General
Inspired by the game “The Binding of Isaac” we tried to create our own 2D top-down game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Binding_of_Isaac_(video_game)
So the world of the game is defined by different Levels.
Each Level consists of a fix number of rooms which are connected by doors.
To open the doors of one room, the player has to kill all enemies in this room.
If all rooms are cleared, the player gets access to the last room, where a boss enemy has to be defeated.
After that another (trap)door opens, which leads to the next level.
While playing it is possible to collect special weapons and items.
Story
To bring the player back to the 80's, we decided to frame our game in a kind of trashy, apocalyptic setting.
So the game takes place in the year 2000.
Planet earth was overrun by an extraterrestrial power an almost every human being was killed or enslaved.
Only a small group of survivors rescued themselves into spaceships.
One of this spaceships is lead by Commander Jack. He and his team formed a research group to study the alien enemies.
While they were researching, one of the experiments failed and caused massive alien appearance.
Because of that, there is only one last mission Commander Jack has to fulfill. Survive!
Git Repository
Find the source code here:
https://bitbucket.org/romanF91/cytronix-m3-fabarcade/commits/all
Controls
W – walk up, previous menu selection
A – walk left
D – walk right
S – walk down, next menu selection
I – attack up
J – attack left
L – attack right
K – attack down
T – previous weapon/item
U – next weapon/item
N – activate special weapon/item
1 – start button/ activate menu selection
While playing on the FabArcade this keyboard commands will be send to the game.
(Joystick = WASD e.g. - For further information visit this page made by our hardware group)
View & Camera
2D top-down view. (320 x 240 screen resolution)
Static camera (shows a complete room in which the player interacts)
If the player uses a door, the next room will be shown.
Level & Rooms
As said before one level consists of a fix number of rooms.
The farther one gets in the game, the more rooms are created (for us max. 25)
Whenever a level is created, the rooms are disposed in a random way so the game will never be the same no matter how often it is started.
We created 5 different types of levels. For every type we used a different color theme, which is quite an easy way to bring variety to the game.
To make this as easy as possible we colorized all obstacles in the rooms of one level with the same color.
Because of that every level could be designed in the same way and automatically gives an optical feedback.
Enemies
There are different kinds of enemies in the game.
Some of them just appear in specific levels or enemy groups
Boss Enemies
Every level contains one boss enemy, which has to be killed to reach the next level.
Boss enemies are stronger than basic enemies and often switch through several phases, which change their attack behavior.
Weapons
Every boss enemy drops a special weapon. If a weapon is picked up twice or more, the selected special weapon gets one level up and because of that becomes stronger.
Special weapons:
- Multishot (1 - 4)
- BubbleGun (1 - 4)
- Bomb (1 - 5)
Sound & Music
To catch the feeling of the 80's we wanted to implement 8Bit / 16Bit sounds and music.
For simple sound effects like pickup item and shooting sounds, we made use of this tool: sfxr by Tomas Pettersson
For in-game music we used music which can be downloaded under a free license, just give google a try.
To edit and create own sounds and music it is possible to use any sound editor you can find.
For us: GoldWave did a good job.
Graphics & Look
We decided to keep the graphics simple, so we used dark colors with accents created by bright colors, which dovetails nicely with the chosen setting (view the latest screenshots).
To create our own textures and images we mainly used Microsoft Paint and Gimp.