Today, “Why Am I Dead” is locked in at 100% complete. It isn’t currently online because I’m trying to get a sponsor for the game, and releasing it to the public would totally defeat the point of that; however, it means that I can totally shift my energy onto other projects and endeavors. I can also say that I’ve completed, from start to finish my first real game! Mandate was a far more involved project, but at the end I can’t really say with confidence that it’s a game; at least, not in its current state. So this is an important step for me.
I’ve spent the past month or so polishing the game, fixing things that bugged me or (more often) problems that I heard from player feedback. Even so, I feel that there’s tremendous room for improvement; in the writing, in the gameplay, in the music, and so on. And while part of me is tempted to spend more time fixing all the flaws I can see, the lager part of me is just tired of working on the game, to be honest. Really, some of the issues are simply the result of the fact that on the outset, I wasn’t planning on making a game of this quality; I was doing a quick experimental game, and so I didn’t use a great amount of foresight with the game mechanics and writing. So, if I want to satisfy my impulse to fix these things, I’d rather simply create a more well thought out sequel than endlessly postpone this game.
So, while I can’t put up a link for the game, here’s a trailer that I made mainly for fun!
Some other stuff I’ve been doing. I took part in the 24th Ludum Dare competition! It was my first one, and given that fact I feel that I held up pretty well overall. If you aren’t familiar with it, well first of all, why not, and second of all, it’s a competition to create a game based on a given theme in 48 hours.
For my submission I made the weird and stubborn decision to just go on a clean slate. No frameworks. No old code from WAID. While it definitely hindered my progress overall, I have to say that I actually enjoyed this decision. Surely, I ‘wasted’ a lot of time programming simple things like collision detection, but I got to return to doing these basic tasks with a lot more experience in AS3 than when I first did them, and so in some cases did them more cleanly or efficiently. There’s also something oddly satisfying about knowing that I physically typed out every little thing in the game in only two days.
The end product is admittedly ugly, obtuse, and unforgiving. I literally did not open a single other program outside of FlashDevelop; it’s all just code. No bitmaps, no tilemap editor, no sounds, just code. And no instructions either.
You can play the game HERE, but if you actually want to try and enjoy the experience I would highly recommend looking at my LD page first, which attempts to make what’s going on in the game a bit more clear.
And lastly, about a month ago or so I had mentioned starting up a strategy game. While a lot of my spare time has gone to finishing up WAID, I’ve chipped in here and there and have progressed a little ways.
The first main thing that I want to do is create a map-editor for a polygon-based map. This is something that I’ve seen people suggest for Risk-style web games constantly, but rarely see implemented. And as a feature it holds a ton of promise. So, I decided that I’d make it the first thing that I do.
A boon which I hadn’t actually anticipated for the project was this: I have escaped the TYRANNY OF TILES!
Now that I think about it, the last three games I’ve worked on have been dominated by tiles. In WAID’s case it isn’t quite as visually obvious since I go out of my way to break the grid and use some non-tile collision detection, but it’s still dominated by tiles. With the move to this strategy game, I get to program a whole different set of stuff and challenges. For instance, last week I spent some time coding a triangulation algorithm so that you could draw any shape you wanted and then have a 100% accurate hit-test for clicking and dragging that shape around. The result:
I’m pretty happy with how the editor is coming along. The fundamental concept of drawing provinces, moving them around, and creating links between them is done. My next step is to add other functionality like deleting shapes, selecting multiple ones at once by clicking and dragging, and so on. Then after I’ve gotten the editor to a more satisfactory place, I’ll be working on writing the map into a file stored locally on the player’s computer, and being able to read that map back into the game.
peltastsoftware.blog 