Protocol 001 Game Dev Blog

The Story

2009-12-16T12:44:00.002-05:00

Some games can get by with only the basics of a story.

Unfortunately, adventure games can't. The past few months, I've been writing and re-writing the story for the events of this game... The formats have changed and even my original design document has been thrown out the window and burned.

Well, not literally.

Starting over from scratch on the story side of things is hard. Especially when all of the rooms have already been drawn. My graphics are still safe, though I may need to tweak them a little depending on how the story flows, a new exit here and more grime over there... but that's later.

So far, I've just started to write the game out as if it is a first person short story. An except is as follows:

"Callihan and Moxley are dead.

I've never understood why an astrophysicist and a psychiatrist would ever work together, but the two of them have been close since before I joined up with the Technical Division. Sam Callihan is built like a box, all right angles and hunched over his desk most of the time. He's the kind of shrink that makes you feel exposed under his beady-eyed stare. John Moxley is quiet. He hardly talks to anyone other than Callihan. He has the build of an awkward high-school wrestler; all limbs stuffed into the standard white lab coat.

The two of them have been out in Sector 35 studying the psychological effects of spatial anomalies on humans out in deep space. Seems like a waste of funding to me, but the big wigs like to act like they are concerned with the welfare of the space workers. All I know is that I have a flat line from the AI of their research craft. Flat line on occupants automatically triggers the recall protocol to fetch the bodies of our fallen comrades. So here I am, in a slow spiraling search pattern to find the Switchblade-class ship, aptly dubbed "Conspiracy".

I can't help but wonder if this is just a malfunction. It has been known to report perfectly healthy people as among the dead due to interference or a software glitch. They could also be using the monitoring equipment as another of their creepy experiments.

The scanners on Norm's computer beep, so I pull up the data from the sensor sweep. The old Switchblade is visible on the scan. The ID query returns back the Conspiracy's ident string.

Callihan and Moxley are dead.

Another beep from the computer means that Protocol 001 is initialized."

Interlude

2009-10-21T09:07:00.000-04:00

I know what you're thinking.

"That floating sandwich would eat the poor technician sprite. It's too big for your game!"

Why yes, yes it is.

That's why the sandwich isn't going in this game.

I found that writing the script (as in the exact plot and dialog) for Protocol 001 is tedious and tiring, but I refuse to put anything in code until I finish it. I'm not going to go down the road of getting to the point in the game I hadn't thought about and improvising a puzzle that doesn't make sense or is badly designed.

So to take the tension out of being Twilight Zone serious, I've found something to keep the stress down.

I'm making a platformer game with an engine called Construct. I know, please stop thinking that I'm going to ignore this game like I did with Bitey the Littlest Vampire... but, Bitey understands. That story wasn't ready and not built for an adventure game... it was for an RPG.

One of these days, one of my game projects will be finished.

Puzzling

2009-10-13T14:56:00.003-04:00

This isn't as bad as it sounds. Not really. I was just in the middle of drawing all the little detail objects in the rooms when I realized that I hadn't finished writing the puzzles. I didn't know what objects that I really needed.

Okay, so... let's open up the Game Design document that I'd started months ago...

What do you mean that I never finished that outline?!

Well it looks like I'm back at the drawing board, using a flowchart software and finally finishing that outline of the plot. Now that I have all three parts outlined, all the puzzles mapped out and all four endings summarized, I can go ahead and write the script.

The script script, not the code script. I wish I was far enough in everything to start coding.

Here is a pic of part of my puzzle chart:

Thinking about everything else, I'm considering dropping the text parser section of the game and just going Point & Click for the whole thing. The story will remain the same, just the user interface won't be so convoluted. Plus I added a couple of minigames and I don't want the player to have to switch from keyboard to mouse too many times.

We'll see what happens I suppose. Until next time gang!

Backgrounds

2009-10-06T12:17:00.003-04:00

I took a brief break from getting the sprite walking to put some more detail into the backgrounds of the rooms. In an adventure game, the environment is the most important. Backgrounds and objects giving the player most of the interactions. Objects will be added later, as well as animated items. Things are coming along now, it actually looks like the character is in a spaceship.

Baby Steps

2009-09-27T11:56:00.002-04:00

fter spending some time away from game development, I decided to jump back in on things and try to get my clumsy sprite walking. I've made some progress... some...

As you can see, the little guy doesn't quite know what to do with his arm there. At least his legs seem to know what's what. And he isn't really moving aside from all those long limbs. I guess we'll have to try this one again.

That's a little bit better. He's bouncing just slightly so we know he's actually hitting the ground instead of just a blue void. Still not so sure about that arm though. Let's see if we can just help him along here.

That's much smoother. A little tweak here and another one there and I'm sure he'll look just fine in-game. So here we have it. A little space engineer ready to go on a horrible journey through space and time. Yay!

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Update: I realized that the above animations were just one step... so I had to tweak and expand some more. Here's a better version...

Walk Like A Sprite

2009-09-14T13:37:00.003-04:00

So our little dude looks better than the last post. Good. He's rather respectable... has a loveable hairstyle and cute little goggles over his eyes. But can he walk yet? Sort of. I have all the frames of my side-facing walk cycle completed. I'm just a few tweaks away from getting Tech here to take his first in-game test steps. Once I tweak up his side walk, I can do the dreaded front and back facing views.

Wish us luck. Tech and I will be here... drawing endless frames.

The Walkcycle

2009-09-06T12:24:00.000-04:00

For years, I struggled with creating a convincing walk cycle. I only passed that part of animation class by redrawing it three times and using extra credit. Actually, this is usually the stumbling block for me, I have no idea how to animate the character I draw and end up stuck for months (or years) with all these half-done graphics and nothing to show for it.

Well, a friend told me that I could use a biped in 3D studio max, pose it how I wanted and render out the frames. Then, I could use those frames to trace over. Brilliant! Now, over the long weekend, I can get started on animating and redrawing the little human bugger.

Resolution

2009-09-01T11:42:00.000-04:00

Yes, I know what you're thinking... why am I talking about resolution now? Resolution here, will be screen resolution. And since this is an old school adventure game with a good portion of the gameplay being with a text parser, then I chose to make the game at 320 x 200.

Now, I know what you're all thinking. How the heck do you manage to make anything look good when the image is so tiny on that 20.1 inch widescreen? Well, I'm not too concerned about running the game fullscreen. I know that sounds rather arrogant, like I'm going to upset anyone by not really thinking about that sort of thing. But hey, how many people will actually play my game and will any of them not run it in a window? Besides, AGS has a 2x and 2x filter so that even if you want to run it "bigger" you can run it full or windowed scaled up. That's just handy.

The reason I'm using 320 x 200 is that is is classic. Well, that's not entirely true. My first game, and the barely started second game (making this actually game #3) were in higher resolutions, 640 x 480 and 800 x 600 respectively. Do you realize how much detail you need to make things look nice in 800 x 600? All the rooms looked empty, even if the characters were a manageable size for me to draw.

So here's my current conundrum. I can easily do the backgrounds at this scale and find details to fill them. It's actually fun drawing at that size. But... I find that shrinking down sprites makes things a bit difficult. How can you make someone expressive if their eyes are only one pixel big? Oh, I know that some very talented people can do it, but I'm talking about me... who is used to drawing and scanning things to huge proportions and then scaling them down in Photoshop or Illustrator.

What do you guys think? Does my little robot pass inspection? Of course, he's just an inanimate drone, but still...

Now that I've got one character and given the floating drone a basic walk cycle, I should move on to the human character.

Not as good. We need some serious anatomical work. While Tech needs to be tall and a little lanky, I think he's crooked in more ways than one. And I don't mean morally. I've been trying to find a way to do a "simple" 3d stick figure so that I can get his scrawny proportions right. But that's another issue... and another post.

And so it Begins...

2009-08-31T10:42:00.004-04:00

Before I get into the meat of where I currently am at the game development process and what I'm using and all that, but I think now is the time to get into the reason for the medium and genre of the game. Protocol 001 is an adventure game. Old School text parser mixed with point and click action. While that seems confusing now, it will make sense during the game. (At least I hope!)

I think it goes without saying that I'm a huge geek. At a very young age, my mother would make me watch Start Trek, Star Wars and any other sci fi show that was on one season and canceled the next. (I have fond memories of Earth 2). To this day, I will watch any show created by Rockne O'Bannon just because Farscape and Alien Nation was such an inspiration to me.

My love of adventure games is a bit more hard to track down. Back in 1993 or so, we had a 386 Tandy computer fro Radio Shack. My sister's boyfriend at the time gave us several stacks of floppy disks and a pile of photocopied manuals... and when I got to Sam & Max Hit the Road, I was hooked. I think it was the insane comedy throughout the game that I fell in love with. It also helped that the game didn't involve fast reflexes or being able to jump just right. The story took up the main focus but there were several ways to deviate from the main and not be stuck or bored. Fast forward several years to 2008 when I decided to load Adventure Game Studio and try my hand at this game design thing.

I have to admit, that Protocol 001 isn't my first game. And even my first game wasn't even my first attempt, but that's a different story. Murphy's Salvage was a good try, but I know I did several things wrong that I'd like to fix now.

It all comes down to planning though; Murphy didn't have any. I had a few characters but no story and I got ideas in the middle and no real way to go back and fix everything from the beginning. So, with encouragement from some friends, I've decided to once more dive into the sci fi genre and make a game. Protocol 001 is set in Murphy's universe, in fact, I had planned a sequel right when I was finishing up Murphy, but I didn't know how to write it. Protocol is not a sequel. In fact, if this project goes over well, I want to rewrite Wombat's story into something playable... but that's another blog.

This game is inspired by several things, including but not limited to, Max Headroom, working as a phone support technician, the infamous AGS game Trilby's Notes, Farscape, Blake's 7, Red Dwarf and Sam & Max. So, while more serious than vacuuming rats out of an air duct, Protocol 001 should have its share of giggles.

At the very least, I'll have fun.