The Candy Commando

I took a day this week and made a quick game, you can play it here, although it does require the Unity web plugin. I decided to try doing this each month this year, we’ll see how well that goes. I think it’s a valuable thing to do because it gives you experience along the whole pipeline, from inception, to development, to publishing. And it reminds to me that I am capable of finishing and publishing a game. Finally, it gives me a chance to try out some ideas that might be festering in my brain. Also, I was interested in the Candy Jam as a sort of protest against King games trademarking the word ‘Candy’. So the game filled multiple purposes.

I’ve been wondering what would happen if you combined the endless runner genre with the run and gun genre (think Contra or Metal Slug). What came out was kind of interesting I think, and the idea could probably hold up to a more thorough examination.

I also wanted to try and learn a new game making tool. I picked up Multimedia Fusion in a Humble Bundle a little while ago, and gave it a shot. It’s kind of a neat little tool, but after getting a very basic game running, I gave up and switched back to Unity. Mostly because Unity has a much larger set of platforms it will publish to, but there were some things that would just be a lot easier in Unity.

However, I think my time with Multimedia Fusion was instructive. Instead of writing code for the game, you set up a series of events. Each event has a set of conditions that will cause it to run, and a set of actions that will take place when it runs. You can set up an event like: When the player collides with this object kill them. Every frame it runs through all of the events, checks if their conditions were met, and executes them if they were. It was a very different way of approaching the game logic, although it was very similar to how I was trying to set up mission scripting to work in Flame Warrior. So I think it was helpful for me to see how a system like that works when fully developed, and gave me confidence that my approach to the problem is sound.

It was a lot of fun, I forgot how enjoyable making a game in a day can be. I also was amazed at what a difference proper artwork makes. I found a set of 2D sidescrolling tiles that perfectly fit the candy theme, and sticking those into the game made a world of difference.

Come back next week for an update on Flame Warrior’s progress.

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