The Platformer

I made the decision recently to exclude platforms from my game. Part of the reason for this is that to create a fully platformed area I would need to scale down my main character, thus reducing the resolution and definition of the graphic, which I really didn't want to do as I liked it just the way it was. Another reason for this is because the way I had built my code would've made it very hard to implement the platforms successfully. I imagine I would probably have to use arrays to get this to work therefore rewriting a massive amount of my code and probably running into more problems on the way. This has been a learning curve however, as has the rest of the coding process and there are many actionscript methods I would be curious explore were I to develop another game, mainly the use of arrays and external classes. Were I to develop the game further I feel that I would definitely include the platforms as it adds so much more room for variation in the levels giving a more 2 dimensional experience. I feel that this single level project didn't need the platforms as there is enough content to keep the gamer interested for the amount of time they are playing.

The Hero

The hero is a character I created quite a while ago and have always wanted to make him into an animation or game. Until this project I had only really used him in graffiti style drawings and doodles so it is great to be able to see him come to life. I suppose the character design is inspired by similar cartoon monsters such as Pokemon and I have been told in the past he shares a resemblance to Mewtwo from Pokemon or Sonic the Hedgehog.

Having the horns and tail makes him look playfully mischievous, which I actually think adds a certain amount of juxtaposition when compared with usual devil-like creatures.I knew from day 1 that I didn't want him to come from Hell or anything obvious like that. I eventually settled on the idea of him being an alien who looks very much like what we would call a devil but actually is an alien with a coincidental resemblance. This is good because the features of the creature automatically trigger certain presumptions, which can be destroyed as the story goes on.



The reason I chose to have no name for the character is because I want their to be a role playing element to the game. At the start the character has no clothes, no name and no particular skills and we don't really know all that much about him. As the story progresses I want the player to make decisions on the character's developments, with the ability of learning and developing new special feats and collecting and equipping items, clothing and weapons to assist the hero in his journey.

Barber Ross

Barber Ross is one of the main character's in the story. The name, image and character or Barber Ross was taken from a combination of the name Barbarossa, which was the surname of 2 13th century, Greek pirates called Aruj and Hizir, a character called Major Robbie Ross who is a from a play by Timberlake Werten Baker called "Our Country's Good" (The sash Barber Ross wears is a homage to the sashes worn by military officers in the late 1700s when colonisation of Australlia began) also from Sweeney Todd, the barber and serial killer of The String of Pearls. I was also inspired by the relationship between Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins in Stevenson's "Treasure Island" and a similar relationship between Paul Atreides and Gurney Halleck in Frank Herbert's "Dune". Having such a strong mentor figure who differs from the stereotypical protagonist sterotype and is more of an anti hero gives room for a lot of interesting plot devices, such as the constant question of morality and the main protagonist's ability to look past the things which make the mentor imperfect. This is specifically apparent in Treasure Island

I liked the idea of the nickname "Barber" has there are certain connotations that go along with that. In the story I wanted there to be a great deal of suspicion of Ross's true character. As the plot emerges the player character learns that Barber Ross is apparently called so because of his tendency to scalp his fallen enemies in his military days. This suspicion creates friction between Ross and the hero and eventually leads to the hero deliberately not leaving the new planet when The Empathy begins its return to Shadow.
In the end the King reveals that Ross actually got his nickname from the fact that his father was the former King's personal bodyguard and beard barber, which is the reason for Ross's links to the Royal family and the reason he was given such excellent military training as a child.

The Synopsis

A basic synopsis/introduction of the story

The Empathy, a privateer space ship embarks from Shadow (The Planet of the Devils) to a recently discovered planet, which King Drake believes would be an ideal place for many of Shadow's devils to emigrate to, as Shadow is becoming increasingly polluted, over populated and many families are having to live in underground bunkers due to an increase in acid rain. The Captain and crew of the empathy have been charged with eliminating the under-evolved, invertebrate, native species that currently occupies the planet and further investigating the minerals and plant life that inhabit areas suitable for settlement and agriculture. You play the role of a young devil, who was found unconscious in the escape boat of a ship wreckage by Captain Serpiente on another distant world 5 year ago. The Captain brought you aboard the ship and left you to be mentored by the Empathy's resident chef "Barber" Ross, who's past is shadowed with secrecy and mystery. And you are old enough now to realise that the scars on Ross's body, who has taught you everything you know and brought you up as if you were his own, probably didn't come from chopping vegetables and each moment you are you are slowly becoming aware that there is much more to this "new planet" than King Drake had ever imagined and that deep in the centre of this alien world may not be a core, but a heart!

Animation and drawing

I took a long time animating all of my graphics. I really thought that it was of paramount importance that I did the animation frames as smooth and proportionate to each other as possible. As I said in one of my previous posts, I was inspired by characters and environments such as those in old 8 and 16 bit console games. Form and functionally is extremely important in all forms of design, but there has to be an equilibrium between the two to create something, which is both aesthetically and practically harmonic.

For the walking animation I drew and scanned 12 individual frames and then went over each one with the pen tool in illustrator then messed about with the colour settings. This in all was a highly time consuming process, which with the facilities I had, couldn't really have been avoided. If I were to go back and do this process again I wouldn't definitely invest in a graphics tablet as I could get better stroke effects using the pressure sensitive feature. Not only that but the drawing phase would be far quicker overall. I would also have done it the way I did my later graphics such as the trees and headstones. First I drew a layer in illustrator with no stroke and a black fill to mark the outline point. I then created another similar shape within the lines that also had no stroke but this time they had the fill colour. The next thing I do is use the knife tool to cut the shadowed bits, then recolour with a darker tone. Below I have shown the different layers of colour in the headstone graphic.



The good thing about using illustrator is that vector points and curves can be easily manipulated. Multiple illustrator layers can also be imported as keyframes into a flash movie clip, making animation much easier to achieve. All the grass in the game is animated. I achieved this by making a basic "zig zag" grass graphic, then made 5 copies of it each on seperate frames. I then went into each layer and grabbed the tips of the grass blades and moved them a bit mor each frame. Once I was happy with those 6 frames i simply copied them, reversed them and placed them after the original 6 to make a fluid loop. Another thing I did was put ants crawling up and down the headstone as if at work. For this I just had to duplicate the same ant shape and adjust their positions and rotation values to make sure the 12th frame would go seamlessly back into the first.

Describing bits of the code

Here is a small example of the code i built explaining how I achieved the side scrolling. mcDevil is the character movie clip. charSpeed is the pixels per frame that the character moves in either direction (depending on which arrow key is pressed). wall2 is a wall background graphic. The following code is accessed on every frame to check the position of the character and make sure it can only move between 100px and 400px on the x axies. If it does try going past those positions the character is moved in the opposite direction with the same pixels per frame (charSpeed)therefore not moving anyway. This also triggers the background to move instead so instead of the character moving along the level, the level is actually moving behind the character.

stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, bgScroll);

function bgScroll(event:Event):void{

if (mcDevil.x >= 400){
mcDevil.x -= charSpeed;
wall2.x -= charSpeed;
}

if (mcDevil.x <= 100){
mcDevil.x += charSpeed;
wall2.x += charSpeed;
}

To scroll the background for an infinite amount of time I made it so the scrolling movieclips such as the grass were 2 identical backgrounds next to each other. Then when the entire movie clip has moved the length of one, the entire clip moves the length of 1 of them, so it seems that the background scrolls seemingly seemlessly. Here is an extract from the code demonstrate.

if (bg1.x <= -1){
bg1.x = bg1.width/2;
}
if (bg1.x >= bg1.width/2 +1){
bg1.x = 0;
}

Here shows how I made the character flip directions according to which direction he is moving, which is triggered by the value of the boolean faceRight

if (faceRight == true){
mcDevil.scaleX = 1;
}
if (faceRight == false){
mcDevil.scaleX = -1;
}

Inspiration

The reason I chose to use flash and develop a 2 dimensional platform game is for 2 main reasons. The first being that I had no previous experience in Flash or Actionscript and recognised that it is an extremely important skill to have and one which can be utilised in a variety of different ways for a multitude of different purposes. The second reason is because I think it is extremely important when doing any project that I am passionate about it. My fond memories as a child were playing Super Mario World for the SNES or Sonic the Hedgehog for the sega. A combination of loveable characters, vibrant fantasy worlds and rich diversity of enemies and challenges really drew me in to play these classic games hour after hour. With that said I knew from the very start of the project that I wanted my game to create many of these design elements to create a game that is visually and aesthetically stimulating as well functional.



Everyone who knows me knows that I am extremely excited by science fiction. I strongly believe art, films and literature are most interesting when they show something beyond the realm of normal life. In theatre for example I much favour practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht or Antonin Artaud, who saw artistic truth as something which represents a theme rather than replicates it. Brecht once said that theatre shouldn't be a mirror to hold up to society but a hammer in which to shape it. Both Artaud and Brecht used symbolism to portray a message rather than trying to recreate reality much like other famous theatrical practitioners such as naturalist, Constantin Stanislavski. In this same sense I think there is something special about creating something unlike real life: A camera can take a perfect picture of a situation but it is an artist's individuality that really makes a message special. This is why I love good science fiction so much.


Take Frank Herbert's Dune as an example. Dune is an excellent novel and one which I have been deeply inspired by. It is a story of love, politics, ecological change, religion, betrayal, corruption etc. The fact that it is set in a distant made up planet filled with alien technology and magnificently imagined creatures just adds to the quality of the story. In the same sense that William Shakespeare's classics like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night or any other of his plays are relevant not only in this chronological era but were just as relevant in a different time and a different place. It is the same reason why the original Star Wars films were so popular; The character driven stories, which echoed those of Ancient Greek mythology could have been set in Manchester instead of Tatooine and the base story would have been just as relevant.

Other novels I considered when coming up with the setting for my game were The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stephenson, Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess and The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. Also speaking of Douglas Adams there was a great serial of the original Doctor Who series from the Tom Baker years also written by Adams called 'Pirate Planet'. I was really interested in the integration of pirates in a science fiction setting, a theme which has been used countless amounts of times in different mediums for example the Japanese animated film 'Castle in the Sky' by Studio Ghibli.