After I published my master’s thesis, a few people asked me about what I did for my bachelor’s thesis. I experimented a bit with controls for an Android shooter. Here is a video showing the game I did there:
Asset Credits:
At the HTW Berlin, the International Media and Informatics master has room for up to two bigger interdisciplinary projects. It probably doesn’t surprise anybody that I chose to work with the game design course on both occasions. I’ll make a blog post about the second project later, but for now our trip down memory lane brings us to: Heart of Decay, a 3D person shooter with a skill system, but sadly we never really got that far. Here is a gameplay video of the slice we were working on:
Credits:
Over two years ago, a theme in university was action recording/replaying, and instead of doing a boring text editing app to demonstrate this, I made a game. Introducing:
Each round your previous actions are replayed,
but your and your enemy’s actions will change the
outcomes of previous moves by placing new tokens.
You can play the game in your browser or download the Android APK.
I think the concept is quite intriguing, but the current execution is flawed. Currently, the tokens of the current starting player start first which leads to fluctuating patterns. Also, no matter how experienced you are in the game, you still cannot beat new players who grasp the concept by a significant score and even you pull of a cool move that should get you in the lead, it often doesn’t really matter much.
What I really like though is being the starting player in a round can both be an advantage and a disadvantage: You will move first and can force the second player to defend a certain position, but in certain situations you might need to defend an important position before the other player moves to attack there – and then the other player obviously will place somewhere else.
Anyway, long story short: I might make another game based on the recording/replaying multi-round concept in the future and I sure hope that one will be a lot more fun. More years of experience have to be good for something, right?
Retcon was made by me, with assets by:
Another month, another jam, another crazy physics game. In the beginning, this one was inspired by the awesome Drei, but it quickly steered away from that and became something… uh, else. I dunno.
You control two balloons attached to a paddle.
Use it to get balls in your colored bottle!
Or you could just remove the ones your enemy has…
(You’ll need two XBox360 controllers.)
Credits:
A few months ago, a Mini Game Jam. The theme was “hiding”, and the artist Leith Gow and I made a stealth duel game for two players – on two monitors.
Lurk in the shadows.
Lie in wait. Ready your laser.
Feint. Grab the points.
Be aggressive.
A Stealth Duel Game for 2 players with
XBox360 controllers and 2 monitors.
Download it for Windows!
Programming: Tobias Wehrum
Art: Leith Gow
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Sound: Moritz Ufer, Marcus Lee
Font: Guy Buhry
Two monitors made possible by SoftTH.
Game Jam time! And when I saw Heiko with this beauty of a touchscreen, I knew that I had develop for this. We wanted to do something where players can cooperate against a common thread. 8 hours later, we had this:
An asteroid storm threatens your mission,
but your trusty spaceships stand ready.
Defend your home base!
Defend your friends!
Try to survive as long as possible in this
cooperative asteroid defense game for 4 players.
Exclusively for 27″ touchscreens!
(Or alternatively for 4 XBox360 gamepads.)
Download:
Windows (Gamepad Version)
Windows (Touchscreen Version)
Android
While it’s certainly possible to play on a tinier touchscreen, playing it on 27″ was a lot of fun! Here’s a video of us playing it at the jam:
Programming:
Art:
Sound Design:
Music:
Fonts:
For our March Berlin Mini Game Jam, the themes were amongst others “Thievery” and “Noise” – and that’s what my friend Dominik and me combined into an ultrasonic burglary simulation:
A dark room, full of jewels – and stuff to run into.
Luckily you have your ultrasonic locator to “see” in the dark.
A few moments later, you realize you’re not alone.
You ready your bludgeon…
Play here, directly in your browser!
This game employs a Hidden Information Split Screen™ (which can optionally be simulated by having two monitors):
Hey folks, it’s history time! I have some old (and fairly new) prototypes and mini-games that I never published – so far, that is. So here’s our first installment in the series!
I did this for the 2nd Blitzkast, ignoring the optional topic. There are balls, and you can draw lines to affect them. It might become something like a shooter and/or a tower defense game if I ever decide to get back to it.
Here are the different versions, as always directly playable in your browser:
After skipping December, even the Global Game Jam in two weeks couldn’t stop us from doing our own Mini Game Jam yesterday. 13 people assembled in the co.up coworking space and in 8 hours, multiple game prototypes were created for either the topic “Future” or “The End is the Beginning”. Here’s mine.
In the future, a sport called “Extreme Painting” is all the rage:
Two contestants are equipped with particle cannons and try to color as much of a field as fast as possible, only stepping on their own color.
Each field which has your color is one point, independent of how strong the color is.
But the stronger the color, the harder is it for your opponent to erase it.
This post is the continuation of Global Game Jam 2010, or: We don’t make games, we make AWESOME games (in 48 hours).
Our final game is about obtaining as many bubbles as you can! You can do this by just peacefully collecting them, as there are many, but soon there won’t be – and then you have to dash at other players and hit them so they drop their bubbles and you (and everyone else, hurry!) can collect them. An interesting (and deceptive) mechanic is that you can go off-screen so that you don’t show, and while hidden, wander, so you deceive players about your real position – and suddenly jump out and get them! Furthermore, you can teleport a few times to the other part of the screen, and doing this while being hidden outside of the screen is a good method to sneak up on the others! (If you have read the post before: There are no alliances anymore, and there is only one kind of ball to collect.)
So without further ado, here is it: http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/zinozini
I suggest you download the version in the “Installation Notes” below, because there are a few bugs fixed – but well, we won’t take down our 48h-state, it is also highly playable. :)
Your graphics card needs to support Shader 3.0 to play this game, and it is optimized to be played with Xbox 360 controllers. If you don’t have them, download it anyway, it even makes fun without them!
The game is written in C#, with XNA as framework.
Oh, and by the way, here is a Zino Zini wallpaper:
And here’s our team again, for those of you who skipped the other way-too-lengthy post:
Lars Kokemohr – Programming
Me, Tobias Wehrum – Programming
Daniel Bock – Game Design and Music/Sound
Norbert Haacks – Game Design
Additionally featuring: Phillip Gronek – Q&A Tester, Fun, Red Bull
Actually, we wanted to add a bunch of other stuff, for example but not limited to: A Splash Start Screen showing our splendid logo (om.nomnom games), a start menu, a credits page, preferences (sound/music on/off), a different mode without time limit, and and and… but time ran out, and since it is playable in the current state, we will only add the things named above for sure.
PS: If you ask where there key, the monkey or the donkey is, well… that is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and therefore hard to find. (There is none. It got lost somewhere along the way of the development process, and afterwards we felt the game is too much fun to try to press a constraint in there. Earlier the balls collecting the bubbles should’ve become monkeys, but that wouldn’t go with the fine abstract look it has now.)