Welcome To Lovely Mount Pilaladrillos - Trailer

Final Update

Cpt. Grumpy Spice reporting, Star Date; uhm... 24012014

It's been a while since we decided to talk to you so just before the game will be released, here's the final update;

When we decided we wanted to remake the NES cult-classic Ice Climber, we had a large amount of wild ideas to revamp the game and make it an entirely new experience. With the idea-bucket filled to the brim, we set out to create the best. game. ever.

Needless to say, we failed. Miserably

Instead we were able to make a barely functional vertical platformer that sort of looks nice. I’m not kidding, It actually looks presentable now. Other than that, quite a handful of gameplay ideas featured in the original design document had been scrapped once we realized we were far behind schedule. People who saw us during the mid-term presentation might be able to tell you more for I wish not to go into any further details.

But enough negativity! Let’s focus on what we did actually achieve in the course of this past month;
-Actually playable vertical platformer
-Two-player versus?co-op?Idunno at least you can play it with a friend
-Level-generation all procedural-like
-AI. It’s better now
-Shiny sprites & animation

These features are what makes our game special makes this an actually not-painful experience. And before my crewmembers informs you on the technical boring stuff, let us tell you a bit about all these features

Actually playable vertical platformer;
For those of you who were with us during our first presentation; we actually got somewhere!
Yes, our game is now actually a creating that we don’t have to be ashamed of presenting and don’t have to feel responsible for the emotional damage it may cause.

Two-player mode;
Our hero, mentioned in earlier blogs and in the presentation, now has a friend!
Meet Dan. Dan D Dansson;



Indeed, Bob no longer stands alone in his quest to climb the mountain of immeasurable size, as his lover Dan joins the fray. Don’t be weird about it.

Level-generation all procedural-like;
Our main goal in the remake of Ice Climber was to create a mountain that constantly grew as Bob (and now Dan) ascended. Yes we actually made that work! With numerable potential “layers” as building blocks for our mountain and with probable variety within these layers, the number of possibilities is endless… or at least something that approaches it.

AI. It’s better now;
The game does feature some AI and we’ve made it better; Now your task is to help Bob & Dan to climb the mountain without dying of horrible wound inflicted by the mountain’s hostile wildlife.
Shiny sprites & animation;
Considering how one of our very first posts on this blog was an update on how we made the player-character, we had a feeling we couldn’t neglect the graphical fidelity of the game as much as some of our artists would have liked. With a colourful throw-back to retro-gaming in the foreground combined with the amateuristic menu & background, we feel we have created an unique aesthetic which seamlessly combines 32-bit graphics with the lack of professional skills as shown in the midterm presentation.

And now some technical details I guess;


 Lt. Shiny Spice reporting, Star Date; same as before.

Being able to infinitely jump upward while continuously generating the level was quite a bit of work. The way our level works is by using a two-dimensional array which stores (the starting positions of) all tiles and enemies. When the game starts, instantly this array is filled with randomly generated tiles and enemies, except for the start of course. When the camera reaches a high enough position, an additional row has to be added at the top of the array so the level doesn’t run out when you reach the top. Unfortunately, the size of the array cannot be changed. Therefore, the first thing that has to be done is moving everything in the level down one row, and then adding an additional row on top.
As for the random generation, it isn’t completely random of course: in that case a lot of the time the level would be impossible to complete. As such, we have a lot of individual layers where for each layer added on top, it is randomly selected from one of those. To add some additional variety, those layers aren’t the same every time that layer is selected. Micro random generation means some tiles will only have a certain chance of appearing, and the same goes for the enemies. All this makes for a good random generation and infinite mountain, and for a nice playing experience.


So to summarize; We wanted to make something cool, but something f***ed up and we had to catch up and now we have something cool! Hooray for self-congratulatory blog-posts!
 

Halftime! - by Terrible Spice & PSI Spice

Like all good game-projects, poorly directed bar fights and soccer matches, there is a halftime, and ours is now. For two weeks, we'll be busy skiing, ice-fishing, sledding, ice-skating, maiming with snowballs with a tad too much ice, clubbing (both with and without seals), going to Christmas parties, slipping, breaking bones and trying to get inspiration by climbing infinite, hazardous mountains (still working on the location for that).

Yesterday we looked back on the past few weeks and how we can make sure to deliver an awesome, and obviously better version of Ice Climbers at then end of January. Although we have made quite come progress, it became clear to us that there is still a long way ahead of us to achieve our goal, and we need to do that a bit more swiftly. Or as the Dutch would say it, put some S.P.I.C.E. up our asses! What opened our eyes were the midterm presentations last Wednesday, to show our current progress to the supervisors and fellow students, and to see what they have so far. Our audience, consisting of five other competitors and some members of the jury, was simply dumbstruck.

Now there is something you need to know here. Although our game does have some gameplay, a moving and stunningly handsome character and enemies, the game lacks basic elements such as a starting and game-over screen, a properly implemented background, enemy collision, the ability to die, alpacas, serious altitude and the actual breaking of the blocks. Due to the non-existent start-up screen, we had to use one from a different game and badly edit our character and name over the original overlay. Although it was very comical, it was not professional in the least.

I think you're beginning to see why exactly our audience was dumbstruck. As for the rest of the presentation, the jokes were poorly timed and as subtle as a heap of bricks to the face, one team member who hadn't seen the PowerPoint presentation yet snickered all the time, and the PowerPoint itself could have been the remake of the famous web game "Press Space to Win!" (which, in my opinion, would have performed better as a tech demo than our original one). 

Nonetheless, our demo was placed fourth out of six. We'll just ignore the fact that one tech demo wasn't working and another one was still in the making on the back row. Also, we had without a doubt by far the best sprites of everyone, so great job on that one team!

Even though we are all going to enjoy our long awaited Christmas break, we made some plans for the next two weeks, to prevent ourselves from drowning in a shitload of things to do weeks before the deadline.

Art-wise, we want to have all the characters and other sprites and their animations done before we start school again. Right now we have the main character and almost all his animations, two enemies, of which one is animated and one still needs a few animations. Also Spice Climbers ain’t no Spice Climbers with just a few ice tiles, so we need to expand our amount of tile types. We desperately need our own menu design, and designing the UI is also planned for the upcoming weeks. It’s not a lot for the art department to do, but then again, one of us is going skiing, and in general, the only two weeks off we get throughout our school year can’t pass without lots of fun activities planned!

As for the code of our game, we have decided that a manageable goal would be to have our game work at least like the original Ice Climbers worked. From there we can add our own implementations and make Spice Climbers sparkle! In particular, we will finish the game states and enemies part of the code, improve our collision detection and add lives, infinity and/or co-op mode. One of the comments we got on our code is that we lack comments with it. So another new year’s resolution is to give more comments on what we do in the code. Another one is to make more use of SVN and our Scrum list.

So for now: That’s all, folks! To anyone who reads this, we wish you happy holidays, and tune in later for more!

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