Posts Tagged ‘ Lone Survivor

The Great Unknown

So I felt it was time to give you guys an update on what I’ve been up to…

The plan (as I mentioned in the quote-unquote interview) was to work on Legend of the Starmen with an aim to heading for an IGF entry.

Well, just like the last time I went indie, I changed my mind once I actually had the space and time to think about it. I still want to make LotS, and it’s high up on the list… But it’s a big game, as big as Lone Survivor, perhaps.

So I figured, if I’m going to do a big project anyway, it may as well be the one which is most personal and important to me. The one I’ve been trying to make for several years, since making Soundless Mountain II – Lone Survivor. After all, the game is already further along than LotS, so it makes more sense from that perspective. And there’s the thing that it may help get recognised because SMII is still probably the game I’m most known for doing…

It’s coming on really well! I’m planning on entering it into Indiecade, either at the end of this week, or two weeks after that if I miss the deadline. I’m focussing on making the first world really fleshed out and finished, the intro and outro, polish and bugfixes and a total overhaul of the audio. Save games, title screens, some more puzzles and survival elements, a new monster, it’s all happening so fast!

And there’s more…

I’ve started a new (relatively) small game – perhaps the size of Soul Brother when finished. It’s called XOR, and it’s a homage to the games I grew up on, perhaps more so than the other games I’ve made. It’s a randomly generated Atic Atac / Zelda mashup wizard-shooter. It is presented in a warped ZX Spectrum view, complete with filthy screen, ‘off’ colours and flickering glows. It all looks much better in motion, but have a (slightly out-of-date) screenshot all the same:


The names are procedurally generated and this one just happened to come up.

There’s also a background story to it which I won’t reveal yet, suffice to say it’s gonna have more than a nod to a certain other glowing movie, but hopefully turn things on their head a bit. According to Anthony Carboni at least, I like to ‘flip the script’ like that.

Finally…

A massive thanks out to the 270,000 players of Soul Brother, and the many new reviewers and podcasts which have covered it. I really am humbled that so many have enjoyed something so silly of mine. Thanks to Terry for helping me along the way so much, and thanks to all the indies who reside in a certain forum I frequent for all their incredible work helping me test and improve the game. You all know who you are, and I can’t thank you guys enough!

Also to Brian Keong, I’m sorry I haven’t forgotten your sprite, I’m just really swamped getting ready for Indiecade, so expect it next blog post, sorry!

Back From The Dead

So I might just be working on Lone Survivor again.  Might meaning am.  I know I said it was unfinishable – but I must finish the unfinishable if I want to make a success of this indie lark.  And that’s exactly what I plan to do.

I’ve now christened my tool ‘TELEPLAY’ – it’s the combination of the visual editor written in BlitzMax, and the Flash project which runs the games made in the editor, which all runs on HAL-script (the high-level adventure language, natch.)

TELEPLAY is now 99% feature complete, and this means that work on Lone Survivor is progressing nicely at last.  Although I may miss my original goal of releasing it in time for IGF entry, I think it’ll have been worth the wait.  My plan currently is to go full-time indie from sometime in the new year.  2011 is the year Superflat Games will get serious!

To keep y’all sweet, here’s a recent screenie, showcasing the inventory system:

Lone Survivor – coming early 2011

El Crab Shack

I wonder when they sold their last crab?

Just to let you guys know things are being worked on.  I think it won’t be long before I can put together a teaser trailer as it’s getting to a decent level of polish now.  Have completed about 30% of the art and animation, only about 5% of the sound though.  But I plan to be actively working on that from now on (taking a break from my music career to do so).

I plan to enter Lone Surivor into IGF this year, and have the game finished by New Year… so wish me luck! As El Crab Shack’s owner likes to say: ‘Go Loco!’

Lone Survivor

I’ll let this wonderful image, courtesy of the equally wonderful Bento Smile, speak for itself.  It’s of the protagonist of Lone Survivor, also known as ‘You’.

It’s my first ever piece of ‘fanart’ (although really it’s ‘friendart’) – and for reason that it totally made my week.  Now onwards and upwards: the final stage begins.

Freedom

I feel like the guy in Shawshank, slowly tunneling away towards it…  Progress is excruciatingly slow, but it never ceases, and neither does the hope that burns with it!

The Thin Man

You find yourself in troubled waters…

Stage 2

This is the fun part I’ve been waiting for, and slogging through all the nasty bits for…  It’s time to make the game proper!  Now I can enjoy the rest of the project a great deal more because it’s all about:

– making graphics

– making sound and music

– making levels

These parts are why I make games – programming and engines are all a means to an end – and I’m pleased to discover that the engine is adapting well to having lots of shiny new content thrown at it.

In that sense I really feel like I achieved my goal of reducing all the bullshit you have to do to get stuff into the game – it’s now just a case of coming up with the creative stuff, and getting it in there is [almost] pleasurable with the editor.

So far there’s heaps of new locations, sound and animation – but I’m going to hold off on releasing any more demos until I reach the closed beta stage.

I’ll leave you with a new screenie – recalling Soundless Mountain II in some ways (I like bathrooms, what can I say?)

In other news, there could be some wonderful things about to happen with Superflat Games – I will tell more when it’s confirmed – but suffice to say things could get quite a bit more serious in the coming months…

Lone Survivor: Update

Lone Survivor – version 0.32 [Play online]
NOTE: This game contains explicit language. It’s recommended you close all other flash windows, including Youtube, for the best performance. Please note also that this is just a tech demo, and in no way shows the level of polish of a final game!

EDIT: The link now contains version 0.32, which improves flashlight, fixes a couple of bugs, and adds smooth room transitions, and lastly adds movement to points of interest automatically.

Update

I’ve linked to a new version of this, which is now running in the new version of the engine, which is close to complete.

Before, all the game objects such as the player were hard-coded in Actionscript using the Flixel framework.

Now instead, every game object is exactly the same thing as far as Flixel is concerned, except they run their own setup and logic routines which are all powered by the HAL parser (HAL is the name I’ve given to my script language). The player is slightly special in that it persists between rooms.

Sixel in Action

Also the assets are now handled in the editor (graphics and sound etc)… You just plonk one in the resource folder, and they appear in the editor. They’re automatically embedded into the Flixel code, so I never need to re-write it once it’s done. I hate manually typing in asset names!

I’ll probably write more about how my editor works at some point – it’s something I’ve worked on for a long time, and it’s just getting to a fairly usable state. There’s still work to do, but it’s almost possible to get a fully working adventure game out of it now. The last step is inventory handling, and I’ve got a plan for it, let’s hope it doesn’t take too long!

A Pixel Bender Stress-Test

Lone Survivor v0.2 – [Play Online]
NOTE: It’s recommended you have no other Flash windows running to see good performance.

So, just say I was going to re-build my survival horror engine (as seen in Soundless Mountain II) in Flash…

To re-create the lighting / fog / film-grain effects, I’d probably need to harness the power of Flash 10.0’s all new ‘Pixel Bender’ tech. This is like having programmable PS3-style shaders at your disposal. At the moment it runs in software, but it’s still faster than pure Actionscript 3 (Flash language).

From the research I’ve done on the net, no-one’s combined this tech with pixel art as yet (partly because it’s fiddly to set up I think, and it’s so new) – so let me know how it runs for you.

Press A/Z to move the secondary lights. Press Left / Right to move your player – there’s no walk cycle yet though!

The reason I’m posting is that I’d love to know what framerate you’re seeing, and your specs – press the ‘|’ key or the ‘¬’ depending on your machine to bring up the console and see your framerate.

Thanks in advance!