Over time every developer forms a long list of projects they’ve started but never finished. Throughout the last two years I’ve accumulated several projects like this and today Today I’ve decided to dig out some of them. Along with each prototype I’ve included some details about why it was never finished.
Paint
Those of you who followed my previous blog, Nexfinity, would have read some details about this prototype. In Paint, you control a sponge ball who can run over buckets of red, green or blue paint. When the sponge ball rolls over a bucket of paint he leaves a trail behind him. On the left hand side of the screen are colored(red, green or blue) characters who will follow paths that match their color. Your goal is to get as many characters from one side of the screen to the other.
Paint as a prototype was a success. It proved to verify the problems with initial design that I put forth and so it was a successful prototype. The problems where:
- The location of the buckets lead to a hotspot of movement in one corner of the map. Going back to this one position felt tedious and frustrating.
- Trying to avoid running over your existing path proved too easy and predictable when all characters move in the one direction.
Some possible solutions for these problems are:
- Make the players color selectable on the fly, put the buckets in a more accessible area such as the center of the map or make the position of the buckets more dynamic.
- Make the enemies come from all different sides of the map.
Asteriods
Asteriods is a game that I made for a University Assignment on Computer Graphics. It is just what it sounds like, a take off of the famous Asteriods Arcade Game. My version of the game is a bit more disrespectful to the player than the arcade version. New rocks can spawn without notice and very close to the player. The collision of the rocks is approximated to only circles and these circles are bigger than the rocks. When this game was created we had only learnt the very basics of OpenGL and so there are no textures or spiffy graphical effects.
Rotablock
Rotablock is another game that I discussed on Nexfinity.net. I simply created it to verify new code that I’d written which supported both OpenGL and SDL. Rotablock is a simple matching gem game in which you can rotate the grid that the gems reside in. This causes the gems to shift based upon gravity. You can also slide gems left and right. This prototype was reasonably successful. As discussed in my last post, I plan to release a proper version of Rotablock once I’ve added more code to my foundation code.
Construction Platformer
Construction Platformer was my first foray into Love2D, a dinky, little Lua engine. In this prototype you played a single screen platforming game where you could add and remove blocks. Your goal was simply to get to the end of the level. Ideas from this prototype were used in Platform Chunk Clump.
Sound Maze
Sound Maze was my second prototype with Love2D. My intention with Sound Maze was to try to simulate what it would be like to be blind. The game is essentially a maze game in which you don’t see the maze, you hear it. You play from a birds eye perspective. When you press the space bar you release a sound wave that sweeps around the player. The pitch was intended to change based upon how close the player is to a wall. Unfortunately I didn’t have the control over the sound that I wanted in Love2D so only the volume changed.
A few months after developing the prototype I found out that similar games already exists except in first person. This games converts the screen to audio, you can get a feel for how this technology works by viewing this video. As you can tell the conversion from images to audio sound displeasing on the ears. Trying to train someone to form a spatial model from such sounds is a problem that is just too hard to complete in the short amount of time a player would be willing to spend on a game.
2D Metal Gear Like
This is a prototype that I didn’t finish. It involved creating an engine to recreate the Metal Gear Solid games in 2D. I feel that there is a wealth of mechanics that could be created from the Metal Gear games. The Merry Gear Solid games are wonderful examples of using this template well. I stopped working on this prototype when I realised that the amount of art assets required for such a game were too numerous and I simply don’t have the skills to create them at the level that I would like. My development of this prototype was interrupted by the first Adelaide University Game Development Club Game Jam in which I created Everything will Eventually Come to an End. This game has far more potential in my mind.
Muso
Muso was a quick little prototype that I created in an afternoon with Love2D. Muso is a one button game in which you are a box that oscillates from north to south. You must avoid other boxes that move from the right to the left hand side of the screen. You use the space bar to control how fast these other boxes move. This prototype was hardly fleshed out. I however really like the feel of this game and think that there would be potential in reviewing it sometime.
I hope you enjoyed this sample of my unfinished prototypes.