Platformer Plot/Character Motivation

Here's a provisional plot; I relayed it during club, but here it is in written form for reference. Not to deep, and it's vague enough to be able to squeeze in a variety of bosses and abilities. Enjoy!

Character Motivation text file


EDIT: Written on Linux, so it lacks Windows carriage returns. Open it in Wordpad or an internet browser for correct formatting.

Game Development Kits

For the sake of efficiency, we are currently sidelining the development of our own Java-based game engine, and will instead select a game development kit/application for the creation of our platformer. Below is a list of potential kits, and we will be spending the next week or two testing them, and selecting one that best suits our group.

Game Maker 8
001 Game Maker
JumpCraft
Golden T Game Engine
Scrolling Game Development Kit 2
Reality Factory
VERGE 3
Sphere
Lightweight Java Game Library


Comments and grades will be applied as we test the applications.

New Semester, New Plan

We lost a lot of members this semester (graduation, etc), so we gotta deal with less until some new members pop up.

Additionally, as a result of getting essentially nowhere last semester, we're going to be changing the game we'll be working on. It's an extension of the plot of the game we were working on last semester, but it's a prequel and a platformer; we already have a basic plot, so most of the bickering can be skipped this time. On top of that, a basic platformer is fairly easy in comparison to the ambitious RPG we were planning last year.

We're going to be splitting development into a variety of stages, starting with a basic, sprite-based 2D graphics engine, and later moving onto a pseudo-physics engine, and a user/AI control system. if we have time, we'll add sound/music and an event system, but for now, we're trying to keep it simple.

Design Document

*The linked file at the end of this post is the current design document, detailing things like game-play mechanics, structure and story of the in-game world, character interaction, etc. It is very much liable to change.

It's amazing is how fast this much was generated, in only two hyperactive/manic meetings. Anyone who frequently attends GameDev can attest to the fact that we normally spend our time goofing off, so when we sat down and started hammering out details for the game, at the end of the day, we found ourselves fairly surprised.

Now there's barely any distinction between the Primary and Secondary Story designers, with the exception that the Primaries simply try to sort through the endless mountain of suggestions supplied by the Secondaries, and keep the game from sounding overly cliched. Everyone has contributed at least a little bit to the story, as well as to how the game should play out.

It's obvious that we as a club will not be reaching my initially proposed goal of four mini-games, nor will we finish this one game by the end of the semester, but as long as everyone has fun, and learns how to grow and organize ideas that can later be transformed into a game, then I'm happy. The purpose of the club, by the way, is not strictly the programming of games, but learning how they go from planning to implementation.


The file: game concepts.txt

DarkBASIC

This probably comes as no surprise to anyone who frequently browses the links at the right, but DarkBASIC Professional is now free for personal use (not commercial or educational though). For anyone who wants to take a more code-based approach to game design, but is too intimidated by the C-type languages and libraries that are widely available, this is a nice alternative to ease you into the methods of manipulating and managing game objects with code.


NOTE: The language used in DarkBASIC is, obviously, very similar to Basic, so if you're one of those people who firmly believe that learning Basic will inhibit your capacity to learn other programming languages, then maybe this isn't for you...

Project Roles

I'm just going to use this space to establish the official roles of the members of the group.

Lead Manager
Matthew Hydock

Lead Story/Conceptual Designers
Andrew Herring
Ben Cook

Secondary Story/Conceptual Designers
Allan Simmons
Garin Dangler
Matthew Hydock
Sean Fitzgerald
William Fisher

Lead Artist
Sean Fitzgerald

Secondary Artists
Andrew Herring

Lead Programmer
Matthew Hydock

Secondary Programmers
Garin Dangler
Matthew Miller
William Fisher

Music/SE
Ben Moser
Derek Robertson

This post will be edited as members decide what they can contribute to.