Mudtato
Story Tweak
Actually, setting-wise I’d prefer to have the crash survivors be more primitive in their architecture and technology (taking inspiration from Riven), and to have had an ongoing and increasingly hostile struggle against the native life on the planet. Perhaps it’s this native life that wiped them out, and not themselves. This would tie in nicely with them being innately hostile and unsympathetic.
Maybe they’re still somewhat sympathetic due to the “aliens” crashing on their planet and possibly hunting and killing them, but still.
What’s the story?
I don’t want to go down the path of being “realistic” when designing a platformer. The gameplay for a platformer is inherently unrealistic. However, I find it hard to design something that’s incoherent or doesn’t tie into a logical narrative.
Take Mario for example. Why on earth would plumbers be jumping around on platforms, mushrooms and turtles and collecting coins? It’s just nonsense. It worked, though.
While I don’t think narrative is really important for a platformer to be great, I want to have a consistent theme in order to design environments, enemies, sounds etc that fit together.
How do you explain every creature and object in an environment being hazardous to the player in a platformer? It’s generally something that players just accept, but I’d like it to make sense within the world I’m creating.
Here’s what I have in mind…
At some point in our future a spaceship is sent off from Earth. It ends up far, far, far from where it was supposed to be going, and from where it will ever be found or be able to return from. It crash lands onto an alien world. A handful of survivors awake from stasis and manage to establish themselves on the planet. Over many, many years the humans end up covering the planet, with their origins being lost to time. Through the usual conflicts, exploitation of the environment etc the humans eventually destroy themselves/each other and the planet once again becomes uninhabited. The native flora and fauna, however, had slowly over time been evolving to defend the planet from the issues the people left behind any future “aliens” that might visit.
After some thousands or tens of thousands of years, through some geological upheaval, the wreckage of the originally crashed ship is unearthed and our protagonist is released from stasis. The protagonist (and player) initially have no idea about any of the events that have transpired and for all they know they’ve landed on an alien world with a seemingly long extinct humanoid alien race and hostile alien life. Not to mention hazards in the way of technology that remains from some ancient wars.
The player will set out to find other survivors from the crash and a way to call for help, gradually uncovering the story over the course of the game. Maybe in the end some future post-human species can turn up, or maybe the planet is irreversibly damaged and the player is the last survivor as the world collapses around them.
I think the mechanics of a platformer can work well within this narrative, so I’ll start with it and see where it goes.
In some ways the story is reminiscent of the original Planet of the Apes, which I love, but I’ve got some different ideas for it and there will be zero apes. Ok, maybe one ape.
Oh and another great platformer I missed in my last entry was Yoshi’s Island.
…and we’re back!
It’s been a while, but gamedev is finally back on the menu.
However, unlike previous entries I’m going to just keep things simple for the next game project, because I actually want to finish a game this time.
It’ll be a classic-style platformer, like Donkey Kong Country (2) and Skullmonkeys, but with a theme/setting like Riven (Myst 2).
However I’m still trying to work out how the theme and the mechanics can work together, as well as a narrative that fits.
Development-wise it’s C# (.net 5) and Raylib.
Excited to actually have some progress to show on a game after all this time… well, soon.
The same old story…
As usual, real work has taken priority and I haven’t been able to work on the game. However, I’m really happy with the progress I was able to make in such a short time, and after such a long time of thinking about the game but not doing anything about it.
I want to keep hope alive that I can finish something for the jam, but it’s probably impossible at the moment.
I will finish this game, though.
Still moving
But this time it was moving things around my house, so I didn’t get a chance to work on the game today… Maybe tomorrow.
(Next day…) I was just thinking that the setting doesn’t need to be the literal moon of Earth. It can still be a desert planet (or moon) like I originally planned for Arid.
I did like the “USA/Soviets fighting on the moon” idea, though… Something to think about.
Time to get moving!
I think I’ve got movement sorted out. There should be a good balance between client and server workload, so hopefully it won’t be too intensive.
Here’s the gist of it:
- The user sends a “StartMovement” request to the server
- The client animates the player moving
- The server sends out information about the moving player to all nearby players, who animate the player moving
- The movement ends in the client, which sends an “EndMovement” request to the server
- The server checks that the end movement is correct
- The server updates nearby players with the moved players position
If the user sends a new movement while an existing movement is in progress, the server will check that the new movement starts on a point on the previous movement’s line, and if so will set the new target.
Things outstanding are path finding and figuring out what to do if the client doesn’t send the EndMovement request. I Also need to test with lag and more players.
But it’s still a good milestone! :)
(The gif is a bit jittery)