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[Amorphous]

MechaFrog

A strange bullet hell tower defense hybrid in which you play as a robotic frog with an existential crisis. Started off as experimental programming practice, although I got a little carried away.

Bullet hell because there are going to be a gazillion enemies on-screen shooting a gazillion bullets at you. Tower defense because you defend yourself by placing turrets over the field. It’s just that you’re the tower you have to defend.

Official Site (Download Link)





EDIT (3/13/13): The game has been finished, and is available to play! The original first post content is below:

Story:
The goal is to kill the lord of the flies that has overrun the frogs’ lake. Along the way, our little Mechafrog begins to question his existence, his purpose, and the meaning of all life itself.

Draws a lot of inspiration from absurdist theatre, which includes works like Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. So elements like tragicomedy and surrealism are probably going to pop up sooner or later.

Art:
I'm going for a smooth, digitally painted look for this game, mainly because it's the art style that I am most familiar with / can produce the fastest. Pixel art looks lovely, but takes me forever. I usually draw with thick, black outlines, but the backgrounds will kinda mess with that.

Here's some screens dump:
Everything that's green is friendly. Everything that's purple is an enemy. It's a mess right now.







Music:
As with everything else in this game, I'm writing the music myself. The music right now is actually incredibly jarring paired with the plot and the art, as I'm more used to writing serious, orchestral, dramatic pieces. Like this one, for boss music:

http://soundcloud.com/beastamorphous/waterfall

The goal is to transition from orchestral to more techno and crazy beats as the game's plot becomes more insane.

This game is a solo venture right now; I'm doing all the code, art, and music, although I'll probably need to find sound effects somewhere.

I am writing this game in Game Maker: Studio, with the eventual intention of making it work on iOS / Android, so all controls will work using the mouse. This is also a very trial-and-error process, as I last used Game Maker for a project when it was still GM7, and quite a bit has changed.

[feminazi]

this looks kool.. looks like a weirdpaul eres game

[jO]

"a robotic frog with an existential crisis"

you got my attention, sir 

[Amorphous]

This game is turning out a bit weirder than I intended - although I probably shouldn't be surprised, given what I ended up calling it.

Turret creation / switching is (roughly) done, as of right now it's left click (and hold for about a second) to place turrets, right click to switch weapons. Every turret has a radius around it to prevent overlapping turrets, which shows up whenever you click and hold to place a new turret.

Looks like this at the moment:


Right now, there's absolutely no way to destroy turrets, and I really have no clue how to handle turret destruction, especially since Mechafrog moves with the mouse. And the cost of the turrets is taken out of the score, which is starting to need a better name.

Energy? Money? Frog points?

...in regards to the story, it's actually quite difficult to write a plot about a robotic frog with an existential crisis without making him sound incredibly emo. The script is starting to look a lot like absurdist fiction, and I'm not sure what to think about that. Read too much Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead before making this.

But despite what little sense it makes, the cutscenes and scripts are also starting to come together, probably as little text blurbs before and/or after levels, like so:



I have no idea if any part of this piece of text will make it to the final story. Just put it here for now because it's absurd enough for my purposes and is more interesting than dummy text.

[Amorphous]

Hello, TIGForums. It's been about a week since I've updated this, but progress on MechaFrog is going smooth and well. Progress should have probably slowed after I caught a nasty cold (I still don't have a voice), but oh well I'm crazy.

Programmed a script to manage levels, and make each level progressively more difficult as time goes on, might make levels become faster and faster as they become more difficult too, not sure. Probably still needs a bunch of tweaking.

Still working through the written script, which is getting to be more and more ridiculous day by day - but that might be because of the cold.

Although since the level generation is in a working state, I have the first demo for this game, which includes early versions of the first 9 (out of 36) levels. Any feedback is welcome, tell me if anything breaks, and I hope you guys enjoy:

https://www.box.com/s/o7huqwhte18qcskjp931
(Windows Download)

[Amorphous]

Alright, pretty productive day today. Adding in more enemy types for current and future levels, as well as more bullet patterns.

The plot is going full-speed in the direction of crazy, so the flies will be experimenting with all kinds of weird bugs before the end of the game, one of them I programmed today is the Bombug (sorry for the really lame pun):


It explodes at you and shoots purple boomerangs. Yeah.

Current to-do: make more enemies, make some more turrets for the player to use, and finish the script.

[Amorphous]

As of right now, all of Part 2's enemies (levels 10 to 18) are complete, minus the boss. Moving onto the part where MechaFrog goes completely insane, which should be fun designing enemies.

Some of the programmed enemies include:

The Hive

Spits out small, annoying flies to occupy your turrets. Had drawn it a while ago (and is in one of the screenshots on the first page), though I just got around to programming its movements

Shield

Not an enemy on its own, but a shield can cover enemies and make them hard for turrets to damage (as you can only shoot through the slot in the front). There will be a type of turret whose bullets can instantly smash shields. This is the biggest version; they'll resize to fit the enemy.

Speaking of that turret, I've gotten around to drawing it - time to implement into the programming:


That's all for now, lots of programming and art done today. Script is also coming together nicely, though I'm mainly writing it too early in the morning. Tomorrow I'll probably work on the music for Part 2, and finish up the boss so I can move on to Part 3.

I'm putting a tentative finish date as February 13th, although I'll probably keep polishing it for a bit longer before release.

[Amorphous]

As of today, I'm done with initial designs of the first half of the game, up to level 18 (including script). Working through the second boss now, here's a shot of what I have so far (plus a new turret):


I want to make a game video soon, as my friends without Windows also want to see what this game looks like in action, and I've got a screenr account set up to do so...although I'm having a lot of trouble getting the audio to play right.

Any good hacks to get the speakers to work with screenr / other video capture tools that can also capture audio? When it comes to video, I have no idea what I'm doing, so now's probably the best time to learn.

And if anyone has any feedback on the demo / gameplay, that'd be much appreciated. I dunno if in the game dev world 'no news is good news', so to speak, but at this point, I'm still willing to tweak difficulty / gameplay mechanics if they can be improved. After all, this project (much like everything else I do) is a learning process, and I always want to make it more fun in the end. 

[Amorphous]

Finished up the boss for the second 'world', everything's complete up to level 19. Plan is still going strong for 36 total levels.

Also, I managed to get video editing to work (sorta), so here's a gameplay video (links to Youtube)

First post should also be updated with the video.

[Amorphous]

As of right now, all of the levels, enemies, bosses, and turrets have been implemented. and I'm going through some personal testing / beta testing with my friends to make sure that I didn't make them ridiculously overpowered / difficult / whatever + bug fixes.

Hoping to be able to get this game released within a week or two, definitely within the month of February. 

[Amorphous]

One month later, this game is done! All in all, took about two months to develop from start to finish, so not too shabby.

I've released a windows version, which you can find here. Game Maker Studio and my Mac aren't really cooperating right now, but I'll create a Mac build as soon as possible.

Hope you guys enjoy the game! 

[Jupiter_Hadley]

I really enjoyed this game. I love how your a frog and the tower you defend is yourself. The story line is pretty beast as well. I made a little video of the game if you want to check it out

[Amorphous]

I really enjoyed this game. I love how your a frog and the tower you defend is yourself. The story line is pretty beast as well. I made a little video of the game if you want to check it out

Hey, thanks! Saw this a few days ago, didn't have the time to actually go watch your runthrough until now. Thanks for playing, and for all the feedback!

Also, I failed to mention this earlier, but a few days ago I found a pretty bad bug with saved games. As of March 20, everything should've been fixed, but if you guys find any more bugs / have any criticisms, feel free to run them by me.