My Flash Game - WIP

Thanks for investigating this thread ;)

During my Easter holidays I started work on a flash game called 'Atrophy'. I'd been toying with a fictional universe I wanted to 'realise' so the first version of the game was going to be a puzzle game which would have lots of storyline going on; however I found about two weeks in that I really needed an artist to bring alive the ideas and I couldn't find one. So the plan changed but since I had exams things went very slowly and I only did programming in between revision.

What I started work on was 'Atrophy - Galaxy' which was a RPG, made with the goal of maximum re-playability and progression. I said 'I want my Flash game to have the same sense of progression as Mass Effect 2' but of course I'm not a whole company so the way I aimed for the re-playability was randomly generated content 'Big Time Styley'.

I was going to randomly generate equipment, stats of equipment, missions, AI behaviour, types of AI, the storyline of the game, minigames and as much as I could. So far I have the random missions, AI and story so i think my goal is suprisingly quite realistic.

So I've seen Foof posting his game engine here so I thought I'd post my game and updates during development (even though a flash game isn't exactly a game engine in terms of difficulty :p ).

Also I will say that I'm following the idea that if you should make things for yourself so this game may get a bit crazy at times but hopefully criticism will balance it out and may actually make it releasable :) .

So here is the content:

IMGS:

Here are some menu screens; as I said I don't have an artist and all work on this project is done by me (with the odd question to Dan :) ) so all art assets are liable to change:

Loadup screen

Main Hub Interface

Galaxy Menu
- The galaxy menu is where you can travel from planet to planet to see different shops, different quests and if you have fallen out with a faction, try to reach sanctuary.

Combat Mission
- Combat is top down, turn based and the content generated is random but I can control the variables to produce limitations e.g difficulty blocks harder enemies, planet varies what buildings will be created, mission type varies what specialist units will be created

VIDEOS:

---- MAIN GAME

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX6sbzlLQ0A

---- HACKING

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwUlvpIkQp4

- Just tonight (time of original posting) I created the hacking minigame and I sent it to the people in the community chat but I made this video because some people didn't work out what they had to do.

--- SUMMER UPDATES

Video on out of combat updates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNdQ96b_an4

Video on combat updates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcyhMluoPMk

Looks pretty cool so far. Loving the dynamic environments and the different mission types. Though you're right, the visuals don't do it justice.

Looks awesome! Or looks like a bunch of bad drawings, but... /cough

Anyway, um... Awesome :D

... Can I make a weird suggestion? Can you have a house? And be able to buy furniture? And get furntiture from quests? It could be your ship ;o

... come on :(

Anywayz... O_o

Well at the moment the sky is the limit with my flash but once I've sorted out combat and therefore can do my shop system I'm going to do saving the game. Depending on how much I can cram into a save file I might be able to add some sort of homespace or character customization but then I'd definitely need an artist.

... well, from what I can see, you definitively need an artist now ;o /sniped

But yeah, that's always been my dream- have a game where you get various furniture and/or furniture "recipes" or materials, and then make a house with stuff from around the galaxy. D:

Oh, and are you expecting to be able to have a fleet with multiple ships during combat? What about ground combat?

Nice, I've always liked making stuff in flash but get lazy and lack of coding skill = boredom and then fail lol. I am more the artist and I am interested in working on anything right about now but this one sounds interesting. I'd be a bit worried about it being too random if everything including story is randomized. Would the battles be more animated? say you move you physically see the player move rather than appear at the next position. You seem to enjoy coding it so I like that. I wouldn't mind trying to make some stuff and see what you think. Are you going for a realistic style?

Very nice work, I really like the concept of the game and the design ideas for the gameplay so far. I can't wait to see more!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by OneEyedBanshee

... I'd be a bit worried about it being too random if everything including story is randomized. Would the battles be more animated? say you move you physically see the player move rather than appear at the next position. You seem to enjoy coding it so I like that. I wouldn't mind trying to make some stuff and see what you think. Are you going for a realistic style?

---

1 - The story is randomised in some areas (think like Dr Who, 'some places must happen') so events like the discovery of Organite, discovery of time being a particle and the 'Red Sky' incident are some events I've planned which must happen and no matter where you are you will know about them.

The randomised things would be, say if you went to a planet which had a scientific newspaper on it; it may be said that a reporter tried to get an interview with someone and then you get a slightly less complete version of what's going on but then you think 'This faction isn't very talkative, maybe I shouldn't do missions for them' or you may be intrigued and do more missions to try and find out what is happening, whereas if the random generator changed it so they did get an interview then you might realize that the faction is developing new technologies they don't want their competitors to steal so then you decide you do want to work with them.

So you see the story is essentially the same, however your view on it may change. Also because different planets have different newspaper, news appears on certain days and things like doing missions and traveling from planet to planet adjusts the game clock then this adds the illusion of randomness.

2 - I am planning on animating the battles with gun shots, explosion and stuff. At the moment I am working on 'collision' or rather enemies recognizing where cover and buildings are, once I've done that I can draw bezier curves (those curved lines with handles so you can change the steepness of the curve) from their start location to their finish and hopefully flash will let me tween along that line.


Then for what Rock was asking about ships and ground combat:

At the moment it is just ground combat and the model at the moment is you are a lone unit but you will be able to buy contracts to bring in off map supports such as UAV, airstrikes and stuff; however I've been talking to a guy at school and he's made me consider rethinking and maybe adding allies to the equation, that you control and can hire for missions. Allies would require a slight rework of the ai but nothing major. Space combat isn't planned and to be honest this game is more about planets, the inhabitants and technology on them so I'll be focusing on ground combat.

Oh, so this isn't space combat? XD

Anywho, you really should add more units to the equation... It would greatly enhance the strategy and stuff... Yeah. <_>. ... /cough

Hm, speaking of which. Will you just "choose" battles, or will there be some way of exploring the planet to find places you can fight and stuff? What about exploring space?

Well the AI has been rewritten to its new puppeteer format; this will help me program communication between enemies and should fix some bugs with the cover system. Disadvantages from it are that the map scrolling is slightly more lagged, enemies take slightly longer to catch up to where they have to be but its nothing that makes a difference to gameplay.

The transition wasn't as bad as I thought; luckily the AI script used to be in an object orientated format (non-programmers smile and nod :) ) so it was pretty modular but doing actions that affect all of the AI (panning) or defining a single AI (setting stats) took a fair bit of array work. All in all 4 hours isn't bad work for such a major AI change so I'm happy.

I'll be releasing my story video today and I'll edit this post with the link when its done.

Also OneEyedBanshee is doing a drawing for me and will hopefully, in the future, be able to draw some cool interface's and stuff so gameplay videos will look a lot nicer :D. Thanks for the help ;)


EDIT: WOOOOOT! After weeks of trying to get the cover system to work I finally found what was going wrong. In my code it basically says if the cover is in range of movement then teleport there, it also says move towards it (with the intention of getting closer if out of range); these both fired off though when it should've been one or the other so AI would teleport then move afterwards when they didn't need to. I also changed a few things with the array so accurate co-ords were given which I think were also a problem.

So now the AI will move into cover if it is in range of the player and if they don't think they can kill you with 1 more shot.

Been ages since I've done an update but here are 2 videos of the changes I've made in the time-gap. The game works a lot nicer now and looks a lot better too.

Video on out of combat updates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNdQ96b_an4

Video on combat updates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcyhMluoPMk

I'll list some of the main changes:

• Player actions are animated
• Map is panned in many ways now
• Enemies will seek cover and communicate
• Enemies will now do idle actions, so when they don't see the player they will do stuff
• Enemies now have personalities so loners don't communicate, grunts follow orders etc.
• The merchant system is set up
• There is now some equipment that can be bought