Sunday, July 15, 2012

Preview of Things to Come

Run & Jump is running a little behind schedule, mostly because my co-developer and I aren't able to work together right now. He's been moving and getting a new job and blah, blah, blah but everything should be settled in soon enough. In the meantime, the rest of the world is going to get to see a preview of the game before he does.


The graphics will likely change a lot before the final release. Also, there's going to be a lot more than just trees.
Here you can see how the top and bottom halves mirror each other. The landscape will do similar mirroring (one "happy", one "sad")

Friday, July 6, 2012

Walk or Fall

My most recent game project is nearing completion. A little project I like to call

Run & Jump

As you may or may not have guessed, you can run and you can also jump in this game. I plan to release it on the PC soon enough, shortly after doing an XBLA release (right after I upgrade to a paid membership). It's a very simple game that is just about finished and we've only been working on it for about 2 weeks. However, in this simple project I did get to do something that was kind of cool.
In Run & Jump you never make it to the end. As in, the game goes on forever. So naturally, how do you create infinity when the player can move in either direction, i.e., they would be able to tell if the level all of a sudden changed upon going backwards. We took a couple of cues from procedurally generated games, as well as from Hanna-Barbera. We have different sections broken in to "chunks." Each of these chunks contain a set of random scenery for the level. The game contains some X number of chunks, so many of them that the player most likely wouldn't be able to recognize them all. After the player passes the last chunk in the level it wraps around, much like the "chase" scenes in The Flinstones and other similar cartoons.
It's not horribly technically impressive but it was a fun little trick that I never got to try out before.

Expect to see Run & Jump out soon.