RodRocket!
Welp so I am trying to make a game. It’s inspired by a game I had a long time ago on my Amiga that I think was called R2, although I can’t find any evidence that it exists. And also a game “Konas Crate” on iOS. I like the idea of a physically driven side scrolling rocket game. Central to the game being worth playing is having a decent mechanism. If it’s frustrating to play well then who the **** is going to play it?
I have never made a game before. In fact before about 5 weeks ago I had never touched a game making environment since AMOS on my Amiga. I got into ue4 and I haven’t touched a single line of code. All the graphics so far have been modelled in Blender and apart from a couple of textures that came with the engine my game is currently texture free (as in everything is colours or reflections or whatever)
I have finally gotten it to a point where I have a single level that kind of works. You can play it, you can fly around, you can shoot balls, there are enemies and you can complete the level and it tells you the time.
There are the obligatory screenshots!
So I have a lot of ideas for the game, some I have already made but aren’t in my first example, and some I have yet to even work out how I might begin to achieve them but here are some things on the list
Most importantly: You can quit the game very very quickly. “q” takes you out of the level and “q” quits to windows from there. Hitting “qq” from a level will quit the game. Autosaving will be included. A “iron man” style save game system is in place, no going back from your mistakes.
A money driven system. You start with some cash and you buy a ship to do the levels. Obviously you get money for completing a level and finding **** etc. Maybe selling things? An inventory system is perhaps beyond me at the moment
LOTS of ships to buy. At first the player will be able to buy the number 2 or 3 cheapest ship but maybe if they do poorly and lose money they will have to resort to worse ships? Each ship will have pros/cons and more expensive ships will have more pros than cons (obviously).
Different physics regarding moving through space. For example, a simple ship might be entirely thruster driven. This is easy to make and in a sense easy to predict but for example, think of the game asteroids, when you spin the ship left or right it has no angular momentum, you don’t have to stop the ship spinning. A simple ship in my game will be harder to control because of the momentum but more advanced ships may use different physical methods (or non-physical methods like asteroids) to move the ship in space.
I have already created a ship that “hovers” like a quad-copter more than a rocket, with a constant feedback loop to keep it hovering. When I made this I was entertained because it’s not “smart” at all, it just turns on booster if travelling down and stops it if not travelling down and that resulted in a nice hovering system. The feedback loop to keep it level however has resulted in a swaying ship. Purely emergent! This ship is easy to control but very slow
A angry-birds 3 star system per level. I know this kinda clashes with some of my other ideas but it’s a simple self measure of getting better. All levels will have a record time too so you can try to beat that. And the kicker is that some levels you will NOT be able to get 3 stars until you have progressed further in the game and gotten better ships and then gone BACK to play the level again. A poor mans way of keeping interest? Maybe frustrating
You WILL be able to die and completely lose the game. There is health in the game, and I have decided that if you quit the level your ship keeps it’s damage, or if you die in the level you lose your ship, BUT if you return to the start point (or end point or whatever) and exit the level cleanly you get your health restored (even if you didn’t complete the level as such). I think this is a nice compromise to not be brutal with forcing people to pay for every mistake.
Instant level restart. I haven’t worked out how to reconcile this with the quitting and health. Perhaps you can instant restart at any moment but you don’t regain your health back?
Ship shops. Each “island” has a shop with certain ships. Even if you get millions of dollars on island 1 you won’t be able to buy better ships till you get to island 2, for example. What exactly you need to achieve to finish and island I haven’t decided
Trying to make it as modular as possible. If I am going to have lots of ships then they need to be interchangeable to a large extent. This is more of an internal how-I-make-the-game thing but I know I need to do it and it will make the future more fun etc
Things I have no idea about :
The name. I mean I love the name but it’s also the name of a cartoon from the 50s or something. Don’t wanna infringe!
A story. Why are you in this game? What are you trying to achieve? I could completely skip this but I don’t know if I should.
Anything else related to making this game available. Steam for example? Or my current problem that someone needs to install vcredist_x86 or x64 on they computer before it’ll run and maybe directx too. I mean this isn’t a great problem, a lot of games deal with it by installing it with the game for example, but I would really like my game to not have to be “installed”. Ulimtately if they need to install it well what can I do? I’ll still avoid “installing” the game.
Themes. I have a few ideas but my modelling skills let down my imagination unfortunately. The level I have done so far is easy because the UE4 engine is doing the hard yards as far as looking good but as soon as I go for something more organic then I will need to step my game up
Whether or not I should take this seriously. I have put a lot of time of time into this, compared to anything else I have ever done out of work, but still a couple of hours most nights doesn’t add up to much when making a game. **** takes a LONG time and not having done anything like this before it’s all new to me so I am doing a lot of learning as well as content creation. I also don’t have lots of spare cash to drop on any other tools but so far I am finding blender really good to use.
And the second point of that recent paragraph is, should I one day think about a kickstarter or making a dollar from this? This by no means is a source of income but I have never been so into something in my whole life I think. I still “dream” about what I can achieve all day while I am at work (only to be disappointed by my skill and the effort involved in doing it)
Here is a link to a self extracting archive containing the first version of the game. It seems it requires W7 SP1 or W8 to play. UE4 compiles for linux/mac/ios/android and so one day maybe on them too but I don’t know for sure etc!
You may need to install VisualC++ runtime libraries for this to work. Check the README.txt