Shadow Covenant

"Enslaved: Journey to the West" was one of those pleasant surprises one gets from times to times, due to low expectations… I wasn’t expecting much from the game (all I’ve seen was some video review and some comments in websites), and I wouldn’t even pick it up, if a friend of mine didn’t borrow me his copy…

Enslaved is a very nifty action/adventure game, that takes place on a post-apocalyptic world where war-machines have almost destroyed mankind, and where we control a character called "Monkey". Monkey is enslaved by the token sexy woman, through an headband that deals extreme pain on command… the girl then proceeds to the usual "take me home and I’ll set you free" blackmail. The story has more to it than this, but I don’t want to give much away anyway, and this is the core of it anyway.

What stands out in the game is the richness of the scenario elements… Instead of the usual gritty grey and browns, the game features bright saturated colors that work very well to break the usual drabness of this kind of games.

The game isn’t brilliant in any of the mechanics: fairly simple puzzles, the platforming isn’t Prince-Of-Persia level, the combat is slow-paced and lacks control, the flying disc parts are almost uncontrollable. The sum of it all is surprisingly very cool… It feels like a genuine adventure, with good level and area design saving what would otherwise be a mediocre title from a gameplay standpoint… there’s lots of memorable moments in the game, that kind of make you feel "hell yeah!".

I have only two negative points to call out:

1. The "Journey to the West" association… In the original story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West), Monkey is atoning for past sins… in this one, it seems that Monkey is actually a good guy just trying to survive, and what the girl does to him is the really inexcusable act… It feels like somebody had a nice idea for a story and somebody went "Hey, that reminds me ’Journey to the West’, how about we say the game is based on that?!".
2. The ending is weak… I understand what they were trying to do, taking a more philosophical tone, but to be honest, it felt silly and out of place, to be honest… A good philosophical debate in my opinion has two equally valid standpoints, and the discussion is just a matter of perspective… Well, after you played the game, the "other" standpoint in the philosophical debate is just plain wrong, however you phrase it… it seems just a play on words, to be honest…

On the plus side, the characters (which initially seem one-dimensional and annoying) kind of grow on you, and I ended up enjoying them very much, which is refreshing!

All in all, the game was a very good way of keeping busy for 8 hours or so of solid game with some "hell yeah" moments! 8/10

Next on my list: "Dead Space 2"

Time for a quick postmortem of my entry, “An Old Man And His Quest”:

What Went Right

• Initial concept: although I’m not a big fan of this theme, my wife helped me with a basic idea so I could jump right into working on the game
• Getting scripting working: this really helped me get the game working as I intended, and really made it easy to add powers and cutscenes to the game… I’m probably going to merge that component I did in the compo onto the framework for the next time.
• Graphics: by going 3d and using some pixel art skills I picked up on the latest compos, I could do something that didn’t look completely terrible.
• Music: Again, WolframTones served me well for 48 hour game music…
• Cutscenes: I love doing cutscenes, specially in this kind of limited environment… Having to think on ways to twist my meager artistic skills and limited tech is very entertaining for me
• Mixing the “game” stuff and the “menu” stuff in a single framework… All becomes more interesting, and it’s less work to make behave properly, especially with the scripting engine

What went wrong

• Time managment: Again, I failed miserably in estimating development time, most of it by not considering the rest of the things that went wrong
• Going 3d: I almost always think about going 3d and don’t do it because it’s normally harder (even 2.5D like in this game)… This ended up being no exception, and I had loads of problems getting the initial setup working correctly… It also led to some driver-related problems and things like that, that made me loose loads of time… :\ The end result is a mixed blessing: it looks better, but it took longer…
• Bugs: Ran into some bugs after the deadline, which meant the game seems more buggy to everyone than it seems to me… :\ Fixed most post-compo, but that’s too late…
• No time for level design: In all compos, I promise myself I’ll code something simple and let 4 or 5 hours at the end for pure level design, game balancing, tuning and polish… and I always fail at this… This time was no exception… I had 5 levels thought of, only had time to make 4 (and the last one was terribly unbalanced)
• Using Photoshop as level design tool: what seemed like a nice idea ended up being more complicated than it should, which kind of defeated the purpose… next time I think I’ll be back to ASCII text files… or a good tile editor, if I can find one that suits my needs (haven’t found any so far, all demand too much work getting to work properly or require me to write a weird importer)

The game has circa 3000 lines of C++ code and 1100 lines of Lua code, and the framework about 17000.

Tools used:

Code: Visual Studio 2005
APIs: DirectX 9 (Feb), FMod, Win32, Lua
Graphics: Photoshop CS4
Sound: WolframTones (very awesome, only had 20 mins or so to play with it), Midi Converter Free (online free midi to mp3 converter), Sfxr
Blogging: Internet Explorer
Listening music: Winamp

On an end note, I’ll probably grab the 3d tiling stuff and scripting binds and merge it with the rest of my LD framework, for future use… I still want a competition where I can actually spend time working on the game, instead of the technology!

Thanks everybody that participated for an exciting weekend!

Finally done!

You can download the game here, and the source here!

The only things I couldn’t finish was a 5th level (so only 4 easy levels), and the binding of trigger points to script (that I manage not to need)…

The part I had more fun with this game was the fact that the game logic was about 60% scripted, which is quite neat… Even the menus and stuff take place “in game”…

Tomorrow I’ll post a post-mortem of the game and the timelapse for the compo…

This is not one of my best entries, but it was quite demanding, technically and in terms of game design… This game could really benefit with better tools for level design, or more time to do it in Photoshop…

Final tasklist:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• Wand of Unsummoning
• End of level (portal thing)
• Main menu
• Title screen
• Game over screen
• Sound
• Music
• Level 1
• Level 2
• Level 3
• Level 4
• Level 5
• Load/Save
• ….

Looking forward to playing all the games and to see comments on mine!