New Game

So instead of doing multiple small games we decided to do a medium sized game that hopefully will not take that long to make (if it doesn't become bigger than expected). I finished my OpenGL engine and it's working a lot better than the old one, so far. We probably should have still went with the small game practice stuff, but we were excited to get this new project moving along. We don't have a name for it yet so I'm just calling it Chainsaw at the moment (it doesn't have anything to do with chainsaws, I just make up random names when creating a new project.)

The new game is an exploration platformer type game where you are a guy on an island who has animal companions to help him. You cannot attack enemies directly, but you can attack by using your animal companions. This will hopefully make the game a bit different from other platformers like it.

The story is still a work in progress, but it starts out with the main character, Jack, and his dog riding in an air balloon. The dog jumps after a bird or something and falls to the island, and so Jack lands his balloon there. You then have to rescue your dog and then can choose to leave the island or follow a different path by helping out the creatures you found on the island. We want the story to change a little bit depending on the player's actions.

Development has been moving very quickly, Caliber has a lot of the art done and the coding is well underway. I rewrote another platforming engine once again, and I'm really happy with it so far. Everytime I rewrite it, it gets a lot better. There are no slopes this time but I have already implemented movable blocks, which I had never done before. I also have been practicing better code organization which has helped speed up the coding process (most of my problems came from lack of organization!)

I'm currently working on the AI for the first companion you get, your dog. He follows right behind you and does a basic bite attack where he jumps through the player and attacks the enemy in front of him, so the following has to be almost perfect for it to work. I am almost done with the dog's AI and am very happy with how it is turning out (I'm pretty sure I got it close to how a real dog would act in that kind of situation.)

We will be working hard on this in the next couple of days and will try to keep the blog updated. We are also looking for someone to join up with us and write music for the game (you can help with the designing of the game also if you want!) , so please leave us a comment or send us an email (admin@can-games.com) if you want to be part of this game.

- HCR