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building the west

 
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
loves your favorite videogame


Joined: 16 Jun 2005
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Location: bohan

PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 1:52 pm    Post subject: building the west Reply with quote

while i was working on calamity annie, i kept a "mockup diary" of screens from the game to give me a sense of layout and proportion. i would work backwards from these mockups in scripting the game. since i updated the images as the game progressed, many of them have changed from their original form. but below is the first mockup screen i ever drew for the game:



pauncho never says that line, but i hadn't drawn the sprite for good prospects yet. you'll note the cards are all aces, and they're "numbered". eventually i changed the numbers to indicate the two and three of hearts as annie's second and third life, but i kept the single large heart in the middle because i liked how the bullet holes, when annie got shot, appeared right smack in the middle of it. slut pointed out that the playing cards used in the actual old west didn't have numbers, only symbols, and that's how i ended up changing the cards to how they look now.

you can also see there's no timer. the timer was a later addition, when i realized there had to be an indicator to the player of exactly when an hombre was going to fire.

if your eyes are a bit more canny, you might notice that pauncho appears higher on the screen than hombres ever appear in-game. well, there's a reason for that, and the reason is that every element in the game was drawn according to a three-by-five grid of 128-by-128 pixel cells:



you can see how the holster and cards each fit neatly into a fifth of the vertical space of the window, with the middle three-by-three area given up to the play. the sprites were all originally drawn at a 32-by-32 resolution and manually resized by a 4:1 ration: this is why the proportions of the window are what they are.

here are some more pages from the mockup diary with the grid overlaid on top of them:



notice how the bonus stage IS, basically, the grid. this is before i attached the curtain to the bonus game; the curtain was originally drawn as the backdrop for the waiting prior to a draw, but it didn't fit my metaphor of having annie's back turned to her opponent. it found a new purpose in hombre blast.



here's the original wanted poster, with wild bill yonder as poster boy. he's still my favorite. the hardest part of implementing the wanted posters was creating an alternate, faded palette of colors for the hombres' pictures out of the palette of the nes. you might notice that the same color is substituted for both white and light yellow.



hey there, stud. you can see the hearts in mid-beat up there, as a reference frame. the background is my preferred placeholder transparent color: it's a lot easier on my eyes than the obnoxious purple most prefer. that's a color that was chosen for its obnoxiousness, of course.



different Xs i considered. in this mockup the X appears on top of the names; in the final game, it appears under the names, allowing you to still read them. other noteworthy things in this image: the hombres are number in ascending rather than descending order, and annie's name is among them. originally the "bad hombres" list appeared prior to every round, with annie's name climbing the ranks. this proved to be both confusing and poor pacing, and was later changed to appearances every five stages only.



skulls. the secret password hadn't been added yet. the "click here to pause" page is a remnant from my first, and more obtrusive, solution to the problem of needing a pause. i quickly rendered the process invisible, but the fringes on the paper were recycled onto the data options screen.

three of the four original fonts i designed for the game are visible in this image.



a later revision of pauncho's mockup: you can see he's in the correct place and the timer has been added. alternate forms of the cards can be seen up top: note that the shot card is the "two" of hearts, even though there's only one stud on it. (HEY THERE, STUD.)

originally an early draw always resulted in the loss of a life; playtesters found that penalty way too harsh, especially when it was possible to move the cursor off the holster by accident (especially back then, when the cursor had to be on top of the holster button and not below it). the three-strike system was a nice compromise, and allowed me to keep the X card back and flipping animations i'd drawn.
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Malloc
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Joined: 25 Nov 2006
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Location: San Jose, CA

PostPosted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 4:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is pretty fascinating stuff from a design standpoint, Dees. By now, I'm used to design-by-committee via people who do not speak the same language as I do. So, sometimes my suggestions are heard and relayed, other times they are not. You do things more organically and elegantly than the larger entity, though I guess that's expected.

Neat to see! I've never tried my hand and this stuff and now kind of want to.
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
loves your favorite videogame


Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 6563
Location: bohan

PostPosted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 3:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i think that's the most interesting thing about these amateur game development kits like game maker: they make it fairly simple for a single person to create an entire game on her own, allowing the game to possess a singular vision that can't exist in big studio titles.
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