Just posting some thoughts. The main character needs a way to interact and "play god" with the world. So the simulation will be run from his ship. Which will be transformed into a giant robot, and disguised as one of the creatures of the world, because you know... giants robots are cool. It will probably be one of the first missions to locate the giant robot and activate it. The main character will also have a personal A.I. that will follow him around, this A.I. will serve as a tool for dialogue, and moving the plot forward.

So if Stu is reading this, you may be happy about the next step. The way this game is eventually going is that the animals will evolve into anthropomorphic sentient creatures and start to alter the world even more. I would like it to develop a bit differently every time you play the game, but one idea I have in mind is for wars to start between species. I have some design ideas for demolition/ rocket foxes and assault wolves. I might make my orc an evolution of a pig.

Should be pretty fun, I'm running out of time though :[

Here's a monkey I made:

Next up.

I just thought I would do a post explaining what isn't in this version, and what people can expect next, as well as the long term story and aim for this project.

This version basically shows the first level of the aesthetic and "game feel", I wanted to get the glitch art look in there, and enough animals to give the presence of an ecological simulator. However, it's not an ecological simulator yet, unlike the last, similar game I made (if anyone played that), the animals don't hunt and breed yet. I will be introducing that as well as a hydro system in the next update. I want the animal behavior to be a little more advanced too; the fawns and cubs should follow a parent until they are old enough to live on their own, and I'd like to have the animals face off against each other too, instead of just gobbling up anything smaller than them, like my last game. This might be in the style of a Pokemon/ RPG battle system.

Why all the game and digital references in an environmental simulator? The basic story is this; the main character has escaped a fallen home world. Something went wrong, and he is trying to figure out what by running a digital simulation over top of a desolate moon/planet somewhere.

Eventually you will be able to find tools to fix glitches in the simulation, tweak the breeding rates of animals, even the chemical makeup of the digital atmosphere. Somewhere in the story it will be explained that the characters home was also possibly a simulation, and that by running his own, he can observe the similarities and make a conclusion.

The current character sprite is just a placeholder, my other space guy character didn't hold up for some reason and I didn't have the time to mess around with it. He will face dangers from the "real world" like running out of oxygen and needing to find water, food, tools. In the game he will also learn to communicate with the creatures of the simulation, and other characters will evolve and appear, hopefully a little differently every time....

Oh yea! This world is randomly generated. That's something I've always wanted to do, and it turned out to be pretty easy.

Going to Neapl next week, so the the next update probably won't be until January.

.____.

No posts for a while. I've mostly been doing programming, and I don't really know how to blog that. Well, here is a few screens and a link to the first semi playable version of the game.

WSAD + and -.

.....Game.....

Back to my other game!

Animations are all working in game, here are a few gifs of my favorite animals.

So I tested  out my first educational game. It went okay.... kids seemed to like it a lot, but I know what I would change now, and have some ideas for next time. I wish I'd started testing games with these kids earlier.

In that last pic one of the kids is using a MaKey MaKey kit, which is set up with one of the cardboard and graphite game controllers I got them to design.

I've animated all of those animals from the previous post. I think they look alright, but I have'nt turned them into sprite sheets, and cant be bothered posting them as gifs or anything at the moment.

I did however start a little side project to test out a few technical features. This is my first actual education game, and I'm gonna test it on my kids on Halloween.

Premise: Collect positive words, avoid negative words. Positive words make you level up, negative words level you down. Here's the ladder your character will visually move across as they level:

These characters are based on points the kids would get during class. I always thought plain old stars were a bit boring.

Dusting out this bad boy....

I've been making games this year, but no one has seen them. So I'm going to start posting stuff here. Below are some of the assets for a game I just started recently:

Not sure if I'll maintain the action of posting or not. The idea of sharing my process just seems tiresome, maybe I'll just post finished products on here.

So this game is going to be an environmental simulator, with animals that hunt and kill each other. The animals will all be digital constructs that overlay the "real world" which the astronaut guy lives in.

[Hence the difference in style between the "digital" creatures and the "real" character.]

So the character in the game (Charles) will be walking around a barren moon like planet, and he will be able to turn on and off an augmented reality, bringing life to an otherwise dead world. He can use this game/ simulation/ world thing to gain information and solve problems in the real world.

I have a bunch of other ideas too....
-Disgusting bachelor frog will be hidden in there somewhere (Maybe he's murdered his wife).
-Insanity wolf will be a police officer/ detective.
-Advice dog will give you riddles in disguise of useless advice.

These animal meme references will be twisted and perverted in order to create an uneasy tone behind the happy digital aesthetic, making the escapism from the barren "real world" only superficial.

Why all the depressing crap? Well..... I dunno, but this game will be subtlety influenced by the themes of hopelessness and maddening terror found in Lovecraft lore.

Or something....