Cowboy Android Game

Back in January, after City of Doom and before Caveman Basketball, we started another game for Android. This time we wanted to try to make a game that's designed directly around the features of the phones. After a while of coming up with different ideas, we finally decided to make a game based around a cowboy robbing a moving train. The player would control the cowboy-on-horse by tilting the device left or right, to speed up or slow down. Clicking the screen would fire your gun in that direction and a click-drag would throw your lasso to capture bags of money.

Early Crude 'Mockup':


Some character concept art by Vinh:



We managed to lay down some of the basic gameplay before I decided it was time to rewrite my Android game engine. The first one I wrote for Angry Boulders was very hacked together, as I had no idea how the Android platform worked when I first started using it. I finished up the newest game engine in about a week or two, which now uses open gl for graphics rendering.

We set the game aside to do the caveman basketball game, and then to finish school work, but we now plan on taking some time to try to finish this game and get another Android release out there.

Caveman Extinction

Time for an update...

We've been taking the last couple months off of working seriously on any SharkArm Studios projects. I worked a bit on Grand Feather level design, but that's about it. For the most part, the excuse is that I have had too many project to work on with my job and school work that I was way too burned out from programming all day long (I should never had gone to school for computer science!)

Extinction of Caveman Basketball:
We were making Caveman basketball for a competition, and it was coming along pretty nicely. We got pretty much the all the main parts of a basketball game fully implemented, to a point where it played like an unpolished version of NBA Jam. We only had a week left, but we didn't get to start on implementing some of the cooler stuff that we were planning on from the beginning. We were also having trouble making the game, what some people like to call, 'fun'. We would have had to probably work all day everyday in order to make the game how we wanted it, and I was very busy with school work that particular week, so we decided that we weren't going to be able to finish it in time.

I also found out shortly after from an archeologist friend of mine that cavemen probably never actually played basketball (though he was unable to provide any conclusive evidence.) He also told me that, even if the cavemen did play some sort of basketball-like game, they certainly would not play with dinosaurs (they would most likely play a different game which involves chasing, biting, tearing of flesh, and digestion).

The caveman basketball engine did give me a pretty nice little engine for 3d/2d games which would work nicely for another beat'em up game. We even talked about working on a short beat'em game entitled Shelled Champions. Nate even made a few test sprites for it:

So I finally finished up school for the summer and am getting really excited to start working on some games again. We really want to take the time this summer to get most of Grand Feather finished. We are going to do some redesigning of the game to hopefully make it more unique and fun to work on. I also think that I am going to participate in the Experimental Gameplay challenge with the theme of 'Zoom'. The game would be developed around that theme within a week's time. Sounds fun!

I'll do some more posts in the upcoming week about some mini project stuff I did since City of Doom was finished.