Hempuli's blog

Hmm… A certain person from the Daily Click made me think of perhaps starting to work again / redo an older project I was working on last Spring, called As Usual. The project seemed mighty amazing until I realized the gameplay was really monotonous; you could only run, jump & shoot, and the slow pace made the concept seem boring. The idea was that there’d be an action platformer with branching paths, so that you couldn’t actually die, but instead losing would just send you to another path. Not always of course, because that’d soon result in huge amounts of branching paths. I had the game quite much planned out, and I was very happy with the graphics.

After this certain person talked to me and praised the demo I showed off before stopping working on the game, I thought I could perhaps try to redo the thing, this time with faster pacing, and with more thought put to the levels. Perhaps I could make it something like Contra, just with those branching paths and suchalikes. One reason I even started considering the recreation was because I liked many of the ideas behind the game; along with the branching idea, my intention was to put in a lot bizarre and memey stuff, perhaps a bit like things Paul Robertson has made. Though on a smaller scale, of course; Paul is just plain amazing and I could never achieve something as cool as his animations. Anyway, the guns that were in the game, for example, were rather hilarious.

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Also I liked most of the boss ideas and enemy designs, though due to the slow pace of the game the basic enemies were kinda boring to fight; they could stand a lot of shooting, and because you had unlimited ammo, you just stood there shooting at them until they eventually died. I guess one of the ultimate reasons the game failed was that I didn’t think about the engine enough; after I had got the main gameplay idea, I hurried to get to work on the actual levels, and only later on checked if the gameplay can support a longer game.

Anyway, I’m thinking of this now. I’d definitely want to use some ideas I had reserved for the game somewhere, and I’d anyway have quite a lot assets ready. The problem is just that this time I’d really have to think stuff through before doing anything. I don’t like thinking.

Lately I’ve had a growing urge to create a retro/traditional RPG game, with the emphasis being on a ridiculously over-the-top storyline. If I made the engine so that it’d be easy to create new content over it, I could just add new places as I come up with them, thus making the game feel long even though it wasn’t that long actually. The way turn-based battle systems work also makes it really easy to create bosses, especially basic ones; just make the art, and add a list of attacks/spells it’d use. For trick bosses, make it easy to adjust the stats, strengths and weaknesses, and add the possibility to make counterattacks and so on. Though the gameplay shouldn’t be too simple, the game should of course be also fun to play on some level.

But the thing I’ve really been pondering is the storyline: I’d really LOVE to create a game where you first do something amazingly huge, like “retrieve your dad from another dimension”. Then you’d have to “prevent the foul gods from entering the worlds by gathering X magical crystals together”, and then add more ridiculous missions and silly plot twists until the player should eventually beat those gods once and for all. Imagine the situation when an oracle tells you “hey mate, now get to the Forbidden Dimension, travel past the Ethereal swamps of Neverending Doom, visit all the 12 gods of Destruction to their castles and beat them up. Have fun!”

Sounds quite like a cliché, but creating a proper game with such ambitious goals would just take forever and be not worth it, since the emphasis was on the hilariously huge scale of the storyline in the first place.

Of course I have many other ideas too, and I guess some of them might be better in terms of actually finishing something (and perhaps even something good), but we’ll see what happens. Just wanted to talk a bit about the idea, it seemed interesting to me.

So yeah, fixed another eensy teensy tiny bug in Excavatorrr; you could open the sarcophagus even when it wasn’t visible. If you’re unsure about these alphabetical naming gimmicks, look at the Readme – it says all the information. I didn’t want to add any more stuff to the in-game version.

Fixed a bug in Excavatorrr; the giant ghost wont be able to confront you straight from the beginning.