Monday, August 25, 2014

Many people take RPG's for granted, they have many complex parts to it that have to work perfectly other wise you could get game breaking results. Many people who have never programmed a game don't understand this and I always explain to them all of the different working pieces to it. Now I have an example I can show them. I programmed a simple RPG game in game maker, granted because it was the free version I had to scrap out an entire town I had created for it and focus more on the battle elements. In the game you are in a small free roam map and you come across random battles. As you fight you can use potions to heal you in and out of battle. After each battle you gain an amount of xp depending on the difficulty of the enemy and the amount of enemies. When you level up the amount of xp required to level up again increases by 1.5. Also when you level up your stats increase such as attack, defence and health. Each of these stats actually has an effect in battle when facing an enemy. The enemies also have stats of their own that vary from easy, medium and hard. When you reach level 3 you are faced against the boss and that's about all i have, so here are some screenshots.
This is the simple in-game menu


This is a battle in game with two enemies
This is the boss when you reach level 3

Monday, August 11, 2014

Shooting Game

Using Game maker I had to make a scrolling shooting game. The Game was very fun but tedious to make but in the end it was worth it. One of the first shooting game was the arcade game Space Invaders, it was created by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was first released in the United States on December, 31 1978. Tomohiro also created but not only Speed Race, Interceptor and Davis Cup and Soccer.                                          

                     Interceptor                                                                                       Speed Race


Screen shot of the game
But getting back to the game, It is a very basic game where you are "flying" over an ocean and you have to fight the enemies coming after you. At first it starts out with one enemy plane but when you destroy one another two appear. When you destroy a plane you get 5 points. When an enemy plane hits you, you loose 10 points of "health" out of the 100 you start off with. After playing around with the game for a bit just because its is amazing how crazy it can get it got a high score of 940 point which means I killed 188 enemies.







Monday, August 4, 2014

Metroid: Zero Mission

 


This game was very enjoyable, there was a lot of exploring available and also there are lots of upgrades to find, some are easy and others take a lot of patience and talent in order to get them.

The Game was very easy to get into and begin playing; the controls are very simple with just left right shoot and jump. But as you play through the game a couple times you learn something and are able to do some pretty cool trick but they are not necessary in order to beat the game. Such as wall jumping for example. You never need to do a wall jump in order to progress through the game but being able to do it can help get through areas that would normally take longer and it makes you look cool if other people are watching.

This game was even better than I thought it was going to be. After playing the original Metroid I was a little skeptical about them making a remake to the game but still played it none the less. The game play and controls were even better than I could imagine and the graphics were pretty good too.

I would rate the graphics for this game 9/10. The graphics when compared to the original game are far superior but at the same time when compared to Game Boy Advance games in my opinion the graphics could be a “little” but better but I am truly fine with the way they are now. In this game you can actually tell what the enemies are and they are and can tell what is happening on the screen. The menu is not too important to game play. Everything you need to know is shown on the screen at all times such as health, and missiles. Also in the top right is a mini map showing the room you are in and where you are in that room. When you press start you can look at the map for the all of the areas in the game and all of the places you have been.

                     Original graphics                                                        Metroid: Zero Mission 

I would rate the controls for this game 10/10, the game controls are very simple and yet complex at the same time. This makes the game fun for beginning players and advance players. The controls are very, very smooth for me to use and it makes the game play so much better. I have never had any problems with the controls and I often find myself replaying the game just because it is so easy to navigate and is very fun to use advance strategies that would be near impossible if the controls were not smooth like they are.

As for the character and the story there is no dialogue during the game. All there is, is a few mini cut scenes but other than that there is not a while story to the game so in that aspect I would rate it 5/10. As for the immersive value I never really feel like I am in the game but it feels just like I am controlling the character through it. If you have played the other Metroid games the story is a little more engaging but only because you already know everything about it and it has a bit of a nostalgia feeling to it but with a twist.   

The audio and music for this game in my opinion is amazing. I actually have the music for this game in my music library. I like the music so much because it has a mysterious kind of feeling to it and also has an adventurous tone with it. Every time I hear it, it just makes me feel like it is something that another “world” would sound like.

There are a couple games like Metroid: Zero Mission like the Castlevainia series seeing as how the game play is very similar with the Side scrolling platform and Action-Adventure. Both games have objectives that you have to do in order to progress but you have to adventure around the map inorder to get to the different areas and bosses. Also there are upgrades you can obtain that can help you get to a new area and defeat harder enemies easier.Also Metroid Fusion is very similar the Zero Mission both graphics wise and control wise. Obviously the both share identical interface and HUD displays but Fusion is both better and worse than Zero Mission. The story telling in Fusion is much more in depth which adds to the quality but the music is not as good in my opinion.
Castlevania Harmony of Despair