Frog The Door Games

So I've decided to continue to put Tales of Leisure on hold until I can get the graphics looking how I'd like them to be. That means an artist who is not me should be employed. Meanwhile, I've started work on the next project: Old School Hero. While at first glance it may appear to be just a Mega Man clone, I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. The 8-bit Megaman series is one of my favorites and I've always wanted to take a shot at designing levels in that style. I'm hoping I can live up to the expectations fans of Megaman have for solid, challenging gameplay and they find it worthwhile to pick up while waiting for Megaman 11. Also, the music must be awesome.

Here's some early video showing off the weapons and items. Notice the barren, uninteresting red tiles. The levels will not be like this in the final game. Here are screens of some pixel art I've been working on for the magma level.

Looking at the new samples on the creators.xna.com I see they have an example for using virtual thumb sticks in a Windows Phone 7 game. I like it, but I decided I wanted a version with the thumbs sticks fixed in place, much like you'd see in an iPhone shooter like Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies. Here's a screen of the result.

The first thing I decided was to not make the Virtual Thumbstick class static, but instead a DrawableGameComponet. While not consistent with other XNA input implementations, it allows you to add one or more thumbsticks to the list of components and let them load, draw and update without calling any methods. You can simply look at the thumbstick position, see if it's greater than zero, and determine what to do with it when it is.

It's been a month since release and Alawishus has seen some good reviews. So Happy!
Here's some links:

http://www.pwnem.com/t-alawishus-pixel-review
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=399982
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/community/blogs/indie-360-going-down-the-list-5.html?blogger=TheLazyPyro
http://forcedisconnect.com/2010/06/21/indies-of-the-week-06202010/
http://gaygamer.net/2010/06/xbox_indie_review_roundup_6251.html
http://www.crushfragdestroy.com/2010/07/06/xbox-live-indie-dome-june-14th-%E2%80%93-june-27th-2010/
http://www.xnplay.co.uk/2010/06/22/week-83-round-up/
http://www.twofedoras.com/2010/06/xblig-update-the-vacation-edition/

So the game's on the marketplace and I couldn't be happier! I just want to say thank you again to all the peeps who took the time to playtest and review Alawishus. I never realized but a great thing about being an XNA member is playing so many of the cool games that come through playtest and peer review. I'll be sticking around there for sure. I suppose I can take a quick sigh of relief and then I guess it's time to get right back to work on marketing the game. There's also that Tales of Leisure thing too...

So Alawishus Pixel is in Peer review. It's got some passes and I'm crossing my fingers that all the bugs are squashed and standards met. If it does pass look for it in the Xbox Indie Games section. I'll be sure to update the blog when it goes live and additionally post a link to a press release somewhere on this website. I hope you stick with me 'cause they'll be lots of stuff to come from Frog the Door Games in the future. 

Alawishus Pixel is in playtest and getting some great feedback. It'll be a much better game because of it. When I first thought of the idea for the game, I decided to grab a pencil and paper instead of the keyboard and mouse. Even though I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, having thoughts and ideas on paper made all the difference for me. At least from the start it was clear to me the gameplay could stand as an allegory to the Sisyphus story.

After a couple of failed attempts I settled on a draft of the look of Alawishus. I originally wanted him 16 pixels high. Since the tiles in the game were also 16 pixels high, the plan was to let him and the block fit into those tile high small spaces. After drawing the pixel art I decided it wasn't enough detail for a character that the player will be staring at for 40 levels, so I upped the height to one and half tiles high and the width to one tile wide. It worked well since keeping the block one tile high allowed puzzle opportunities for the block to go where Alawishus couldn't.

It's time for Alawishus Pixel to go into playtest for a while. I hope I can get some good feedback from the fine folks over there. In the meantime, I'll be checking out the other games in playtest and peer review and I'm looking forward to giving some feedback to the fine folks over there;) Soon, I'll post some concept art and maybe a version of the Tile Ripper utility I wrote which takes an image and returns another image with all the unique "tiles" found. Till then...

Some more things to do:
-Trial Mode
-Saving is implemented, but not fully tested.
-Redo some bitmap fonts so they look better.
-Some small sections of music and FX need to be finished.
-"De-brown" the graphics in the first several levels.
-Redraw the exit doors for the later levels.

On another note, I squashed an annoying bug that's been bothering me for a while. Not long ago I noticed the game would drop a bunch of frames right after a load. My initial though was "obviously, the garbage collector." Profiling revealed no problem at all in the GC. Nothing but a stray string here and there was being allocated after loading all the assets. I decided to ignore it for as long as could and instead just focus on the game.

Frog The Door's first commercial game is almost done. A few things to finish up before release:
-Scripting (tutorials and story)
-Finish up Music/FX
-Prolog/Epilog
-Polish (including rumble, timing and graphical tweeks, some minor bugs)
And on the community side:
-Evil/Not so Evil checklist and Indie games best practices.
-Playtest