"bugs, bugs everywhere"

Now for the next installment of this blog, we are going to talk about the last few weeks.
First of all we had to do a presentation about our game for the class we are following in University. And after a short night for most of the teammembers, due to bugs that needed fixing. Just before the presentation we found out that there were still some bugs in the latest version of the game, so we were forced to present a demo from a two week old version of the game. But in the end the presentation was a succes, so we are happy XD.

After quite a lot of time, our artist has finished the first sprites and animations for the game, here are some examples:

These are the sprites for the different powers you can choose. In the first one timmy has set itself on fire, out of pure desperation. The second one is a sprite for terrorist timmy, dropping bombs all day. In the last one Timmy is "diggin" his time in the game, just like you will.

At the moment Timmy has 4 different powers which all consist of 2 different attacks, for example fire Timmy has a flamethrower as main weapon and can also drop a huge flaming ball that does damage when the enemies walk into it.

In the last two weeks one of our members has been developping the enemy class, and after a lot of blood, sweat and tears it is almost finished. He has made an enemy superclass, so that it is a lot easier to add new enemies. This class has a lot of parameters so we can tweak the enemy to our liking with ease. A few examples of the parameters: there is a parameter which is used for the knockback the player gets when he gets hit by an enemy, another one to indicate if the enemy is ranged or that it is a melee character, and what the exact range of his attacks are. The enemies now even have artificial intelligence, AI, they look for the enemy and when he is in range they will chase him down and they can even jump onte higher or lower platforms to chase the player. and if they are in attack range of the player they will try to annihilate you. 

Also, we now have a working scoring system, you get a certain score when you complete one of the levels and if you kill an enemy. If you die it shows a graphical keyboard where you can type in your name by clicking on the keyboardtiles. When you typed in your name and it is one of the top ten scores you can find it in the high scores list.

We are now working on the the powerselection screen, so you can choose which powers you want to use on your run. But this had some bugs, during the presentation, so we are still working on that. Our leveleditor has also started to develop the first levels of the game and is going to continue making levels untill he dreams new levels, and then make some more. 

We now have the foundation of our game, so the next step for us is to expand the game as much as possible to make it even more fun for you guys to play. 

Well this is it for now, if you want to now more about our game, you are going to have to wait for the next installment of this blog. And now i could use a beer, so see you later.

first update

Why hello again, here is our first update for project Elemental Madness. ( finally made a decision on the name of the game XD) We have been working very hard on this project, sometimes with great succes and other times with a little less succes. But we are making good progress.
We have had some problems with our graphical designs suddenly disappearing, and never reappearing. Luckily our graphic designer had everything drawn on paper before he started to make the digital copies so nothing is really lost. (except some time)
Here are some examples of what you can expect in our game:

Now some technical stuff: (its boring i know, but we need to discuss this)
First off i will give you the general class structure of our game. At the top of our class structure for the objects is the Gameobject class. In this class we define some member variables which we need to use in all of the subclasses of this Gameobject class. The gameobject class is the superclass of several other classes, the most important class of this is the Spritegameobject class, this class represents all of the object in the game that need to be drawn with a sprite. We also have a class that is a subclass of Spritegameobject, called animatedgameobject which we use to represent all the moving objects, such as the player and the enemies.

The player class is dived in different partial classes, one for the general character  and one for all of the actions it needs to do.
In our game you will be able to choose from a couple of special powers to use, these special powers all have a class of their own, which is a subclass of the main power class.
Also all of the enemies will have their own class that will inherit of the main enemy class.
The player and the enemy class inherit from the animatedgameobject and the powers are a subclass of the spritegameobject.

One of our programmers is working on the improved AI from the megaman game for the enemies. Another one of the team is working on creating different maps for the game. At the same time people are also working on  timmy's superpowers.

In the Next update we hope to have finished an alpha version of the game so we can start with some playtesting and maybe even some testing by the readers of our blog.

introduction of Project elemental madness

Hello to everyone that is willing to read this. We are a couple of students from the university of Utrecht that have founded a gaming studio to be able to make our own games.(maybe we were forced to do this but we would rather not talk about it :D). If you want to know more about our team-members you should check out our amazing team page.

The first project of our studio is to remake the best retro game ever (we think): MegaMan. Our main goal for this project is to take the retro game and remake it with modern technology to make it an even better game. This project is called: Project Elemental Madness (Title for the game is under construction).

Before we can make our own version of it, we needed to take a look at our retro game. For the people that have never played or heard of Mega man, here is a short analysis of the game. MegaMan is a classic platform game in which you need to clear rooms to be able to move on to the next room. After a few rooms you will need to defeat a big boss, which will drop a special power/ability you can use to get as far as possible in the game. Then, when you have cleared all the levels of the game, you need to kill one final boss.

The story of our game is set in an asylum, when you play the game you will get to know the world of our mentally ill patient Timmy that has lost it's favorite horse and can't cope with everything that is happening to him anymore. In the asylum Timmy has developed special powers to help cope with the loss of his horse. The main idea of the game is that it is an endless game, so you can never finish it (Muahahaha). When you start this game you will be sucked into the madness of Timmy and once you get into his head you will NEVER get out alive.