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[miconazole]

This image is amazing and I am inspired to make a game! Sadly I have a bunch of other projects going on and haven't made a game since I was 14 (and what a sack of crap that was) so don't get your hopes up too high.

I know what kind of game it's going to be though, it's a multiple people on one keyboard deal where everyone is pressing too many buttons at once for them to all register and there is lots of screaming and finger-pointing and "WHY DIDN'T YOU GO RIGHT, I TOLD YOU TO GO RIGHT", just like when you were a kid and played computer games together with your neighbour friends, way before any of you understood what a LAN was or played any games that required it.

Edit: Oh and if anyone could tell me what the hell my title means I'd appreciate it.

Son of Edit: v0.2 AGBIC version is out!

GET IT HERE

[J. R. Hill]

Onion punks on a strange adventure.

[Razz]

You should keep that as the title, it's pretty funny

[miconazole]

I'm worried nobody will be able to remember it, lol.
Maybe I should just call it "strange adventure" and keep the Japanese title as an alternate name?

[Nugsy]

This was another one that caught my eye. I'll be watching this! Haha.

Good luck!

[ChevyRay]

I love this cover; if I were to enter this competition, this is probably the one I would choose. Good luck, hope you make something of this!

[Inanimate]

Onion punks on a strange adventure.

"Punk" is just an inherently awesome word.

[miconazole]

I've hit on the idea of designing the levels around colours. For example, this is the blue level:



That's pretty much what the game is going to look like, with any luck. Sadly, the actual game right now looks like this:



I r not programr.
Anyone know where I can get some help with Game Maker? I tried posting on the Yoyogames forums but they've been ignoring me. I can't even get the jump mechanic to work right.

I've noticed there isn't really a whole lot going on the vertical axis and this game *is* a game about running to the right forever, so I think I'm going to resize the screen to be a bit flatter and longer. That way you can see more of the upcoming screen and allows for larger sprites, etc without feeling cramped.

[miconazole]

Ok, so I managed to solve my jumping problem, but I hit upon a somewhat more serious and much more stupid problem... the game requires three keys to be pressed in order for the horse to jump, and three keys for it to move at a reasonable pace. Sadly, most keyboards (or at least mine) are not very happy about accepting 6 key inputs at once, making it impossible to jump and move simultaneously. Since I meant for this to be part of the core mechanic I guess I've been hoisted by my own petard. Back to the drawing board!

[Jonathan Whiting]

Is that tree's shadow about to attack the horse?  Wow!

Really liking the mockups, and the idea of players struggling to organize themselves is great too.  It sounds a bit like a computer three-legged race.

Their ought to be a lot of creative ways you can solve the 6 key problem.. I'd suggest using some sort of one-button style control scheme two map both actions to one key, or introducing a rhythmical player-turn mechanic of some sort.  Several specific options occurred to me whilst writing that, but it's your game, so I won't foist them on you (unless you want me to!)

If you're having coding problems I'd advise keeping your scope as simple as possible, and rely as much as possible on the physical player-to-player interaction to make the game compelling.

If you need programming help then framing specific problems you are having will do a lot towards getting people to step in.  There are (sadly?) relatively few saints that are willing to commit to providing 'general help', but yet many people that will be willing to take a few minutes to help solve a specific problem.

[Nugsy]

Seeing as PC's don't like more than 3 inputs at once, you could do as Johnathan suggested. Maybe you could make it so that when you hold the button down the player moves forward, and when the button is released they jump whilst still moving forward.

Also out of curiosity, how are you handling world movement? By this i mean does the player character move on the level, or does the level scroll behind the player and the player always stays in the same position?

[J. R. Hill]

Just FYI I love the art direction you're taking.

[B_ill]

Maybe you could try something like having the order of the buttons matter, almost like a rhythm game, where the 3 players have to hit their buttons in order to move (1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3)? Or, you could do a binary compression of the commands. 3 buttons gives you 8 combinations of up/down. Maybe you need 1 and 2 down to go forward, 3 is jump, 1+3 and 2+3 could be speed up/slow down/turn/whatever you need

[miconazole]

Also out of curiosity, how are you handling world movement? By this i mean does the player character move on the level, or does the level scroll behind the player and the player always stays in the same position?

I was planning on having the world scroll past at a constant rate, but the players would be able to move forward and backwards relative to the screen, kind of like a side-scrolling shooter.

Also, thanks for the gameplay suggestions, everyone! I'll definitely keep them in mind. I was thinking of changing it to a two-player game, though, to solve the more low-tech problem of finding two people to play with. I remember being pretty frustrated back when Treasure Treasure was released because it took me about a month to find someone to play it with (because "can you come over so I can play this indie game you haven't heard of" is kind of a lame reason to call someone if none of your friends are particularly into indie gaming). I don't want to make a game nobody can play. If I did switch to two-player I'd be a little sad, though, since three onion-heads feels more like a proper expedition. But anyway even with two players the controls could probably do with a little refining, hmm.

[B_ill]

The third onion head could always be a slightly-intoxicated AI that's just along for the ride 

[Nugsy]

Maybe he is your half-dead friend and you are trying to get him to Onion Hospital.

[J. R. Hill]

Make it so the 3rd Onion still has a button, but instead of contributing it just does something silly, like give the horse a mustache or something.

[Snow]

Ooooh. I'm going to be watching this one. I too really love that case. Your art will do perfectly. It matches well.

[miconazole]

I'll be out most of today and tomorrow doing more useful and less optional things than making games about onions, but here's a question for Game Maker users. I couldn't find an answer online because it's honestly pretty vague and I might have to just try it out to see, but is it feasible to have a single (or, um, several) background images span the entire length of the level? I don't know how long my levels are going to be but I'm thinking they'd take maybe a minute to run across. Since there's a pretty big visual focus I thought hand-drawn backgrounds would give it a unique look, but I recall this kind of thing causing pretty significant slowdown when I tried it in the past. Anyway I guess this question is pretty hard to answer but if it's completely undoable let me know.

I don't want to post too much in a row without showing some kind of progress so while I sort out the control scheme here's a doodle of a forest level I drew at work.

[J. R. Hill]

It'd probably be better to make a "staging" system that loads the next "map" and appends it x number of pixels before you reach it.  (Assuming you want long, seamless play without breaks)