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.

Upcoming Designs

Oh how the time flies by and no posts are made to this blog, such a sad thing. Well heres a new post. Some concepts for the game and one of those concepts realized into pixel art (not going to show you the animation or explain him yet though)

I started working on some ideas for housing for the creatures who inhabit the island. We are trying to stay away from any kind of cliche designs, and if we do use a common game convention we are working hard to make it unique.

These are some quick enemy designs I drew out tonight. Im trying all different kinds of shapes and trying to stay away from common enemy designs.
And one of the concepts colored in and already in a pose holding an innocent rabbit by the throat.

Artwork

Were working hard on the game, especially now that we have much more free time with classes out for the summer. I am currently working on doing a painting of the main characters of the game Jack and Rodger. Lynn did the line art while I, Nate, painted it in PS. In other news, our other artist Lynn Wang, is currently in Burbank,California working as an Intern at Cartoon Network! Congratulations Lynn!


Here's a little sneak peak at some of the graphics that I'm working on. I almost have a fully complete tile set for the water temple and lots of partly finished sets for other sections of the world. Plenty of finished and unfinished enemies and characters as well!



Thanks for all the comments as well, readers. It's really encouraging to get feedback, so let us know what you think in the comments section, anybody and everybody!

-Nate Kling (Caliber9)

New Art

Here is some new art from caliber:

Apparently the main character is a lot smaller than I originally thought if he can fit like that on the back of a turtle.

-hcr

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

Wyre Concept art

Everyone say hello to Wyre, one of the main characters of the game.

-Caliber9