Bacon and Games

Here’s a quick teaser of the progress I made this weekend and a quick summary of the stuff that’s changed:

• removed the springboards, clicking on an animal now makes it jump
• added food (drop food to temporarily stop animals) – only carrots for bunnies is shown. Eventually these will be in limited supply. Mechanism for placing food not implemented yet
• warning icons for impending traps
• added furnaces – these will eventually open and become traps that you’ll have to keep the animals from walking into
• added saw blades – not deadly yet, but they will be
• added mines – jump on to kill them, otherwise if an animal walks into one it’ll blow them to pieces
• added some new placeholder art (warp pipes, simple poof animations for item droppin, sorting bin icons, etc) – just to clean the look up a bit

There’s still quite a bit to do, but I’m extremely pleased with how it’s progressing after only 3 partial days of development. I’m really getting excited about the idea of this on an iPad with touch controls… that could be REALLY fun but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Prototype first, then I’ll worry about release platforms. More to come soon, I promise.

I had a chat recently with Ajay Karat about building games inspired BY art, rather than designing a game and then dressing it up with art. He sent me a bunch of his concept art to dig through and this is the one that stood out to me. (Not sure what that says about me…)

I could really imagine those dudes bouncing around in a game and, much like Happy Tree Friends, I kept thinking how much fun it’d be to kill something so darn cute. The concept I landed on takes place in a classic arcade format where the animals drop in from the top and bounce their way to the bottom. Your goal is to sort them into the 4 different openings at the bottom of the screen.

Get them in the right bin, horray! Get them in the wrong bin and… well let’s just say the sorters don’t take kindly to receiving the wrong fuzzy animal. The 5th gap, at the bottom center, will eventually be fire or lava or something equally nasty though the level isn’t close to being designed yet.

You can’t control the animals directly, rather there are different “gadgets” spread around the level that you can click on to modify the paths of the animals. Right now all I’ve got is conveyor belts, trap doors, warp tunnels and springboards but I have many more in store for this game. Anyway, not bad for a Friday’s work. I’m excited to see where this one goes. I meant for my boxy, pixelated versions of Ajay’s characters to be placeholder but I’ve kinda fallen in love with them :)

Here’s the first sketch…