Final thoughts on FlockRPG development
Last Friday we concluded our first HeavyBoat’s Game Jam, the result was a quite fun yet incomplete RPG. We succeeded at building a system instead of a game, focusing on mechanics and creating a new experience over pretty graphics and polished gameplay.
Design & Art by Juan
The basic gameplay came to me while riding my bicycle to the office on Wednesday, I was thinking about the upcoming game jam for a whole day, but it wasn’t until that last moment when a remote interesting interesting idea came to mind. It was a casual RPG with a flock mechanic. You control a flock of minions on their quest to increase the number of the horde, destroy everything, get bigger, stronger and faster.
I don’t like RPGs much for different reasons like the fact that I don’t know how to read, I never got to learn that skill and I’m too old to start now. As a result, the game concept ended up being a RPG whiteout any sort of popup window or text.
Anyway, we started the project right away on Wednesday morning and by the end of three days we got a prototype that’s very similar to the original idea, which is strange and nice.
Making a game from scratch on such short time rewarded me with two things:
- Don’t think much about an idea, test it almost right away and it will show it strengths and weakness by itself.
- I’m pretty good at making art for our games, we are seriously thinking about ditching Leo.
Code by David
When you’re at a Jam you don’t have enough time to think on performance issues, you just want to try out new ideas and test out the ever changing gameplay. Flash seems to be an excellent choice for this kind of events, but is really not, Flash is one of those languages in which the coder needs to pay special attention to the code’s quality for the game to run smoothly. I didn’t have that time last week and that’s why the game needs almost your entire CPU.
The process itself was really interesting and I’m more than happy on how the flock feels.
Jobs
