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[mcoorlim]

I'm making a series of short quick to iterate games with relatively narrow focus to sharpen my skills and build up some portfolio material. Lumping them all together in this single thread to save space, and because I don't expect I'll have a lot to say about any individual game; this is more about the process.

The plan is to release all of the games as a free bundle when I'm done, until then they can serve as mailing list sign-up incentives.


Background

I've been a full time novelist for the last 8 years, but I've been dabbling in game design since the 80s, coding up text parsers and playing with graphic modes on my Atari 800 and TRS-80 microcomputers. I was into text adventure engines like TADS and Inform, as well as game creation kits like Unlimited Adventures and ZZT.

To date myself, in college I took C++ and COBOL classes to get work with that pesky upcoming Y2K problem.

Yeah.

Anyway, I let that all drift away during the 2000s while roaming the country like a vagabond and working a series of temp jobs, and I'm only now getting back into things. The Minigame Marathon is me easing my way back into dev.

Minigame Marathon Game 1: Airship Assault

Tools: Unity, Aseprite, Visual Studio

Airship Assault was inspired by the 1977 arcade games Destroyer and Depth Charge and heavily modified from a project that was part of a Udemy course I'd been taking.. The player controls a launch platform, firing missiles up at the airships flying above the cityscape. The goal is to score as many points as possible before the 1-minute clock runs out.

Controls: Mouse. You don't control the platform directly, the mouse cursor becomes a cross-hair, with the platform moving left to right under it. Click to fire.

Gameplay: Missiles are slow, and fire to detonate at the point the crosshair was at when you fired. They cannot hurt the airships directly, but ships will be destroyed by the missile's explosion when it detonates. In this iteration, the bombs dropped by the airships are cosmetic representing the ongoing raid rather than existing as gameplay elements... you're not being attacked, you're trying to buy time for the evacuation.

The key here is patience and timing, rather than twitchy reflexes.

Art

Almost all assets were hand-crafted in Aseprite, except the bombs, which I grabbed from opengameart because I realized I'd forgotten them. Music is also from opengameart.

Further Development:

I will not, in general, continue work on Minigame Marathon games; the goal is to rapidly prototype something playable. However if I feel inspired to turn them into longer projects, I have ideas for expansion and development.

• Replace the timer with a damage meter reflecting how many bombs have been dropped
• Add a red cross zeppelin trying to reach the top of the screen with evacuees.
• Replace score for killing ships with score based on refugees protected.

Dev Video

Afterthoughts:

This was a good first project, got me comfortable with the production process and building releases. Nothing too fancy, though I did add a few bits of flair as I went. I've also been inspired to develop my pixel art skills to enable me to make better placeholder art until I can get around to commissioning real assets... though for the Marathon I'll probably end up sticking with the placeholders.

[mcoorlim]

Tools: Unity 2019, Ink, Twine, Visual Studio

Adventurer is a demo for an interactive fiction gamebook framework. Choices are made by clicking on one of 1-3 choice buttons on the right panel, updating the story passage above and sometimes the image on the left. Icons representing earned and chosen character traits appear at the bottom left, and when random chance becomes involved for skill checks we see some dice.

Controls: Mouse

Art: All of the art is CC0 assets found online. These are placeholders; in a production build I'd either make some pixel art or commission something nice.

Development: The game's story was adapted from an unpublished Twine game that I wrote some time ago, rewritten in Ink. Twine remains a useful tool for plotting branching narrative fiction. The trait icons and dice rolling are pure frosting and not integral to the story, but implementing them was easier than I thought it would be.

Future Development:

As written this is an intro to something that would have simulation aspects - an adventurer career sim, essentially. It could also be expanded just as an old school gamebook representing this single adventure. I'd want to replace all of the art, clean up the interface, do some sound engineering.

Dev Video

Afterthought:

The goal here was simply to work out an ink-unity integration that I liked. Mission accomplished, and I have a few gamebook-style game ideas I'm going to build out of this.