DESCRIPTION:
* Kaeru the Journey (or Kaeru the Frog) is a tile-based platformer about guiding a wandering frog from the left to the right side of the screen while avoiding deadly obstacles and using special tiles such as springs, water, fire, and bombs to your advantage. It is a two-player game--one player sets up the obstacles and the second tries to bypass them. It's an ActionScript game designed for use with a 8 ft by 14 ft Monster Media interactive wall.
DURATION:
* Kaeru the Journey (or Kaeru the Frog) is a tile-based platformer about guiding a wandering frog from the left to the right side of the screen while avoiding deadly obstacles and using special tiles such as springs, water, fire, and bombs to your advantage. It is a two-player game--one player sets up the obstacles and the second tries to bypass them. It's an ActionScript game designed for use with a 8 ft by 14 ft Monster Media interactive wall.
DURATION:
* Two weeks.
TEAM SIZE:
* Five people--two artists, one "designer", and two programmers (me and someone else).
PRELUDE:
* If there was ever a game that I worked on that didn't work out, this would be the one. This was one of the FIEA rapid prototype games. Work with a randomly selected team of five to complete a functional game in two weeks. I liked our team--we had two great artists and two great programmers but the producer was, to be blunt, was a slacker (he dropped out after the first semester). It is not my intention to focus the blame on others but like a sports team, every position needs to perform to get ahead. There are things I could've done better--I could've polished the game's design or rehearsed a better class presentation, but sometimes you get stuck in a rut. That's okay, I learned a lot from this scenario--the main thing is if you need to scale the project back because you're not getting much done or are doing poorly in presentations, then please don't hesitate to do so.
PERSONAL GOALS / ACHIEVEMENTS:
* Utilized the Monster Media ActionScript API. It can track multiple points on the screen that are currently being touched. Using those method calls, determine which kind of block the user is holding and draw it on the top of the screen. As his hand is held down, sustain holding the block. Since this is a tile-based game, make sure all blocks are aligned to the grid (like in Tetris). When the screen is let go, the block ascends to the ground.
* Each block dropped by a player is stored in a vector of all blocks in play. There are five types of blocks (standard blocks, springs, windmills, enemies, and explosive device) in four elemental flavors (wood, fire, water, metal) for twenty blocks total. Once the game starts, they act upon each other differently. For instance, take the wood block. If placed underneath a water block, it'll rise to the top. If touching a fire block, it and any adjacent wood blocks will catch on fire. Each spring, enemy, and explosive behaves slightly different (i.e. a metal spring bounces the frog higher than a wood one). The windmill was the most fun of all as it can rotate any blocks adjacent to it. All of these rules had to be programmed into the game.
* Back to the two-player mode, one player drops the initial blocks and the other player drops his. Neither player can Player two cannot edit or delete player one's blocks yet he can delete his own. Programatically, the ability to allow a player to delete his own blocks but not the other without causing some bug or lapse in game logic was more challenging than it seemed. If Player 2 fails to save the frog and wants to reset back to the setup Player 1 left for him, then an instant fix switch had to be added too.
* Last but not least, I programmed Kaeru the Frog to hop across the screen, bounce off springs, float through water, jump faster/slower if the block its on is in a windmill (moving) state, and die when it falls or touches a painful object. Dittle.
* This game is terrible but it tells a story of a beautiful story of a forest destroyed by industry, ravaged by fire, and eventually succumbed to a watery grave. Music's great too. This is a great game if you take culture into consideration (it's really all I can say positive about this game, ha).
MEDIA:
LINKS:
* Monster Media Interactive Wall
