USC Ch. 8: Rogue....um--One!
So ends the 48 hours of Global Game Jam 2017. It's currently 3:35am on a Sunday night, just settled my recursion / discrete math homework for good, and I'm typing this with my laptop propped on my knees, head against the wall by my bed.
This event marks my first attempt to play rebel at something. I couldn't see myself working in the direction that my team was heading, both in the game concept (gimmicky, physics-heavy puzzle) and art style (vector-based objects with no characters to be animated). So I went rogue, and decided to make a game solo.
Here it is -- God of Music, simple high-score dodger game. And yes, you can download it here right now.
It's a cloudy swirl of random ideas and impulses I've had -- generic Animesque kid hero, cloudy night sky from Cave Story's Outer Wall stage (Moonsong is an amazing track, give it a listen!), and a creepy ethereal-ish angel that's always floated by in my shower thoughts. Really quite satisfied with what I have so far -- I really like how the player character looks and I think I pulled off the dreamlike look and feel that I wanted it to have.
Also, this project is my first brawl with real game programming, and I think I've got the hang of it! It was a long bout of googling tutorials / forum questions and copypasting code, then retroactively trying to make sense of it all by more googling. I actually really enjoyed it -- once you get the syntax and API functions down it's really the same development process as in Construct 2, add sprite -> add mechanic -> find and fix bugs -> pingpong between script and game, tweaking values to make the game "feel right". And I live for that last part, the part where you're approaching perfection.
Unfortunately this game sank hard among a sea of crazy talented developers in the world's top game institution. I thought I had done a pretty decent job for a solo developer, but there were solo devs with production quality, full-on vector graphics games that nabbed awards from the judges. There were 4K resolution 3D multiplayer games with animations, textures and some truly insane lighting. There were room-wide Virtual Reality games up in the VR lab. It felt bad, all those veteran developers coming over to pity-play my game for all of twenty seconds and then give a clearly customary "Cool!" before heading off to other more exciting entries. And to that one guy who casually, happily remarked that "This was like my high school project" when playing God of Music -- I hope your socks got soaked in the rain outside after the showcase. Man, this university. There's so much to catch up on.
I'm definitely going to make this a Version 1.1, because currently the game's difficulty is constant throughout -- the sine wave of musical notes never changes shape or anything. I might add a second wave, or maybe just vary the speed and amplitude/frequency, and then also mix in some green musical notes as health collectibles. I look forward to giving it a nice ethereal 8-bit track too, and of course -- a high score system! The fact that this wasn't there probably screwed up my showcase majorly too.
But that's all after I get on top of my next wave of schoolwork -- Writing Project 1 is coming straight up, and Data Structures Homework 2 is out too. I'm actually baffled that I managed to solve Homework 1's recursion problems at a reasonable time, but there's still a constant uphill battle ahead. This whole thing seems recursive really: doHomework(var nextWave) {
if (date > 10may2017) {
beFree();
} else {
finishHomework(nextWave);
doHomework(nextWave + 1);
}
....Alright, now I'm seriously spouting nonsense. Time to knock out -- better not be late for tomorrow's 10:30am Discrete Math class, because that would screw me over really, really bad.
