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Roses or game?
Roses or game?
| Name: | Clint Herron | |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Feb 14, 2007 | |
| Rating: |  Not Rated | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
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| Profile Page: | View profile page for Clint Herron |
Blog post
Some guys give roses, some guys give poems.
Some guys give dinners, or perhaps a trip to Rome.
But for my special valentine, I didn't do the same.
Because I gave my valentine, her very own small game.
I wanted to give it to her for Christmas, but I didn't get it done in time. However, I was able to sneak enough time away from the rest of my projects without her knowing too much about it, and I showed her a playable version of it last week. I'm so glad, because she *really* liked it -- it's not every day you have a wife that you can give them a video game and it makes them get all teary-eyed. :)
My wife and I both have fairly fluttery memories, and so this was a game that I wrote to help us remember some of the fun times we've had since we've known each other. The game is done in a stick-figure hand-drawn style, very similar to SketchFighter. The game is chock-full of things that are special to us, even down to the art style. We draw little stick-figure caricatures of ourselves from time to time in the corners of church sermon notes or on cards that we write to each other, so I happily ran with that concept and did the whole game in that art style. I drew up a sprite sheet with an ink pen on a piece of paper, took a picture of it with our digital camera, and then cleaned it up in Gimp before bringing it into Torque Game Builder. With heavy reliance on the TGB Mini Platformer example, I tweaked it and added some things that I think make it pretty fun. The boogs (bugs) in the game are this particular kind of beetle that hang around our house in the summertime and are the bane of my wife's existence when they're in full season -- they eat her garden plants and generally just crawl around on the ground so much that it looks like it's moving. It's really gross. So it seemed very fitting to have them be the things that one has to dodge in the game.
So basically, you run around and collect treasure chests, which contain memories that I've written down. Your goal is to collect all of the treasures on a level, then the gate opens up and you can proceed to the next one, and at the end, her little avatar is reunited with mine, and we go walking off into the sunset holding hands (this end cutscene has the artwork done, but it's not put into the game yet).
It loads all of the memories from a text file, and removes them one-by-one so that a memory is never repeated during the same game.
The biggest thing I changed in the TGB mini platformer was making a variable-height jump, by making my jump function look like the following:
So that if they let go of the spacebar while jumping, then it cuts their vertical velocity in half. It actually makes for a very good jumping feel, and it's quite a bit of fun to run around in the level just jumping around on the platforms. My wife has hair that reaches almost to her waist, so I couldn't resist making the jumping-down sprite have her hair flying up in the air. :)
So in this festive (albeit overly-commercialized) Valentines holiday, I hope you all give your loved ones a big hug and kiss (if appropriate), and in some small way endeavor to love them with a heartfelt and selfless love.
Cheers!
--clint
Some guys give dinners, or perhaps a trip to Rome.
But for my special valentine, I didn't do the same.
Because I gave my valentine, her very own small game.
I wanted to give it to her for Christmas, but I didn't get it done in time. However, I was able to sneak enough time away from the rest of my projects without her knowing too much about it, and I showed her a playable version of it last week. I'm so glad, because she *really* liked it -- it's not every day you have a wife that you can give them a video game and it makes them get all teary-eyed. :)
My wife and I both have fairly fluttery memories, and so this was a game that I wrote to help us remember some of the fun times we've had since we've known each other. The game is done in a stick-figure hand-drawn style, very similar to SketchFighter. The game is chock-full of things that are special to us, even down to the art style. We draw little stick-figure caricatures of ourselves from time to time in the corners of church sermon notes or on cards that we write to each other, so I happily ran with that concept and did the whole game in that art style. I drew up a sprite sheet with an ink pen on a piece of paper, took a picture of it with our digital camera, and then cleaned it up in Gimp before bringing it into Torque Game Builder. With heavy reliance on the TGB Mini Platformer example, I tweaked it and added some things that I think make it pretty fun. The boogs (bugs) in the game are this particular kind of beetle that hang around our house in the summertime and are the bane of my wife's existence when they're in full season -- they eat her garden plants and generally just crawl around on the ground so much that it looks like it's moving. It's really gross. So it seemed very fitting to have them be the things that one has to dodge in the game.
So basically, you run around and collect treasure chests, which contain memories that I've written down. Your goal is to collect all of the treasures on a level, then the gate opens up and you can proceed to the next one, and at the end, her little avatar is reunited with mine, and we go walking off into the sunset holding hands (this end cutscene has the artwork done, but it's not put into the game yet).
It loads all of the memories from a text file, and removes them one-by-one so that a memory is never repeated during the same game.
The biggest thing I changed in the TGB mini platformer was making a variable-height jump, by making my jump function look like the following:
function Jen::Jump( %this, %pressed )
{
if (%pressed)
{
if ( MemoryWindow.visible == true )
{
HideMemoryWindow();
}
else if (!%this.airborne)
{
%this.setLinearVelocityY($JUMP_SPEED);
}
}
else
{
if ((%this.getLinearVelocityY() < 0) && (%this.airborne))
{
%this.setLinearVelocityY( %this.getLinearVelocityY() / 2 );
}
}
}
So that if they let go of the spacebar while jumping, then it cuts their vertical velocity in half. It actually makes for a very good jumping feel, and it's quite a bit of fun to run around in the level just jumping around on the platforms. My wife has hair that reaches almost to her waist, so I couldn't resist making the jumping-down sprite have her hair flying up in the air. :)
So in this festive (albeit overly-commercialized) Valentines holiday, I hope you all give your loved ones a big hug and kiss (if appropriate), and in some small way endeavor to love them with a heartfelt and selfless love.
Cheers!
--clint
Submit your own resources!| David Montgomery-Blake (Feb 14, 2007 at 19:56 GMT) |
| Chip Lambert (Feb 14, 2007 at 19:59 GMT) |
| Unsung Zero (Feb 14, 2007 at 20:16 GMT) |
| Tom Perry (Feb 14, 2007 at 20:51 GMT) |
| Ray Noolness Gebhardt (Feb 14, 2007 at 20:56 GMT) |
| Martin Busse (d4rkm4r3) (Feb 14, 2007 at 21:33 GMT) |
Can you post a screen shot?
| Vashner (Feb 14, 2007 at 21:35 GMT) |
| Anthony Rosenbaum (Feb 14, 2007 at 22:25 GMT) |
| Chris Calef (Feb 14, 2007 at 22:53 GMT) |
| Jesse (Midhir) Liles (Feb 14, 2007 at 23:26 GMT) |
@Ray: I'm also interested in a screenshot of the game that made you single. I think I can help some of my friends with some holiday gift-giving advice if you let me in on your secret.
| Joshua Dallman (Feb 14, 2007 at 23:55 GMT) |
| Daniel Scott (Feb 15, 2007 at 00:40 GMT) |
| David Higgins (Feb 15, 2007 at 00:55 GMT) |
Do you have any intention of updating the platformer tutorial to account for some of the things you may have added?
| Clint Herron (Feb 15, 2007 at 06:56 GMT) |
Thanks so much for all of the kind encouragement. :)
@Ray: Did you make her her own game, or buy her a game as a gift?
@Jesse: Yeah, normally I'm fairly opposed to V-day as a rule as well (Hallmark rubs me the wrong way), but we sortof made an exception this year. :) Plus it's nice for us, because Feb 14th is our half-anniversary (just hit 2.5 years).
@David Higgins: Y'know, that's not a bad idea. I didn't make huge improvements to the game -- seriously the biggest improvement I made was adding in the variable jump height, and that would perhaps be worth it to add to the tutorial. Thanks for the suggestion! :) Maybe we should start another page on TGB for "expansion packs" to the mini platformer, that adds things like enemies, sloped tiles, attacks (I have a version of this that I've been working on casually that adds Kingdom Hearts style air-combo attacks to the game), and things like my little variable jump improvement. We still want the mini platformer example to be as absolutely dirt simple as possible for newcomers to the game engine, but having expansion resources for it might be worthwhile. I dunno', maybe this one is small enough to go in the root though. *shrug*
Anyways, thanks again for the feedback, all! :)
| Stephan (viKKing) Bondier (Feb 15, 2007 at 08:19 GMT) |
I should try to make a Starcraft clone for my wife... 8-/
| Tom Bentz (Feb 15, 2007 at 11:20 GMT) |
| Oliver Rendelmann - DerR (Feb 15, 2007 at 11:26 GMT) |
| Anton Bursch (Feb 15, 2007 at 18:55 GMT) |
Edited on Feb 15, 2007 18:58 GMT
| Clint S. Brewer (Feb 16, 2007 at 09:40 GMT) |
-clint
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