Hey guys,
THE GAMEDaniel Flores and I (Csaba Nagy aka Blacksmith) are working on a side scrolling game that could be described as single player motocross, but with a truck, and a relentless Alien spaceship that's chasing and firing after you. You are always driving to the right, and the saucer is always chasing you. The challenge is to navigate bumpy terrain while simultaneously aiming and firing at the saucer. It's not easy to do both. Trust me.
Here's a graphic that should give you an idea of some of the elements. Note there is only one truck and one spaceship in the game. I've also attached the pic.
CONTROLSSince we want to put this on mobile (Flash only for the contest), one of the most important design considerations was to have simple, and comfortable, controls. The simplest we could think of is to hold the phone or pad like a console controller allowing each thumb to press one side of the screen. Right side for speed, left side to aim your gun. For the computer you press two keys, like 'z' and 'm.'
So if you press anywhere on the right side, which is the gas pedal, and the truck will speed up. Release the thumb press and friction and gravity will slow the truck down. The left thumb controls the roof gun turret allowing you to tilt it smoothly along the arc starting from 9 and ending at 12 o'clock. Release your left thumb and the turret slowly returns to it's starting position. To keep things simple, the gun fires automatically at a set interval. All you have to do is "just" aim. (You can't lock the gun at an angle, it's always rotating either clockwise or counterclockwise.
As I said above, what makes it tough is to simultaneously watch and handle bumpy terrain on the right while dodging spaceship lasers and trying to aim at a moving spaceship. I've found that it's kind of like the kid's game of trying to rotate your arms in different directions at the same time. It looks easy but requires a good deal of concentration.
STATUSI'll do more in a subsequent update, but we have draft physics down for the truck. We have kludged saucer movement. We have animations for the different damaged states of the truck and saucer. We have a random generator for the tiles and terrain which allows every run to be different. I.e. you can't memorize the terrain. And since the tiles are generated on the fly, we are currently working on levels 750 tiles wide (that's 24,000 pixels). We want levels to last between 30-90 seconds depending on the objective. We are also working on different layers for the background, clouds, hills, and closer objects like cacti.
RIGHT NOWOur to do list is very long. But among our urgent goals is to get the UI down, determine the level objectives (like jumping over the Grand Canyon :-), and of course making the physics of the truck and saucer much more lifelike. In addition we have the other screens to worry about, title screen, level screen, inventory shop/mechanic screen, etc.
We were able to compile a recent version and run it on iPhone 4 (on iOS 6 :-) and iPad 2 (on iOS 7), and we are happy. So we can put the iOS version aside and focus on the Flash version exclusively to get it polished.
QUESTIONS1. Do you have any suggestions, or pitfall warnings, regarding games with similar two-button/two-finger controls? Can you suggest any games for us to review.
2. What kinds of in-level objectives do you think would be fun for a side-scrolling driver game?
3. What kinds of statistics would you like the game to present at the end of each level? (Or even in level.) Some of these could be considered achievements you might need to get trophies, bonus points, etcMANY THANKSI think it goes without saying that Jon is at the top of the list of people to thank. Without him I wouldn't be making games at all. There are also many, many other people that we should thank for their help with Stencyl programming. I can't list them all, but Tuo, captaincomic, Photon, Hectate, and Innes all deserve special mention. And Rob1221, besides answering my questions so patiently, you wrote the tile API without which our game would not be possible.
Best regards,
Csaba and Daniel
