Published....

The deadlines has come so I had to get all the work done for tomorrow. Therefore I had to upload my game on Kongregate. I know it is probably one of the worst games ever but if you want you can try playing it :)

Here is link if you would like to try it:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/fallen56/ninja-cat-in-space

Today I have done all animations for my game and I have added music, i found on http://dig.ccmixter.org.
Credits are as follows:
"Moments in Space" by spinmeister (feat. DJ Rkod)
http://ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/12093
is licensed under a Creative Commons license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/


I know that there are probably many bugs in my game so far.....but this is the first game I have ever created...:) I already found out that music is playing after the player has returned to menu screen after being killed by turtles...but it is not a big problem and I don't really have time to fix it anymore.....

Changes, news and finally demo almost ready :)

 I didn't have time to update this blog earlier as I was working all the time on my game. Last week I got to know that this Friday I have to have ready, playable demo, so i had to make a few changes to the game. First of all the game is no longer platform game, it is some kind of zombie shooting game but instead of  killing zombies it consists of killing turtles. :)

During this week I learnt a lot about Stencyl and managed to fix some bugs(proabably there are still some left) thanks to help of my collegues from course, and second year students. So I managed to implement simple game mechanics for my game.

I also made a main menu screen, and help screen as well. But help screen is not fully finished yet and I will finish it today.

Main menu screen

Help screen

The main aim of the game is to kill as many turtles as possible and therefore get as much points as you can.
The final version of game itself looks like this:

I haven't done any animations yet as unfortunately I run out of time. :( But I will probably improve that in the close future. :)

When creating the game firstly I struggled with doing graphics but later on I discovered stencyl is much worse than I expected and I had to solve a lot of errors it came up with.even though I mostly used already made behaviours. Therefore I had some troubles when setting the collissions, spawning turtles in right place after some time. Then finally I even managed to crash my own game, but I solved this problem as well(with help from my corse colleagues).

So I guess that is mostly the end and my demo is ready for testing. :) After that I should probably add animations to my game.

More graphics...

I finally finished creating graphics for my game, I have actors (enemy and main character), background, tiles. Now I will start creating basic gameplay in Stencyl and I will also do the animations for characters. So this means that the next week will be very busy for me. :)

Here are some of the graphics I created:

Background

Ninja Cat

As you can see I added couple things to the main character. I think now it looks better.

Tile

 It was really difficult to create this tile and yet it looks better in inkscape as I wanted to add some shadows etc. but unfortunately it is not visible in .png.











I also imported all the graphics into Stencyl, so that the complete graphics for level one will probably look like that(but I may change it later):

Now I need to create animations, starting screen and gameplay. For this week I will probably start with gameplay first.

Creating graphics continues....

I am still on the level of creating graphics. I now managed to create the main character for my game, that is Ninja Cat! :) Here is the unfinished example of its design, as I still need to add something to it:

This is supposed to be a Ninja Cat so I will have to work on that design a little more, but at least I finally have something :)

I also played around with Stencyl and I started creating some basic fundamental stuff for my game there, such as importing some of my designs and setting up some actor's behaviours, scenes and other features, that I will expand later on when the graphics will be ready.

I planned to do a lot of work during this weekend and I hope I will finally be able to motivate myself enough to do this and I would really appreciate feedback or suggestions from you :)

Creating graphics

 For the last week I have been trying to develop my idea for the game and starting doing some graphics, which appeared to be more challenging than I thought. Luckily I managed to find some tutorials from which I learned how to create planets etc. 

Using Inkscape I managed to create couple planets which I can use then for my game background throughout all levels. Here are two examples of planets I created so far:

Saturn

Neptune

For the rest planets in the background I am thinking just to create circles etc. as when I save files in .png it loses some of its details created in Inkscape anyway.

Enemy actor- Turtle

I also managed to create final graphics for enemy that will appear in game. Fisrtly I was struggling to create a duck but eventually I changed the idea for enemy actor. I started exploring creating curves in Inkscape and accidentally I come up with idea of creating a turtle! :) It appeared it will be perfect enemy actor for the game so now I have finished the graphics for turtle and I will begin creating animations.



I would really appreciate feedback from anyone, so don't hesitate to comment on my posts. :)

Lets begin with.....

First project I have to do is to create a simple game using Stencyl and publish it on the Kongregate site, as well as set up a blog to share the progress of making this game. So this is the main purpose of this blog, but I will write posts here even after the project will end. And I will really appreciate any suggestions you have about the blog and the game I am creating for my first university project. :)

After doing couple Crash Courses from Stencyl site I am now able to make my own game, but before this I have to get some ideas first then make graphics.


For now I am struggling with finding the best idea for the game I can possibly think of. As I expected it is really hard for me as I am not very creative person. So I started drawing various things and eneded up choosing a main character for the game being a ninja cat.

I also tried to familiarize myself with some graphic programms. Having Inkscape introduced during my High School, all I had to do was remembering what functions of this programme do what. Then I tried watching some tutorials on other blogs and I managed to make an axe in Inkscape(which was easier than I expected). :) To be honest I don't know if I will use it in my game but now I remember how to use the programme. As well as this I found out that Pixlr can be used to create graphics as well, earlier I used it only to edit photos and now I discovered other functions. Even though I think I won't use it a lot during this project as its very similar to Gimp and I'd rather my graphics not to have pixels all over. :)



After I have done some drawings and talked with some friends who helped me find the idea for the game, I will probably end up doing a platform game where ninja cat has to fight evil ducks with its laser eyes in space, just to find other cat (probably the one I draw in Pixlr). Therefore it will be easy platform game but I will try to set up levels in a way it won't be too hard at first levels but with the progress of the game it should get more difficult to go through levels. I will mostly focus on graphics as I would like it to look like the one I have in my mind already and that would not be the easiest thing to do. I decided to use only Inkscape to do all the graphics for my game :) If it comes to music I haven't thought about it yet but I will proably leave for the very end but before testing trials. :)

So I think I covered everything I thought of so far and I hope all that text wasn't too boring for you. :)