Author: Andy Biar

Dysfunctional is a game about a family. Up to eight players can join in a session, each taking on the role of a family member helping to clean a newly inherited home in preparation for resale. One of the family members is a greedy sonofabiscuit though, and his or her (randomized) objective is to kill off the other family members or convince the family to disown them by preventing them from cleaning the house. The rest of the family must discover who the killer is, and agree to kill him or her by majority vote, before the killer eliminates everyone!

WARNING! THIS GAME IS HOSTED ON A LAN THROUGH MY LAPTOP. YOU CAN JOIN THE GAME, BUT WEIRD THINGS MIGHT HAPPEN WITHOUT A PROPERLY ORCHESTRATED CONNECTION.

tl;dr – the game works with exactly 8 people. no more, no less, no disconnecting allowed.

Link: http://128.237.181.170:8080

CONTROLS:

WASD      –>  move

Enter      –>  open chat/ send chat

(in chat) /accuse <name>      –>  accuse this player of murder. opens up a vote.

(in chat) /vote <yes, no>     –>  vote yes for guilty, no for innocent, for the accused player

Space     –>  kill, if you are the killer and you have poison

So I have two prominent ideas for the final project, each of which are centered around their own central game mechanics.

Idea 1: Drawing game, temporarily called Poltergeist. The idea is that you are, well, a poltergeist, and within a certain range around you you have the ability to manipulate matter. How we actually implement the mechanic is something that will take some more experimentation, but here is a screenshot from an existing prototype from last year:

Yeah we would probably scrap the prototype and start over. For the final version I’d like to see as much drawing control as there is in something like crayon physics, but backup implementations could include dragging corners to create shapes or designing the environment such that you can only interact with certain objects.

Idea 2: Online multiplayer game. Here’s a screenshot from the hackathon that I participated in last weekend:

The back-end for this game is almost done, and allows any number of players to connect to the server, move around, and chat. The front end is currently a top-down game, building toward a multiplayer action game, but could fairly easily be changed to a different idea. I’ve put about 20 hours of work into this, but most of that was on the back end so I don’t have a solid pitch for today. I probably want to build on this in or outside of class though.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/27507970/SleepFighter.gm81

Still in progress, but you can get the idea.

Without the narrating that I wanted the following things might not be clear:

After you come in from collecting the coins, sit at your desk.

Then go to your bed.

SPOILERS!

The game has the opportunity to infinite loop. To break the loop, you must go back to bed instead of going outside to collect the coins again.

I will most likely be submitting on Thursday due to various production delays, including getting GML code to compile.

EDIT:

This sheet is an example of a character in the game to get a sense of the art style. 8-bit animation is kinda tricky. None of the built-in behaviors seem to do what I want to do for movement and animation, so I’m currently writing my own movement code.

Together I think these articles really summed up what it is to play a video game. After all, what do games have? They have journeys, and they have places to go to. I really liked how the narrative architecture piece described video games and theme parks as “spatial media”, and I think that description fits some games (especially my MMO’s) really well.

I definitely resonated with the transit article, though. When I played through Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I never fast traveled. The ability to journey through unfamiliar territory was so refreshing, and it really is something that has been marginalized with globalization.

With the ideas of putting space and obstacles between destinations, and filling those spaces with narrative design, I feel empowered to make an awesome assignment 4!

I think the biggest thing I did this weekend was decide on a soundtrack. After playing around with using freesound.org again and composing my own music, I ended up settling on a song that I found just a few hours ago. I’m hosting it here:

http://soundcloud.com/andybiar/karlofs-the-darker-side-of

I want to make this game fairly sound-intensive (yayy Music Tech), with the soundtrack developing as you explore the different rooms (Definitely doing a tile-based zelda type thing in GameMaker). So expect something hopefully cool with lots of variations of the main theme.

The one thing I have left to decide before I have a working demo is what the subject of the game will be.  I’ve been thinking about an abstract autobiography where you have to fight against projections of yourself, but I’m not 100% sold. Comments are always welcome!

http://www.andybiar.com/Autumn-Skyline

(Showing you the same screenshot, but the landscape varies quite a bit through the game)

Also posting a screenshot. As you can see, I drew the orange marker.

Woooooo RenPy.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/27507970/MindReader-1.0-all.zip

Howdy class! I’ve been out of town all week, but here’s my proposal. For project 3, my proposal is a simply drawn or geometric-style point and click game featuring an ant (or potentially ant colony). Through clicking around in the space, the user will discover interactions like going to the surface to get food, digging a deeper home for the colony, using the displaced dirt to build a mound, mating, taking care of larvae, raising an army, defeating invading animals, stocking up on food for the winter, rerouting water paths, coming up with societal standards and culture… until the game finally ends when a large human foot kicks the mound and destroys everything. Depending on how flash goes, I could see this project taking on some RTS aspects, but should definitely work as an untimed point and click if not.