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  Sneak Peek: Happyponygate 01:37 PM -- Wed May 7, 2008  

Today's sneak peek demonstrates the user interface of Happyponygate, as well as what was going to be a very secret enemy. I've decided to display this enemy today in honor of the holiday we are celebrating today. If you don't know what I mean, then you surely don't know what this enemy is, either! You'll just have to find out. The monster's still going to be secret in game - you may have seen it now, but you don't know how to encounter it in the game!


Obviously the monster is just pasted over the screen, not actually in the game at the moment. But I think it turned out great - it's remarkably close to the concept art I used, right down to the oddly tentacular roots! Anyway, this is the on-screen interface as well. The big block at top is the life meter, and all the white bars are meters for different things (all full at the moment for testing purposes). Weapons go in the slots down the side, click on them to select. You can also select with the number keys on the keyboard (and - and = for weapons 11 and 12). Click Menu to visit the menu (same as pressing ESC), and the intentionally blank spot is for something else you will find out about someday.

That's it! Nice and simple and easy to use.

I got much done today already, as you see in the picture. How did such a miracle occur? Quite simply, and I don't know how I didn't come up with this plan before. I realized that since most of my development tools only work on my old computer (non-Vista), it was ridiculous that I tried so hard to work on the new computer. It's always cramped my style dramatically, and I would procrastinate doing any art or sound for weeks and weeks just because I knew I'd have to go over, turn on that computer, fire up the needed programs, do the work, transfer the results over, and so on. So today I decided to move the code over there, and just do all the work there! The difference is splendiferous. That computer is also not connected to the internet, making it even more ideal for not slacking off. That is probably the reason I avoided being there before. I like to slack off.

Sol Hunt has given me a deadline on this game - it's supposed to be in a playable complete-ish state (not necessarily even beta, just something worth playing) by the time her school gets out. I have 5.5 weeks. I have a lot of work to do.
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  Perdon! 11:26 AM -- Tue May 6, 2008  

Ay! No he blogado mucho! I don't even know if that's conjugated right. But I do know blogar is not an actual Spanish verb. It means "to blog" in Jamulish.

So, results are in for LD48 #11! I did well. I got 1st place in Humor, 2nd place in Theme, 3rd place Overall, 5th place in Polish, 5th place in Audio, 6th place in Graphics, and far too low to bother even calculating in Technical, Innovation, and sadly Fun. I also got insanely low ranks in Food, Journal, and Timelapse, but I didn't try to compete in those.

I got a lot of comments that my game was really nifty but not fun. Oh well, I am happy with it! And the first place in humor is a triumph (note: huge success!), because it really was intended to be a joke in video game form. Looks like it worked! I thought it was fun to play too (though I can really understand not thinking that... all it was was trying to click objects quickly). Many people lamented the fact that you start over when you die, but my defense is twofold. First fold: the whole game can be completed in under a minute (and by "can be", I mean "must be", because you'd lose if you took longer!), so really how bad is restarting? And second fold: I made it work that way (and with a simple fade out rather than any kind of "GAME OVER") intentionally, so that it would seem at first glance that all you do is watch a leaf fall and then it returns to the title screen. The actual game is supposed to be sort of a secret... a really really obvious one, but nonetheless, a bit of a surprise. It's supposed to appear to be some kind of snooty art garbage, but then you subvert that by blowing it apart. I was going to have big gunshot noises too (I also considered having your clicks be used to target nuclear homing missiles), but that would ruin the surprise at the 4th level, since you'd already be in ridiculousness at that point.

So no, commenters! I do not regret the restart on death! I shan't repent! It's funny because I am a stickler for playability and ease of use, and I would never make a restart-from-the-top game normally, but this joke game truly calls for it. Although one commenter did mention limited lives, that would be nice (but again, they'd have to kick in on level 4 or something, or they'd ruin the joke).

By the way, the words that many people can't understand in the game are: "THE K IS SILENT!" (bad Sean Connery impression), "WHAT A DRAMATIC CONCLUSION!" (bad Strongbad impression), and at the end is an outtake from when I was recording rhino noises, where I am laughing and saying "Rhinos don't sound like that!". That's because I was actually making cooing noises, something I probably should've included in that sound clip. Come to think of it, that final rhino should've cooed as it fell.

So that's that game. Another game just finished was our first try at Heroes Mafia. It was so awesome! My wife thought I was crazy because I'd run around the house shouting out strategies and plans, and how things were working. I was a bit excited about it. I am dying for the next game of Heroes!
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  Sneak Peek: Happyponygate 12:41 PM -- Fri May 2, 2008  


As promised, it's a Chocolate Moose! Two, because I wanted to get a shot of him facing you. Surprisingly enough he has big googly eyes. This is also the lovely alleyway you begin the game in (it won't be full of monsters like this, though). You can see some debug text in there too, ignore that. I always feel a little guilty making the monsters just a bunch of spheres stuck together like this because it's so easy, but honestly it's exactly the result I want. That is my style, and it's just a coincidence that it's really easy to build. I love super round, super simple, characters.
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  Playtime's Over, Punk! 03:23 PM -- Thu May 1, 2008  

I feel like I've been spending far too much time playing instead of working lately, so I'm kicking my point system back into gear! It didn't last long because of some interruption or the other... I think it was when I got sick. But anyway, it was a good system that worked well for me, and I'm bringing it back! Today was my first day back on it, after yesterday indulging in too much Ratchet in the morning, and too much WoW all evening.

Today is the first of the month, so I've earned my points on maintenance type things - the newsletter is written, three addons are (almost) ready to go, new fan art is up, the monster contest is judged and done, and a new microntest is up. Oh, and I've finally finished judging LD48 entries. Right now I am working on the bills and writing a journal entry in which I am writing "writing a journal entry in which I am writing "writing a journal entry in wh... okay. Hey, and I did the dishes too!

So, I'm holding off on sending out the newsletter until I have the addons up, and I'm holding off on the addons until I get some files I am missing for one of them, but aside from that, it feels pretty productive. Tomorrow, maybe I can be productive on an actual project.
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  Ker-Blam 09:14 PM -- Mon April 28, 2008  

Little update on the 'Gate today. Items are now destructible! It was a little bit complex for various reasons. First, items have never had 'health' in this engine, so I had to find a way to cram that in without breaking my existing map. That wasn't really a requirement, since I've hardly done anything on the map, but I always hate to trash things. Lucky for me, that turned out to be easy once I discovered how I load and save maps (discover is the right word - that code hasn't been touched in 8 years!).

Secondly, there was a bigger issue, which is that items only occupy a single tile of space. They're an element of the map. That would be okay if they were all tile-sized, but of course they are often quite huge, like my trash dumpsters. They could of course be arbitrarily sized, treated like monsters in that regard, and kept in a list, but that means a whole lot more collision checks, and I am already increasing the number of bullets that will be bumping into things at once, not to mention other stuff like the scrolling world that just slow this game down more than previous ones made with this engine. So bad idea to do that. Instead, I did something used in a lot of the previous games - added invisible blocks that can be placed to make items get in your way over a wider area. But this time, that's not enough - you need to be able to shoot those inviso-blocks and have it harm the main item, and when the main item is destroyed, all its associated inviso-blocks need to die with it, or you'd have strange invisible obstacles left over. So I made a whole system of invisible blocks with a direction, so you place items on the map, then inviso blocks around them that point to the item. They feed the damage done to them onto the item, and when it's destroyed, they go with it.

So anyway, it all works! You can destroy items now, but there are no explosions or anything, they just vanish. Yay?
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  Ponies & Pals 06:33 PM -- Fri April 25, 2008  

It actually feels like something is happening with Happyponygate today! I spent the morning making tiles so that I could actually have some buildings instead of just grass and roads. The buildings I made look... well, pretty much just bad. They're not ugly or horrible, they just aren't good art or impressive in any way. They're just really simple block buildings. But you know what? I totally don't care! I just want to blow up ponies, so I am going to roll with it.

So, once I had my blah buildings available, I started actually laying out the map as it will be in the finished product. The firs tiny tidbit of map now exists - you are forced to walk down a dark alley behind a grocery store (okay, it's not dark... but it could be, this is the Supreme editor after all!) because the main road is blocked by those traffic barriers. At the end of the alley, you'll meet your first enemy and have to deal with it, and obtain your first weapon. That encounter doesn't exist yet, but the map is laid out for it. It doesn't sound like much, but it makes me feel more like this is something instead of me randomly toying with weapon ideas.

On an alternative note, you may recall that the Paladin was my second most hated WoW class in the past. I got over that and started rather enjoying her for a while. But then, my friend started playing with me, and he had a Paladin too. Since we both had the same thing, I decided to change my talent spec, so that we'd be different. I was formerly Retribution, as is to be expected, and I respecced as Protection. Wowzies. Quelastima (that's her name!) is now my favorite WoW character ever and has totally sucked me back into a game that was kind of getting less interesting (well, mainly the teaming up with my friend is what has sucked me back in, but this is seriously fun). She is absolutely invincible! Fighting a single enemy is terribly boring, because she doesn't do a lot of damage, so what I do is run around gathering up enemies, and I fight them all at once. They just pound on me as I stand there ignoring them, and one by one they gradually crumple to the ground. It still takes a while to kill an individual one, much longer than Retribution did, but by the time he's dead, the 5 friends he had around me are all pretty close to death themselves, and I mop up and enjoy the experience, none the worse for wear. I'm telling you, it's a whole new game, and it's fun.

On the other hand, there's not a lot of stuff to do in these fights. Mainly it consists of picking which guy to attack next (and it really doesn't matter which), so it'll probably get boring. But there's more fun stuff to come in the talent tree, like throwing my shield. And the other big downside is that I am very weak against magical enemies. But for the moment, it is just raw fun in liquid form. Only not liquid. I can fight ten guys at once!

It's hard to know what's appropriate to write in this journal, since this is obviously not a WoW blog or something. I'm sure a very small percentage of people who read this know what I was talking about there, and a smaller percentage care in the slightest. But it was exciting to me to discover this whole new game hiding inside WoW, so I blurt it out. Blurting is the key to blogging.
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  Sneak Peek: Happyponygate 12:19 PM -- Wed April 23, 2008  



So many mounties! Recall once again that I do not have graphics for most things, and thus these mounties are not what they appear. They are in fact made entirely of chocolate! They are the Choco Blockos for now. Those blue bullets you see are actually chocolate chips. And the red bullets are marshmallows spit by the ponies, and the colorful bombs are jellybeans dropped by the many many badguys I have slain with the Choco Blockos prior to this shot.

Slain, you say? How do Choco Blockos hurt people? Well, that goes back to those chocolate chips. Enemies like to attack Choco Blockos, and when their bullets hit the blocks, some chocolate chips off and goes flying (for some reason at high velocity), inflicting deadly Choco Damage. So the Choco Blocko is actually a pretty effective weapon. It's pretty much useless as a shield, I have found, since it's just one Bouapha-sized block (and you can only fire them about once every 2 seconds). But enemies like to attack them, so they work as decoys in that respect, and rather dangerous ones. I may try making enemies ignore them, but then you'd have to be very careful about placing them and maneuvering to get them between you and the enemies. Which might not be so bad, actually...

They also dissolve over time (not visually, just eventually die), and explode into chocolate chips on death (but only the same number they launch when hit, nothing impressive). Leveling them up makes them last longer and survive more hits, fire more chips when hit, and makes each chip do more damage. It also raises the rate you can launch them slightly.

It's a little weird to see them as mounties, but they seem to work. If they remain working as decoys, attracting enemies, maybe I should change them to be chocolate easter bunnies rather than plain blocks. Something to consider for sure, and before I build the gun, since everybody knows a gun that lobs bunnies looks nothing like a blocko launcher.
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  a leaf falls on a still pond. 02:11 PM -- Mon April 21, 2008  

Those words may just haunt your nightmares. Give our new tiny little game, Still Pond a try! It's my entry for this weekend's Ludum Dare 48-hour contest, and it is truly minimalist, but I think (until you win it, at least) it's a lot of fun. It's not really a game you'll come back to again and again, but you'll really enjoy the first time you win it. After the contest (and in less time than I had left during the contest when I quit... dadgummit), I added two new secret bonus modes to the game (which should really help with the replayability shortage). So find them and enjoy!
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  Ludum Dare 48 #11 10:03 PM -- Fri April 18, 2008  

The latest Ludum Dare 48-Hour Game Development Contest is now on! The theme has been announced, and it is "Minimalist". So yeah, I'm not sure what I'm doing with that. Should be an exciting, if minimal, weekend.
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  Sneak Peek: Happyponygate 11:17 AM -- Thu April 17, 2008  

So soon, it's another one! Forget my crazy idea of actually doing complex code work and implementing a map-based chocolate lake. I have fine-tuned the amoeba, and I like him.



He's got eyes now! The eyes always move to the center of mass. Of course, he's an albino at the moment, but again I must remind you that I don't have artwork yet, so he's made of snowballs and has Bonehead-bullets for eyes. He's a giant creepy friend that follows you around. I'm going to make him chase down enemies instead, but he is of course very slow moving. You can constantly add to his size by spewing your Oozinator, but there's a limit (actually, it removes the oldest blobs as you fire new ones beyond the limit, so you don't actually have to stop spewing) to keep it from chewing up all the available bullets. I think a good thing to have upgrade with levels is in fact that limit. When it's low, he can't be very big, but with the limit I have set right now, he can cover about 2/3 of the screen. Of course, the blobs only live so long, so you have to constantly fuel him if you want that size.

The name I have for this weapon is The Oozinator, but in order to get both winning weapons in the game, and for logical reasons, I am going to have it replace an existing weapon - The Fonduethrower. So that's an issue... Fonduethrower is also a really good name for this weapon! The amoeba is obviously made of fondue. But I do really like Oozinator. Anyway, the Fonduethrower was originally a shotgun, but since I also have a "spread shot" weapon, which is basically a shotgun with long range, I figure it could go (but I think I'll shotgunnify that other weapon, because the slow, big blast of a shotgun is more fun than the usual rapid-fire spread shot). I had actually already made the model for the Fonduethrower, and it is perfect for the Oozinator as well, so good luck on that one.

An amoeba gun! You don't see that in Ratchet & Clank. It's a pretty far cry from Varkarrus' original Chocotsunami, but I did say your goal was to inspire me, right? And who can complain about an amoeba gun?
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