Appleseed Prototype, Part 5

Well, friends, here is the last leg of this particular adventure (or is it!?). Once we've put everything together, we can play it and see it all working in unison!

First things first. In order to build a game, you must have a way to write the game. Some people build their games from scratch, engine and all. Other people build games using software others have created as a basis. I am certainly the latter, thankfully so, and the fact that other people have written this software allows me to create my own games without ever having to learn how to create the engine to go along with it. Bravo!

I use two different pieces of software to create games currently. Most of the games I have made or worked on have been in the delightful Adventure Game Studio. Aside from having excellent, well documented features and an excellent community to go along with it, it is free. This was a big 'selling' point when I was beginning to look at game building. Why pay for something when you can get it for free?

For this game (as well as Gherkin Surfin') I have used Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion 2, which costs money. Why not use AGS? Well, AGS is primarily designed for building an adventure game. Whilst some extremely clever people have used to build other forms of games, I am not one of these clever people, therefore I turn elsewhere. MMF2 is fantastic for a number of reasons - It's the easiest thing I've ever used in my whole life (relative to it's capabilities), it's powerful, it has been used to make a whole bunch of games that made me say "I want to do a game like that!" and it is customizable to the point where you can download extensions (similar to AGS modules) to help you build your game just right. The aforementioned extremely clever people can build these extensions with the wondrous and mystical arcane script known as C++. As before, I cannot :P.

Building a game in MMF2 is quite different to building one in AGS. Instead of typing all the functions in, MMF2 forces one to look through lists and select the appropriate objects and results. This makes it very quick to learn and intuitive, although sometimes if you wish to do something advanced you have to rely on things like trigonometry. For the purpose of Appleseed however, I did not.

I won't go ultra deep into the coding process because I am not very good at it (and also because this post is over 1000 words long anyway :P) and therefore will probably tell you wrong things, but the basic process is as follows:

1. Create your game world. Import graphics and assign them to their associated objects. Put each backdrop image in a separate layer and set up scrolling ratios. Put all items that the user interacts directly with (Player character, enemies, ground, blocks) in the topmost frame.
2. Set behaviours. Make blocks and ground into obstacles so the game knows what to do when the player character collides with them. Give enemies a movement path.
3. Set up player character movement (including camera scrolling). Set events for hitting an enemy and being hit by an enemy.
4. Test.
5. Fix insane amount of bugs.
6.Test.
7. Fix ridiculous amount of bugs.
8. Test.
9. Fix considerable number of bugs.
10 Test.
11. Fix remaining bugs.
12.Test.

As you can see, most of the time I spent on this game was fixing bugs and polishing. The initial setup for having a second character was so preposterously bad that the game would end for no apparent reason. The game wouldn't load the ground after everything was compiled. The goblins walked through walls. The player character got stuck in blocks. The player character got stuck on the edge of the screen. The player character would stop jumping 2-3 pixels before actually bumping into the block above her. The music wouldn't load. The music wouldn't load. The music still wouldn't load, dammit!! Oh, it's loading now. Wait, now it is not? Hmmm. The game won't compile!? But I compiled it yesterday!

Fixing most of these bugs was a fairly simple process, but I needed help with some of them. For the strange character getting stuck problem, a search of the Clickteam forums proved that this was common, and the solution was out there. After downloading an extension and spending an hour or so figuring out how to write custom movement where the player character follows an invisible 'detector object' without any spikies such as arms (whoever thought of this is a clever fellow, in my book) I had fixed a bunch of the remaining bugs. Getting the next 3 out took a search of the Clickteam FAQ on their website and 2 forum threads, in which people were very helpful.

Finally, the game was ready to compile. It is perfectly playable, with two very minor non crashing bugs, one of which is very rare. After testing more post compilation, the rare one crashes the game now. I am sorry if your game crashes when you hit a goblin as Appleseed, I honestly didn't think it'd be a problem. I am working on a fix for this (well, I plan to when I am less exhausted). The other one has been joined by another one which won't crash the game, but will look a little funny. Sorry about these as well. I hate releasing games with bugs.

Anyhow, after much thought and much more testing, Appleseed version 0.1 is ready for download. We've come a long way since the 'idea' phase, but we finally get to see it all in action. Still quite shaky as these bugs would indicate, but a successful (I hope) demonstration of my idea.

Get it here.

I honestly hope you like it. Oh, and if you have a pc gamepad, plug it in. It is three times better than playing the game with the keyboard!

All feedback very, very appreciated :)

Oh and a critical gameplay feature I stupidly forgot to note! You have to be stopped to attack as Applecore!