Tag Archives: one game a month

Ghost Maze is Live – October’s #1GAM offering in time for Halloween!

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In this game, players race through a spooky maze trying to find a portal that might grant them access to the next level. How deep will you delve into the maze? Screen Shot 2014-10-31 at 9.59.16 PM

 

In the game, you are pursued by ghosts that can kill you. You cannot hurt them, but usually you can outrun them. Each level will mean more ghosts. Don’t worry, if you die you will just respawn close to the beginning of the maze (bottom left corner). The exit is usually in the top right. The compass can help you try to navigate your way as well as the pillars and torches. There is a dungeon level, a couple different cave levels, and a temple. Once you get past the lava rock cave, levels are built of different segments so you might find a cave leading to a dungeon. There is no way to win or lose really  because the game will keep generating new mazes  forever so I’d say if you can get to level 10 that’d be a win. Also if you can do it without dieing that would be a feat. Click here to play Ghost Maze…

Controls:

WASD =Move
Mouse = Look
Shift = Run
C = Crouch
Space = Jump
M = change music volume

Technical Notes!

The mazes are generated procedurally using Conway’s Game of Life. The current default is Chance to Start at 20%, Birth 2, Death 0, Crowd 6 and Generations 6. This seemed to yield dungeons that worked best. The game tests for solvability with a flood fill algorithm and if it fails after 3 tries, it drops the player pretty close to the exit–so if that happens, congrats you get to go to the next level! The game also features an generally unseen homemade occlusion culling type thing. I disable rendering most of the maze that is not within a certain range of the player and re-enable as the player approaches. It cut the draw calls down to nothing and boosted the frame rate.

Additionally, I used the Ultimate First Person Shooter asset for my player and the spawning for the player, enemies and random objects. I used Breadcrumbs AI for the Ghosts AI. I used music from www.nosoapradio.us once again! Of course I used NGUI for my menu as always. I sure I can use it better. I need to figure out a good pause screen so players can configure the game.

Tap Invasion – Simple Space Shooter Early Look

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tapinvaderscreenshot

My April #1GAM is going to be a mobile space shooter meets wack-a-mole game called Tap Invasion. I don’t think the name is taken and if not, I will attempt to release it on the Android Store and maybe the Mac Store as well. I am posting the WIP of the game just to show how it progresses over time. I’ve got recognizable place holder graphics for now. I think I will be adding a cityscape to the bottom that will get destroyed when aliens crash into it. I guess the way to lose will be to lose all the buildings of the city. Currently the game is infinite, but I may institute levels, a couple different enemies, enemy movement more like Galaga. The idea is to add touch controls so the best way for me to emulate that on my computer is the mouse, so just click on bad guys to blow them up.

Click here to play the EARLY demo of Tap Invasion.