Shadow Covenant

VVVVVV is a game developed by Terry Cavanagh that has caused quite a buzz in the indie game scene… Unfortunately, I didn’t pick it up right away when the buzz started, since I was put off by the retro graphics (I like retro graphics, but those just look ugly!). Only when it hit the Humble Indy Bundle 3 I finally gave it a try, and boy, was I missing out!

At first glance, VVVVVV is a standard platform game with a gimmick: instead of the usual jump action, you can reverse the gravity of the screen, making your character shoot out in the air and walk on ceilings… Although this looks like pretty simple stuff, it really adds a differentiation factor to the game. That, coupled by an exploration component really makes the game shine.

The level design is brilliant, with very challenging areas… when you die, you just restart in that room, so frustration is kept to a minimum.

The story is as straightforward as possible: a ship gets thrown into a strange dimension (the VVVVVV dimension) and the crew gets split. The captain has to go rescue them… Throughout the game you get clues on what the dimension is all about. What the game does right is to make you empathize with the characters, even such so crudely drawn and distinguishable only by color, by using simple texts and making you work hard to get access to them…

The game ends when you rescue all 6 members of the crew (I did it in 2h30, dying “just” 1400 times, but I’m not very good at platformers).

VVVVVV does a minimum of hand-holding and it’s quite merciless in some rooms, but even rooms where I got stuck for 10 mins seemed to be “fair”, i.e. the challenge wasn’t overcome because the game was being too hard, but because you suck!

Seriously, this game deserves all the praise I’ve been reading about it in the last months, specially considering how cheap it is! Even the graphics, which at first glance seem really ugly kind of it with the overall theme, and I ended up appreciating the simple color schemes and forms…

This game is a 10/10!

Although I’m not a big fan of “Guild Wars”, this trailer (at least the first part) is amazing… the music is absolutely brilliant, and the special transition effects just put me in the mood for some epic-ness… Brilliant work…

I’m wondering if you can do something similar to the transition effects in the first part of the trailer with realtime 3d graphics and some nice juicy shaders… You could go around it by creating a “stroke map”, by analyzing the direction of the surfaces you render and use that as a basis for a “paint stroke” effect that would fill the screen with the painted scene. To do the depth effects, you could “clamp” the Z of the objects to specific depths before transforming them to screen space, doing “layers” of an ortho-perspective… I’d love to have the time to experiment around with this…

I’m dropping out of the compo…

I’ve been tired like a dog, and not feeling very motivated with this game (although I have an idea and progress has been good)… Some ideas just don’t click like they should when it’s time to develop them…

Anyway, good luck everyone that is still participating!

On Monday it’s back to work for me, so expect more regular updates on the blog!

Finished most of the art for the starting area, the bedroom… It is supposed to be a night scene, hence the blue hue… I’ve screwed up on that already, since I want to make a light spark cast glow on the scene, and it will all show blue (should have done stuff in their “normal” color, and let the lighting engine take care of the blue-fication…). I may fix that before the end, but I’ve lost enough time on this, with 3d props, etc… specially considering this is just for a cutscene…

Next step is adding the scripting system to this, so that I can start coding the cutscene proper and get some gameplay in…

• Load level
• Get Lua scripting working
• Draw main character
• Character display
• Character movement working
• Draw area tiles
  • Bedroom
  • Corridor
  • Forest
• Game mechanics:
  • Follow mechanic
  • Reversed keys
  • Perpetual movement
  • “Just jump” mechanic
  • Darkness
  • Random teleport
• Cutscene system
• Initial cutscene
• Text render

Got the level loading working (placeholder tiles) from an XML file:

Also designed the main character:

Imba pixel art skills…

I still have no idea on what to do on the environment front, from an art standpoint… Don’t want to do the usual “dungeon” theme I do on this kind of thing, but my graphic skills don’t go much further than that…  but I have to try, since I wanted the game to start in the heroine’s bedroom…

• Load level
• Get Lua scripting working
• Draw main character
• Character display
• Character movement working
• Draw area tiles
  • Bedroom
  • Corridor
  • Forest
• Game mechanics:
  • Follow mechanic
  • Reversed keys
  • Perpetual movement
  • “Just jump” mechanic
  • Darkness
  • Random teleport
• Cutscene system
• Initial cutscene
• Text render

Got an idea for the game… You’re a girl trying to escape the nightmares in your mind… Each level has a different gameplay mechanic, like inverted keys, or having to follow something, and hopefully a surprise ending (which I still don’t know what it will be!).

Want to have time to work hard on the cutscenes, general ambience and level design, so I need to do good progress in the beginning.

Task list:

• Load level
• Get Lua scripting working
• Draw main character
• Character movement working
• Draw area tiles
• Game mechanics:
  • Follow mechanic
  • Reversed keys
  • Perpetual movement
  • “Just jump” mechanic
  • Darkness
  • Random teleport
• Initial cutscene