Verrrrry cool. I like this a lot so far. As a side note I really enjoyed AsciiSector too.

For what's there so far, the graphics are pretty nice - I especially like the death/ghost anim

Hey Cosr. Thanks for playing.

Yes, the game is pretty shallow. We just wanted to come up with a solid mechanic and pump it out in 48 hours. This game was made almost entirely at TOJam, so please excuse the brevity of the experience.

Recently I was pointed to the lovely treasure trove of Three Hundred Game Mechanics, and really this mechanic in particular is the game we should have made. I'm going to be dead honest and say that I don't believe I could have come up with a such a neat way of doing it as Squidi outlines, but certainly after having made this game and having read that article I think we could make something much more interesting in the future. Maybe a sequel or something..

Again thanks for playing and here's hoping our next game tickles your fancy a little more

[Concepts]

Seafoam

Concepts

• PG Overworld consisting of many small islands scattered about the ocean. Main mode of transport is by boat.
• Each tile on every island corresponds to a 'room' which can be entered and played in a platformer perspective.
• Players can defeat enemies within these 'rooms', collect resources and build both temporary and permanent structures.
• Some islands will be home to civilizations, friendly and otherwise. They may patrol their local waters, hunt the player or wait passively for traders to arrive at their ports.
• Over time, the player will gain the ability to secure islands as their own and mark them for easy navigation through building more complex infrastructures such as docks, shipyards.

Alright now that we've got that out of the way – Seafoam is a game I've been itching to do for a little while which combines two games that are mostly reviled by fans of the franchise they come from. If you've read the above you may have guessed that I am a big fan of the seafaring elements of The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker and the overworld and platforming style of Zelda II: Link's Adventure.

Of course these are not the sole influences, although I can't help myself from thinking about them constantly while I flesh out the game.

My current prototype allows you to sail about a rather large and sparsely populated ocean which is chock full of these little islands. As needed, the game generates each tile that you visit as a platforming room and stores the data relevant to it. If you build a campfire there and come back within a certain amount of time, the campfire will still be burning strongly. If you leave and come back much later, it will likely have burnt out.

I'll release a playable prototype in time.. If there's anything I've learned here at TIGS, it's that people do not like unfinished prototypes or demos until they have something really interesting in them.


Although I have a rough 'TODO' list, what I've got so far was banged out on afternoons and this weekend. That includes the luxurious official SEAFOAM font, pixeled in this morning before I got out of bed.

Previous projects of mine have usually failed (partly) due to a lack of a focused TODO list, so here's a rough list of what I'm going to be working on.

Overworld - Ocean View

• Divide the world into screen-sized areas for multiple purposes:
  - Easy render culling of distant islands, enemies
  - Lazy procedural generation (only generate the islands for an area when the player ventures near them)
  - Eventually, distribute areas on an update list eg., when simulating AI for island towns/civs/pirates
• Provide good methods of navigation to the player by providing basic information (eg., speed, compass), a means of allowing them to mark landmarks, and the ability chart paths on the map to be followed automatically by the boat should they desire to AFK-sail
• Provide a means of switching to 'ship view', which is quite similar to the platforming room view but would allow the player to drop anchor and rest to recover health, inspect the ship's hold (if any items/prisoners are aboard,) and perform most things that would be possible in the platforming view including crafting, fishing, etc.. if these would be possible in a ship-like setting. (see: Platformer View for more details.)
• Provide rudimentary combat. I don't want this to be the focus of the game, so perhaps this would happen in the ship view mentioned above on an infrequent basis. However I have a hard time thinking of a compelling mechanic for that. Will come back to this, low priority.

Overworld - Island View

• Needs better PG - right now extremely simple, just beaches, plains and forests. Would like to provide for 'realistic' micro-biomes incl. swamp, desert, mountain, tundra.
• Provide a means of examining at a glance which tiles on islands have structures built upon them and a means of differentiating significance of these structures (eg., a campfire vs. a dwelling.)
• Provide a display of the current island's name (if any), its coordinates in the ocean. There is likely more relevant info that could go in a HUD-like area here*

Rooms - Platform View

• Design a mechanism for interacting with the environment, incl.: attacking wildlife/monsters, harvesting plants/trees, crafting impromptu shelter/warmth providers (eg., campfire, tent), interacting with structures eg., for more complex crafting., fishing (where possible.)
• Create periodically spawning wildlife: artwork, behaviour & spawning mechanism.
• Mark rooms with a 'last visited' timestamp and calculate effects of absence upon the player's return (eg., campfires extinguishing, shelters collapsing, vegetation growing.)

General

• Fix up my BitmapFont class for generic use in the SEAFOAM game.
• Player should be able to designate landmasses as 'discovered' and allow them to name unpopulated islands to their liking. Populated islands should come with a predesignated name appropriate for their people.
• Conceptualize: people, pirates, monsters, wildlife. Design XML formats for each that permit easy creation of varied types of each.

That's all for now. It's quite a bit, yes, but I'm hoping to chisel away at this slowly and methodically. I've learned a lot of hard lessons over the past few years but alas, I am constantly drawn towards these 'megaprojects'. I'm hoping (mostly) that I can get something really interesting and fun to play, some core nugget of gameplay and experience - and that this might inspire interest and fuel the whole thing farther - but I know that's a bit of a pipe dream, so I'm just going to do the best I can.

As a final note, I am certainly open to collaboration on this, in particular on the art/sound fronts.. though I imagine there will be little interest in that until I can prove that this behemoth might actually be fun to play.

For those wondering, in Flash when you use getPixel on a non-transparent bitmapdata you will get a uint value of 0x00FFFFFF where FFFFFF is your RGB color.

However if you use getVector, each pixel is dumped into a uint value of 0xFFFFFFFF.

To be fair it's a 'gotcha' I should have realized from the start. but arg. annoying.

Similar to the above, turning off the internet can lead to oodles of productivity. Wait, why am I here posting in this thread again...? Ack, back to work.

Thanks for that, Richard. Without that I wouldn't have rolled up my sleeves and started wading into haXe.

So far I'm not sure I'd have a use for it over regular AS3, but it's certainly intriguing.

I heard your little murmurs about this two years ago - if I'm not mistaken you used an early version of this framework for your Assemblee entry, yes?

Anyway, following on Twitter! I am excited to try this out.

Felt the need to bump this, my apologies..

It's been two years since this was posted but recently I've seen (a little) buzz about haXe. How does haXe now compare to haXe then?

Personally I'm consistently intrigued by haXe, but I can't bring myself to try it since it seems the community for it is tiny.

I am also thinking this could be a browser game done in flixel or flashpunk or something.

I had someone offer to program it for iOS devices.

Do you guys have a platform of choice?

I'm happy with either, but if you plan to monetize it's probably smart to do both

Also if the gameplay is very similar to Cat Poke, it's probably simple enough to do once in Flash and then export to AIR for iOS (once they release AIR 2.7, which actually has impressive performance on iOS.)

Here's the problem.  The speed of your processor is almost certainly 0, unless you're throwing it out the window or something.  Speed = distance / time, it describes a rate of motion.

Hz is a measure of frequency, not speed.  Your processor doesn't have a 'speed', it has a frequency.

Now, almost everybody refers to their processor in terms of speed.  People understand this number as speed, and if you talk about it as speed, it doesn't fail to communicate the concept.

Is it actually speed?  No, it most certainly is not.  Speed has a definition and frequency is nowhere near it.  It is completely incorrect to refer to something measured in Hz as 'speed.'

This fact does not matter to most people, it doesn't impact their lives, it doesn't impact their understanding of certain concepts.  These people are still wrong in their usage of the word 'speed'.

If you really want to be pedantic, you could note that Physics does not have sole rights to the definition of the word 'speed'. It can also be used to convey the rate at which any task is performed. ie., Consider the sentence:

'He can complete a task with impressive speed.'

I think this is still correct, even for sticklers of the correct definition of the word - and it refers to the completion time for the individual task, not (directly) the motion of the individual completing it. So altering the sentence a little bit:

'The newest generation of computers complete tasks with impressive speed.'

I think this completely validates using the words speed, fast, etc.. to describe relative processor frequencies. I'd be interested to hear arguments to the contrary though

Gabriel Verdon you sir are pretty cool dude.

Wait, so this isn't Syndicate?

I'm just checking, because you know, Syndicate was pretty awesome. Are you sure your game isn't Syndicate?

I never got to play Cat Poke due to it being for Windows but the playthrough video gave me warm fuzzies, as do these teaser graphics.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is

Got my time off and my PEGJam reservation bought.

Now I watch the flights like a hawk and make a last minute panicked purchase.

Personally I wouldn't pay $10 USD. I'm gonna be harsh because you asked for it and frankly I'd appreciate the same harshness from critics on my own games. Here's what I think needs patching up.

- Make the hand cannon either do more damage or fire more quickly.
- If you're going to have damage simply tick away on the player while they're being hit rather than a full on reaction, then at least blink the screen red or something that indicates that maybe wallowing in enemies would be a bad idea.
- The main character feels very floaty when he falls (ie., his terminal velocity is very low.) This isn't necessarily bad but coupled with the above two it just feels like lazy programming and not an intentional game mechanic.
- The graphics are OK, but you really need to fix up your HUD. Also if you're going to do the un-antialiased vector artwork, that's cool but either implement a better rotation algorithm or implement an actual vector engine. The harsh rotation artifacts really ruin what aesthetic is there, and force the player to assume amateurish graphics rather than intentional simplification.
- Shooting through walls..? I guess this could be a feature but it really just looks like a bug (even though you've clearly shown it in your preview video.)

100 Levels also sounds a little ambitious, but maybe that's just me.

All that said, the base concept is solid and it really just needs a fair amount of tightening up in design and gameplay details.

Thanks Fyren. Yes, it's a somewhat shallow Flash game, though we've considered more interesting sequels building on the same mechanic, where each guest would be unique and there would be 'observers' such as a band, a bartender, etc.. which you could garner clues from without the penalty of someone dying every time.

The clue is always something about the accused that differs them from the murderer, so you can calculate your guesses.

We addressed several issues that were mentioned. Precarious mode is much, much harder (the room is chock full of people.) Easy mode is now labeled 'Practice' mode and almost no stats are tracked when you play it. Skipping cutscenes can be done by holding the 'Z' key to speed through them. There are a few little touches that make it more novel to play, such as slightly more amusing expressions from the patrons.

We'd like to add more - but I think we'll let it sit for now and move on to another game.

Love the music, my only nitpick with this is the lack of an explosive weapon (or maybe I just haven't played long enough?)

the playbook emulator is smooth and nice. You can take the risk of not using a real device if it works really well on the emulator.

In fact the playbook emulator runs a little TOO well. We released a Playbook app and when we finally got our free device we noticed that one of the minigames runs extremely slowly.

Put in a request to take 15-18 of July off..