Putting in the Hours

recently put out my first serious finished game project, after a handful of late nights and a whole lot of hard work and script study. Kuma Story is much more a personal project than this one was, and in such, was a much easier project to see through to completion.

As they say in the AGS forums, if not the entire business - start small. For the 6+ years that I've been fiddling with the engine, only since the beginning of 2009 have I truly made a vested effort to complete one of my projects in a timely and organized manner. It took a simple, small-scale premise on the monthly MAGS gaming contest to really give me the inspiration to work out a project on a level that I thought that I would be able to achieve. Even a simple, one-room game like this proved to amount up to something along the lines of 50+ man hours in order to get the project to the level of quality that I wanted for it.

As a little background about the project itself, it may help to give some insight into what the MAGS competition is, for anyone that isn't already familiar with it. On a monthly basis, the AGS community has a competition to create a game (short or otherwise) that fits into a specific theme. The winner of the previous month's competition provides the theme, and it is moderated by the MAGS caretaker, Mr. Klaus Schlichter. This month the job was to remake and re-envision one of two classic AGS games made around the time when the runtime was still a DOS-based engine. As opposed to explaining it all, I'll provide a link here to browse at your leisure.

I chose to remake the game Red Flagg: Don't call me Blue, since it seemed to be a straightforward game, while still offering the wiggle room to create something with a little bit of meat on its bones. I joked to myself and a few others I correspond with during the developing process that fishing is simple enough a "sport" that it shouldn't be hard to make an accurate representation without breaking my back. For my part, I think I did a reasonable job in that respect, although it still could use a fair bit of polish to make it a more engaging game experience.


The original Red Flagg, Creadted by Scid

The original game, aside from some witty responses to attempted actions, is a somewhat bare-bones. You start the game having already caught the fish you set out to get, as well as a hat for your 'great aunt Hattie' (much to the hilarity of the 'Hodzinsky family' living in the bushes/forest across the lake). The only really required action of the player is to walk off the edge of the screen and to enter their house. Which is followed by a semi-substantial blooper reel (which I ultimately didn't bother with).

So I made the executive decision to reel back the gameplay a bit (no pun intended) so that the player is responsible for catching the fish, and perhaps a few other things - which ultimately gives me the option to add a little more interactivity to the game, which I feel people would probably prefer. I took most of the text from the original game, at least as set on the Pier area, verbatim from Scid's original piece and adapted it to my own devices. All in all, the game is still very limited in terms of what you can accomplish, but I liken it to a fishing minigame that you would find in a game like Breath of Fire or the older Suikoden games. Incidentally, I was listening primarily to the Suikoden 2 soundtrack's minigame BGMs during much of the production of the game, for inspiration.

By no means am I a background person, so I'm glad that I took the time to develop my 'Behemoth in the Desert' image a few weeks back (which I will write about soon). The experience certainly helped to streamline my artistic process. Partially influenced by the 'Header' image created by pixel art master, Fool, I tried to take the minimalist background created by Scid for the original, and make it a more convincing natural environment. About 2 hours and a fair bit of fiddling later, I had the setting for the entire game.


My take on the lake/pier, and what you'll see a lot of.

Though I would have liked to have added the house as well, it plays such a small role in the actual 'meat' of the game, it didn't really seem a necessary addition. I may deign to add it back into the game in a future update, but as it is, the game is a 'one room' piece. If I had been this diligent a few years back, I could have released it for an AGS OROW (One room, One week) contest as well.

As is my nature as an animator and character artist, the largest portion of the game development process was devoted to animation of the eponymous main character, Red Flagg. I'm no stranger to character animation, but had to spend a fair amount of time after the standard movement animations on making a convincing fishing rod wobble, and the swinging and snaking of the fishing line. There were complete animations of 140+ frames done before the fishing line was added, specifically so that I could focus on the kinetics of the line itself. I'm still not 100% sure that I got it right, but I'm satisfied, at least, with the end result of my toil.

The GUI was a last-minute addition, only really added because I was already over the deadline by a few hours, and didn't think that an extra hour of polishing up the GUI for final release would hurt. I made alternate graphics for the standard SIERRA style GUI, and removed their top bars altogether. Like Kuma Story, I attempted to keep the game as simplistic as possible. Considering the scale of the game, I felt no real need to include saving/loading (though they're still accessible through F5/57), and used my original Kuma Story 'X in the upper right corner' quit button, which I may develop into a standardized interface for my games going forward.

I'm particularly proud of my 'inventory system'. Truth be told, I had originally planned on having a graphical inventory, but running out of time, I decided to do something slightly more innovative, and have Red describe the contents of his cooler instead, using a series of if/else if calls in the engine to tell him exactly what to say. I think the end result, especially since there's really nothing you can do with the inventory, is perfectly acceptable.

All in all, it was a great learning experience, and helped to recharge my batteries to continue working on my current large-scale project with the Screen 7 team, Kinky Island.

You can find and play the MAGS release of the game here.