EL405: Developing Dodge
When I heard that we were going to be developing 2D arcade games, I began drawing up elaborate plans to turn my radio adventure serial into a side-scroller a la Shinobi or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on NES. I spent a great deal of time on the phone with my co-writer James and my co-actor Mike, discussing the various elements of the game. It would be an epic masterpiece… if I could only get it made.
Actually sitting down to the work with the Games Factory 2 program has been an experience quite different from my original expectations. The book, Make Amazing Games in Minutes, was a crock; a product of slick marketing and design-outsourcing. You could make amazing games in minutes if you knew the program inside and out, and had your animation and images created by a professional designer. However when in practice, I find GF2 clunky, unintuitive, and buggy. It promises a lot, and may very well deliver a lot, but so far has been just a tad difficult.
I spent the limited amount of class time trying to get the mechanics down before actually working on the levels for the game. This has proven to be more than a little frustrating thanks to changing contextual menus and GF2 jargon that I can’t seem to get around. The other issue is that you can’t work in class on the GF2 Pro version and expect those files to open up in the trial version. Despite these hurdles, the game is slowly coming along.
I spent a lot of time in Adobe Illustrator, crafting the Dodge figure and his various animations. At first, I drew him exceedingly large, however when converting him to a bitmap, the fine details tended to get a little muddled. The style of the characters has to be simplified in order to still look good in a 640x480 game screen.
The main focus of the game will be punching and collecting books (two things Dodge does best!) You begin each level with the simple mission of collecting all of the book strewn about the world. Then, as you progress from left to right, you have to fight the various goons (in the first level, they are Buick LeSabre’s penguins). Dodge’s animations are a tad limited, but in actuality he doesn’t need to do a whole lot. He runs, jumps and punches, just like in the radio show.
The plan right now is to develop this first level to meet the requirements of the GF2 group project. Then, I will continue work on the game so that it is ready for the term project, due at the end of the semester. I expect that I’ll be scaling back my plans for the final game because of time constraints, and my inexperience with GF2.