- best fish who died: Dr. McCoy
- best topical television episodes: Parenthood
- best corresponding topical thing: STFU Parents
- best topical medication: Bayer Advantage
- best topic at TIGSOURCE: mockups
- best topic of conversation: children’s book illustration
- best living tropical fish: any
- best tropical video game: a tie (Startropics and Wonder Boy)
- best anticipated thing: Macaulay, #sworcery
- best unanticipated thing: 0space
- best food: pretzels and mustard
making JUNI & KUNI has given me a lot of opportunity to think about fail states in games, since it has such modest stakes, and since the environment isn’t nearly as threatening as in together fight, or planet snack; really, anything else i’ve done. typically, the plots and frames of my games are sparse and oppositional and failure is obvious, but JUNI & KUNI is a bit more subtle. sure, you can jump on spikes, or fall in lava, or run out of time, but nothing is actively trying to kill you. i tried to make it a game that is only about one thing, and that is preparing a picnic in a decaying world that can only temporarily be made alive. in this world, failure is really closer to giving up, since the goal is almost achieved just by playing the game.
i suppose it remains to be seen whether that is how it feels to a player, or whether the existing failure states still feel too game-y. here is the proposed failure screen: an empty world, left to itself.
every time i’m on the ferry i think about the scene in that ringu remake where the horse goes into the propeller. and I take the ferry a lot. thanks a lot, Movies.
i’ve finally resigned myself to the lack of internets on my main computer and i’ve been ferrying files back and forth with a flash drive. so, work on JUNI AND KUNI continues. i have a story / how to play screen, now, and i’ve refined picnic-placing. i was working on getting the game to recognize whether the picnic was “indoors” or not (for the victory screen) but now i’m in port orchard.
will try to get a new build up tomorrow. here’s the “how to play” image, but it’s a .jpg; thanks, iPhone.
work continues on JUNI & KUNI:
tif and i finished up our report cards, so i should have more time to make this. i’ve added scores to the game, and location-specific flowers (some flowers will no longer sprout if their surrounding environment is not to their liking. the player always gets Some Flower, but some manifestations have become More Rare). not sure how i feel about archibald, the tv / column flower. anyway, scores are in, except for the time bonus, but they are not linked up to the database yet, so you have to attach your own significance to them.
play JUNI & KUNI HERE.
as the EDITOR pageant winds down over at SUPER FRIENDSHIP CLUB, i’ve been adding more features to the prototype that i made for it. i’m pretty pleased with what i’ve been able to accomplish. JUNI & KUNI is a simple one-screen platformer about planting flowers and having picnics with your best friend. when the game is finished, it will be about having picnics in a ruined world that has to be remade every day. i have the script written and ready to go to change the world over every 24 hrs, but i need to get the rest of the gameplay into place (see: scoring).
pretty excited! you can now place and remove blocks in the editor, and when you press play, it dumps the entire level into an array. now i just need to save it somewhere on the server and read it back into the game! kind of thinking that a game that only needs to save and load one score and one level doesn’t really need a SQLy solution, so we’ll see what i can look up.
also: i don’t know how to make objects run collision checks when they are instantiated as a class, so that’s why that clumsy GO nonsense is there.
there are probably better ways to loop, but hey man! THIS BE MY LOOP.
coded the UI for the editor; it can flip from the top to the bottom of the screen (and back!) and it knows when it is in “record”, “play”, or “stop” mode. it also moves the cursor around when you click on the different blocks and tells you what block type you have selected.
next: placing blocks!
even nexter: saving a level!
for the EDITOR pageant at super friendship club.
realized that before i start (another) project, i should finish some prototypes before i completely lose the motivation to do so. sprited the three manifestations of the player in HUNGRY FOREST:
realized how i’m going to fix game pacing:
- houses and caves will issue humans / animals at a constant rate. this will smooth over the gaps in action where some humans are hanging out at bonfires, or loafing, or wandering; the player will always have something to fight or rebuild.
- the king will be super powerful, and he will cause havoc almost anywhere. anything the king collects goes towards improving the humans, generally; the king invents things in his own little shop and has a separate tech tree.
- since the player accumulates a LOT of MP, she will be able to use it by manifesting as the forest deity once a grove is of sufficient size. the MP (mystery points?) will then vanish at a constant rate until they are gone, at which point the special ability of the incarnation triggers. forest incarnation: new starting grove of trees appears. animal: curses the spot where he dies (humans fight each other). mushroom: infects all surrounding humans, who go back home and make swamps.
i can picture how it will play now, and it seems fun. hooray, prototyping.
re-doing the flowers, because they look TOO MARIO right now.
