Roses or game?

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:

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