Blog for Griffin Knodle at GarageGames.com

Wings of Albero: Alpha testing begins

Griffin Knodle — 2008-03-04T03:30:59+00:00

February update for 1 Year Dream Game entry, Wings of Albero (formerly Vision of the Golden City, formerly formerly Last Ancient, both ideas being saved for later). It's entered alpha testing as of this weekend. Alpha testing is open to the public. (Links below.)

The game is an action RPG, short and simple. I'm looking at 5-6 main areas, a couple new enemy types each, a couple of bosses, a couple of player ability/item upgrades. I'll be going for polish rather than length.

This first alpha release is still missing most of the content, and has some serious gameplay issues. If you're not up for such a rough draft, you may want to wait for the next alpha release in a week or two. I'll be very grateful for any feedback.

Alpha testing page, including instructions and other important info
Direct download for alpha (Windows): WingsOfAlbero.zip (2.49 MB)
Development blog still at same place
Latest video: Clips from Alpha #1

Golden City: Battle engine

Griffin Knodle — 2008-02-07T05:24:16+00:00

January update for my entry in the 1 Year Dream Game contest here, formerly titled Last Ancient. I've been neglecting my GarageGames monthly blogging -- for a while I took a break to learn my way around TGB and had nothing interesting to post -- but have been working and progressing (pretty) steadily.

The contest entry will be greatly scoped down from the full action RPG I eventually plan to make: It will be mainly just the battle system plus whatever extra features I have time to fit in. I think I can still make a fun simple game out of it for the contest. The title for the eventual full game will be Vision of the Golden City; the contest entry will have some appropriately scaled-down name. =)

I've got most of the basic game engine and battle system in place. Most of my work was on foundation code for all of my combat objects, including the player character, enemies, and everyone's shots, spell effects, and so on. All of the logic is done for processing collisions and determining if one object "hits" another (more precisely, performs any kind of effect on contact), which causes a callback implemented by the subclass. So far it seems to work very nicely and make it easy to add new creatures and other objects.

Although I've got the main code in pretty good shape, I've got pretty much all of my final content to make, so I have a lot of work to do to get ready for alpha. I'll try to make a polished, fun game even if it winds up being very short. =)

My main development blog, including some recent work-in-progress videos, is still at lastancient.blogspot.com/.

Last Ancient -- Battle system prototyping

Griffin Knodle — 2007-09-05T06:54:35+00:00

Here's the August update for Last Ancient. I've been working on prototyping the battle system. (I was hoping to have it done for this update, but didn't make it.) So far it's got a player and waves of enemies fighting each other. The player makes sword attacks and casts a flame spell. The enemies (yellow, fanged fluffballs ... I like how that placeholder art came out) move towards you, pausing periodically, and occasionally make a long pause then a fast lunge. (I was proud of that. It came out surprisingly fun for a quick hack.) Player and enemies get knocked back when hit. Player has a brief wait period after each action (trying to avoid button-mashing gameplay). So it's got most everything I want to try out, just needs special attacks and a bit more on the magic system.

I've often found myself unsure of how to do what I want to do in TGB, and worse, unsure of where to look for the answer. The tutorials I've seen so far are all good but pretty basic. The reference documentation is pretty overwhelming. I probably need to spend more time on the forums.

My goal for the next month is to finish prototyping the battle system and get the real game semi-playable through an intoductory area (probably with mostly placeholder content). I'm behind my schedule, so that latter part may well have to slip, but I'm going to try to catch up.

Weekly Development Blog posts from last month:
5. Planning
6. Various improvements to prototype
7. GUIs, stat display
8. Wait time, knock-back
9. Magic system

Last Ancient -- Introduction, initial design

Griffin Knodle — 2007-08-04T06:02:51+00:00

(I tried to make a similar post earlier this week, but it seems to have vanished. Apologies if two show up.)

This is my introductory post for my entry in the Dream Games contest, Last Ancient. The team is just me, Griffin Knodle. Last Ancient is a fantasy action RPG. I'm trying for a general feel similar to Secret of Mana / Seiken Densetsu 3. It's focused on battles and character power/ability development, with a pretty linear plot (but with room for wandering and side-quests). It will have 2D graphics, overhead/three-quarters viewpoint for the main screen, implemented in TGB. Single-player, offline.

I've just finished my first month of work. So far I've spent most of my time on design, both game mechanics and plot outlining. I finished my design document (at least the first version). I also made the first small small step on my battle system prototype/demo. Getting the battles right and fun is my top goal for the game, so I'm going to prototype all of the major battle system features early to make sure that everything seems like it will work out OK.

I'm currently feeling alarmed by how many features I'm trying to include, and how much content I have to (want to) come up with. So I'm first going to draw up a schedule and a prioritized feature list to plan my time. Over the next month, I'll probably spend most of my time building up my battle system prototype and seeing how well my ideas will work out.

My development blog: lastancient.blogspot.com/
- Week 1: A bunch of ideas and brainstorms; this became the start of my design document
- Week 2: Not much (fixing broken computer)
- Week 3: Design document started, battle prototype started (complete with screenshot with terrible placeholder art!)
- Week 4: Design document complete! And here we are.

Any questions or comments so far? I'm new to this community -- what sorts of things do y'all like to read about in these contest blogs?