Neuro Project Ballio

[v6v]

Hey, what do you know... I'm planning on making a game that Ill actually finish and release sometime.

I actually prototyped this game 4 years ago in SGDK1, its original name was Ballio. I decided to recreate it from scratch in SGDK2. Total time worked on... Id say 2-3 weeks exactly.

 Its still developing, but I finally have enough to at least show. Its called Neuro, its an OpenWorld Game about 2 Robots with the Power of Alchemy, crash landed on an unknown planet, seeking information to help them uncover their purpose of existance. Its a fairly complex engine, with every item in game being fused with or having the ability to be used with other Items. A Block based System, Similar to Minecraft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8kpm_DRp2U&feature=related
That video demonstrates how the quick fusion engine works, You can ping(retrieve with a beacon) any item with a hardness of less than 4.5 and hold it in the first robot's gravosphere. Any Item held can be replaced anywhere else or can be combined with another item. Hence the name fusion. Sand + Topsoil = Peat (Flammable Grass) - Sand + Soil = Fresh Soil (FarmLand) I plan on adding 300 items.
Sprites/Lifeforms can also be created, and some fused items are Terminal- They cannot be fused with anything else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NPPQcPWJfU&feature=related
That video demonstrates the physics of Liquids- In this case water. If Water is placed, it acts like a single glob, and disappears when hitting the ground. If water is placed in a porous block, (Sponge, Perlite, etc) It flows out of the block until the water runs out. This can be used to stop fires, and make makeshift ladders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQhVmm5ZkM
That video demonstrates the daytime/nightime engine, at 100x speed. Daytime lasts about 7 minutes, Sunset about 2, Night about 7:20, Sunrise about 2:10. Different Sprites spawn at different times of day, with helpful (Health Giving Sprites) spawning at sunrise and sunset. Music Plays at Random Times, (Really Random) as to not get annoying. The only 2 Special Time States Implemented are Plenilunium, Night of the Blue Moon, (Increased Enemy Spawn Rates IN and OUT of Houses and Caves, and Solis ardoribus, The Day of The Burning Sun. Damage is caused if the player is outside, from the Heat of the Burning Sun.

Multiplayer WILL be implemented, I guarantee that. I would just like some suggestions that would make this game more fun, attractive, unique. Any ideas, or even criticisms. Anything that might actually help me develop this game more. Currently, Im working on the Inventory Fusion. (Just random)

Edit: Life giving sprites now spawn at night, giving motivation to go out during nightime

[Vincent]

It looks good!

It seems to me you are setting big goals from the start (300 recipes?!?).  Maybe it would be best to get a minimal amount of things (alchemy recipes and effects) working and then make the first challenges of the game. 

You speak a lot of the mechanics of the game, but what is the actual goal, what are the challenges?  I suggest you make a tutorial level with a couple of recipes and effects available and a couple of challenges to overcome or goals to reach.  Maybe it will help you get a roadmap toward the end of your game that is better defined.  Not to say that it cannot change along the way, it sure will, but for now, I don't see the point of the game: you didn't really tell us.  Is it because it is not clear to you or did you simply didn't talk about it?

Maybe what I'm saying is a little confusing (sorry if it is the case), I see that the story-goal of the game is for the two robots to understand their purpose, but to me the "story-goal" and the "gameplay-goal" are two different things.

For example, in LoK: Revival the story goal is this: Kain (main character) wants to avenge himself from the Elder God and revive Nosgoth.
But the gameplay goal is this: defeat at least 2 bosses, get the 3 or 4 required powers to reach the end boss, kill the end boss.  (of course, more bosses can be defeated and more powers can be amassed along the way).

Does this help?

Anyway, nice job for 2-3 weeks of work!

[v6v]

300 does sound large. Hm. Maybe It will reach that amount in updates. Ill start with 150 :p.

Oh, I see what you mean, lol I never did say the gameplay goal. Well the gameplay goal is that your Ship's Broken, And The Two Robots- Which are actually supposed to be One advanced space exploration robot, are broken, and the 5 parts of your body are scattered across the planet, held by "bosses" (Enemies that are exceptionally stronger then the rest). You have to try to survive long enough (Enemies, Batteries, Shelter) to find all parts of your body, then use said parts to locate your lost ship, and then get off the planet. You can only get past certain areas and defeat certain enemies with different items and weapons made in the recipies. Certain blocks of a certain hardness block Storyline Important areas and can only be passed when a certain item or block is obtained.
Ex: Diamond Walls can only be passed when Coal + Pressure + Pressure + Handle = Diamond Hammer, Or Lava can only be passed when Sponge given Water + Lava = Lava Glass. Gel can only be passed with Pressure + Pressure = Explosion.
Bosses the hold parts of your body, and with each part, a new ability is gained... Sword- Attack (Even though Swords are in the recipes) Shield, Take Less Damage... (Also in the Recipe) Boots (Move Faster). By Existance, really I mean why they exist in the first place, but that might be a spoiler. Its one of those things where you can choose to follow the storyline, or just make an entire city. The entire game you try to survive, being hunted by hunters and wildlife (I would love to post concept art) while improving and fusing items to become stronger, to get all 5 parts to repair yourself.
Ultimately using your fully repaired body to locate your lost spaceship.

The original game 4 years ago was about a kirby-like robot that could fuse enemies elemental powers for powers and items of his own using ping beacons. Somehow it evolved into this :p

[bluemonkmn]

Wow!  I wish I had more than 1 minute to look at it.  I will have to remember to take a closer look this evening!  This looks great!

[Vincent]

Ah!  I get the idea now.
So there must be a battle system in addition to the alchemy system.  Wow, it looks like it going to be a great game!
Keep going, I think you're headed in the right direction.

[bluemonkmn]

Your game actually has a very important element of a game I wanted to make one day (though maybe I'll just let you do it and help out where I can ) -- that is the ability to create a very large variety of creatures (or in your case, items) by finding, capturing, and merging other creatures.  Some creatures would be rare and hard to find.  Some combinations would be secrets to discover.  Most creatures would give you certain powers to overcome obstacles.  For example creatures that fly could carry you over a lake, but you might need a fire-breathing flying creature to carry you over a lake with a glacier on it.  And some of th challenge would come from the capturing process.  Capturing certain creatures might require the abilities of other creatures.

Some other ideas I've picked up from various games that I would like to see in more games (actually this kind of becomes a list of general ideas for interesting game development):
1. Ability to build a base and have automatons carry treasures back to it to fortify it (Magic Carpet)
2. An element of randomness / rareness -- you have to be lucky to find certain items, and get excited about finding the rare ones that open new opportunities to you (Patapon)
3. An element of luck -- Certain actions might be tricky and yield different results depending on luck or very precise timing. So every game is different, partly because of this element, and partly because of the randomness (Angry Birds).
4. Secrets -- The best games, in my opinion, are games of exploration, what new things can you encounter that you haven't encountered before, or nobody else has encountered yet?  One way to do this is have not just little secret areas, but whole secret quests and maps and multiple paths that can run in parallel to the main story line. (Super Mario World)
5. Detail / mood -- Providing extra bits of detail here and there can enhance a game much more than I expected. There's almost a magic to enveloping the player in the game world successfully, but if you do, you have created (in my opinion) a spectacular game.  And I think the key to this is having those extra bits of detail, and a consistent mood and theme carried out by the music, sound effects, graphics and story. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I think the games that I consider most successful with this are those that have bits of super-detailed environment that seem extraneous to the player, but subconsciously they help form an impression of a much more complex world that you are playing in.  For example, assume you simply introduced a door in one of your trees that took you to another map where you could talk to a character who would tell you some stories, and you had some very detailed graphics in that room.  And assume you also placed similar un-openable doors elsewhere.  Even though you only had to implement one or two such very-complex rooms, the player gets the impression that they are in a hugely complex game world with a sophisticated back story... and they maybe even imagine complex environments behind every one of those doors.  Yes, I hate being unable to explore certain areas, but that's the trick to having an impression of a complex environment without having to invest an impossible amount of effort.  There is a game called Albion that did a very good job of this.  I think they even took it a step farther and filled in many of these details... excellent game.  Some of the 2D Final Fantasy games did a pretty good job of this as well.  I miss that a bit in the newer Final Fantasy games.  It also sometimes helps if you can draw on larger stories with which the player may already be familiar.  Final Fantasy does this by referring to (and referring back to) Norse mythology with names like "Odin" and "Ragnarok".  I think Albion does a better job by incorporating Celtic lore.

[v6v]

lol, I see, I need to increase the amount of creatures craftable, kind of like Spore. There are rare items, and some are achieved at random. I try to focus on small small details, like small fireflies at night, or small grasshoppers jumping when touched or mosquitos buzzing around a lake, en the birds that fly in the sky and fish in a lake. Is this what you mean by detail? making the world around you seem alive despite what youre actually doing? I want to add more Sound effects but its hard to find them to tell you the truth.. there are much sound effects for "Metal Ball Landing on Grass" for free at least... I figure that I need to focus more on the creature creation system, with the mass amount of realm crafter games coming out that focus on ground and tool creation. I also see what you meant by the unopenable doors thing... doors that seem like they hold a secret but can never be opened? You're giving me alot of great ideas. Thanks. Ill try to post a link with the download as soon as I make it look nice enough so you all can see what I have so far, videos aren't too powerful at showing what a game actually is like. Its kind of a downer that the Weather Effects dont work, because Drawing Raindrops as sprites lags and drawing them as tiles looks... theres a better word, but Ill use artificial.

[bluemonkmn]

Yeah, I think that's what I mean by detail.  I don't have a very specific notion of it.  But that thought was reinforced when I was watching extra features about the Lord of the Rings series (on DVD).

Sound effects can be hard to find.  I often just try to synthesize them myself.  I imagine the sound of a metal ball falling on grass might sound like a combination of two other sounds faded into each other: maybe rapping a cup or punch bowl with your fingernail as the second half and running your hand lightly and quickly across your keyboard as the first half.  The sounds would have to be manipulated to see if you can make them sound more appropriate, and you might have to try fading them different ways to see what sounds best.  I don't actually have a whole lot of experience with it, but I figured I'd mention an idea just in case it works out.  It can take a lot of work and time making accurate sound effects.  And getting them right is probably harder than getting graphics right where you can directly edit pixels.

Another thing that occurred to me that immerses me in a game is having lots of characters.  Even if you can't talk to all of them or they don't all have much to day, just seeing lots of other people or other characters walking around that *could* have something to say makes the world feel more complete.

I don't know if the weather effects sample had any rain in it -- I thought it was just snow and fire.  But if there was some rain in there that you wanted, durnurd could probably help to get it working in 2.1.9.  Otherwise maybe the mechanism where you draw them as sprites can be improved so it doesn't lag.  Perhaps a combination of animated tiles *and* a few sprites on a non-scrolling layer (that only fills the visible display area) will look more realistic and perform better.  Or two layers of tiles raining at different speeds.

[Vincent]

Hi guys!

For the sound effects in my project, I used the website FreeSound.org extensively.  There's a lot of stuff in there of various quality.  In most cases, as long as you name the person who made the sound in your credits, it's ok.  I used the free sound editor Audacity to modify and cut the sounds.  I don't have much equipment to record my own sounds, so it was very useful to me.

If you're interested to make some weather effects (or other effects) with particules, you can get this system in lok: revival project.  It's sprite based, because it interacts qui the character sprite (rain, arrows and magma hurts).  You can configure the generator to specify what kind of element you want to generate: such as rain, snow, magma bubbles, arrows, fireworks (all of these are in Lok: Revival), the speed at which they are generated and where they are generated.  So it's a two part system: one generator which handles only creation of elements and the element itself and it's behavior.  It's sprite based, so it's not very performant, but it behaved well in my game.

I hope this helps.

[v6v]

Thanks for the Sound Effects! Im still looking into the weather effects though. I need to save alot of space for other sprites, so this might be somewhat of a hassle.

[bluemonkmn]

If you have a way of ensuring that all the weather sprites are on the screen (so you're not processing a whole bunch of off-screen weather sprites), and they're not in a category that does collision detection, then I don't think you can improve the performance of weather graphics much better than implementing it with sprites.  Sprites are not terribly complicated.  So if you're going to decide that they're going to be too slow, at least do it based on some performance test.  I think you said that you did a performance test, but perhaps I should review it to see something wasn't done in a bad way if it's not performing well.

[Vincent]

With the generator sprite in my game, you can arrange so the generated weather effects sprites follow the player, you simply have to set the generation location each time the player moves.  It shouldn't be too difficult.

[bluemonkmn]

I hope this project is still moving along.  Let me know if you could use any help.

[v6v]

Heh. It's moving. Like a Glacier. I might consider using that actual Physics example you posted somewhere else.

I think I'm manic when it comes to making games. One second I'm down like a Falcon's fan then the other I'm peppy about finishing it like some beserk cheerleader, I even motivate myself while I work.

But yep. It's moving. Well under the speed limit.

[v6v]

Oh, yikes, with school and all making a more prominent appearance in my life... I dont work on it anywhere as much as before...

I still add things here and there

If anyone wants to help or add onto in in any way, feel free to tell me.

I'm not trying to push this on anyone, but if I actually do have any avid supporters, feel free to lessen the work by however much you feel is fit. ^_^