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@Alex@
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« on: July 29, 2011, 11:14:26 AM »

Pocket Pirate


Excuses


After some issues with posting the other night involving random internet fluxuations, I'm going to post this. It has been updated since the version I was going to post, this is clearly marked. Some time today I'll be cutting some concept art through from my artist, I'll be sure to post the art here if it meets my high expectations.


--- The Concept and Early Works ---

It's been a while since I've told anyone what I'm doing in the ways of game design as I do it. I normally blurt out random spouts of information now and again but have never really maintained a log of my actions.

Pocket Pirate is a wave based action platformer. The player plays as "Capitan Curtis" a down on his luck Pirate who no longer has anything left but the hoard of treasure he has accumulated over the years. His crew have abandoned him and his ship stolen. He won't let this treasure go, it's his only thing left in the world. However the creatures of the sea, other pirates and even Vikings are trying to get a hold of his riches.

The player is armed only with a sword and a barrel of bomb, which he carries on his back. They have the opportunity to upgrade both the sword and the selection of bombs after every stage( 10 waves). This is done through an intermediary shop window where the player can spend there hard earned cash on getting bigger and better weaponry. The player can also spend there money on their character buying various hats that have no-effect on game play. These hats stay purchased even when the player fails a game or restarts.

Each wave gets progressively harder with the enemies damage & health increasing along a nice curve. To avoid monotony I've coded the wave based system in such a way that the enemies can be varied as both the stage number and the wave counter increase. Each stage ends with a sort of boss creature or enemy. This could be an Alligator in the early stages or a rival Pirate or Viking in the later ones.

A variety of achievements are available to unlock. Now of course I've got the typical kill X
enemies sort of achievements but I've also included others referencing popular internet memes such as valves obsession with hats. I've managed to get the achievements to stack if you achieve more than one within a small time frame, this way the player is notified of every achievement they achieve rather than just the last one.

I'm working closely with an artist to provide the graphical elements of this game since I lack the skills to create suitable art in a reasonable time frame. Oddly I can sprite better when I've got a fair bit of alcohol in me than when I'm sober and it's just not cost effective to get drunk every-time I want to draw a little enemy or touch up a tile.


---- 28/7/11 ----
Today I added a nice little customisable weather engine. I'm not sure if I'm going to end up even using weather in the final product but I've now got a system where I only need to tweak a few variables slightly to get completely different effects. I've been able to get some nice Heavy rain and a weird shower of money. Because we all know that it would be awesome if we could get money from the sky. Unfortunately since the weather is really just graphical trickery the player can't collect the money but If I do implement this weather I will be sure to get that changed.

Expanding on the idea of weather I was thinking that the weather could have an effect on the types of enemies and the effectiveness of the players bombs. Perhaps more aquatic creatures , less fire damage in rain and less aquatic creatures / birds and more artic  creatures (Polar Bears) in the snow. And well more greedy bankers , pirates and Vikings in the money. I've also implemented dust but It doesn't fit well and if I am to put dust in it would need to use a slightly different system.
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leonelc29
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« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2011, 07:36:07 PM »

hmm...sound nice Hand Thumbs Up Right
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@Alex@
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« Reply #2 on: August 01, 2011, 06:35:34 AM »

I think we've decided what the pirate is going to look now. This is the still sprite zoomed in 800x but you can see the sort of style we will be using and whatnot . Image contained in the spoiler incase you have a slow internet connection like I had up until a few days ago going from a mesely 27KB/S to 400KB/S . Apparently the still is made of 16 layers so it sounds like its going to be a bitch to animate. Considering we need an animation for each side to ensure the sword is held in the right hand no matter what direction the player is facing. Anyway the next step is that all the pirate animations can get done.



http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/7458/screenshot20110801at152.png

We've had a small conversation about how to handle to the "story" telling and we've come to the conclusion that comic strip-esque cut-scenes would be more beneficial then spending weeks on properly animating a traditional cut scene. It isn't like the story is terribly important but we do want the player to know we have thought of one. I'm going to begin sketching them out once the GMC Jam is over so we have something to work from after the story is finalised.


edit : So apparently Spoiler tags don't work here so I'll remove them.

« Last Edit: August 01, 2011, 06:49:09 AM by @Alex@ » Logged
@Alex@
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« Reply #3 on: August 03, 2011, 02:43:57 PM »

The last few days I've been playing with procedural generation, not specifically for this project but in general. It's starting to look a lot like Terria style caves and land. We were toying with the idea of procedurally generating the stages in "Pocket Pirate" but this little endevour has proved that it isn't very practical and tailored specially created levels with a some nice scenery.

In the graphics department some of the Pirates animations are done. In particular the running. Keeping the sword out while running ended up looking stupid so he now puts it away. This was great news to my artist as it meant the second running animation for the other direction could be done a lot easier by shifting the sword back a few layers and flipping the entire image in each frame.
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