HelixFox Games

Eleven months ago I made a post about starting a secret project. I’m still working on it but it wouldn’t be totally accurate to say it’s eleven months in the making (I’ve moved twice in the past year and all progress on the game is basically in my spare time, which I don’t have a lot of), but I’m still working on it!

The last couple of months have been particularly fruitful for game progress. In fact, I reckon probably more than half of the game has been coded in that time and the basic engine is pretty much complete right now! All that’s left to do is art assets (which I’m having to do myself as I don’t know an artist and don’t really have to budget to hire a pro), coding tweaks and bug fixes (I guess there’s a bunch of those), a couple of extra features, optimisation, level design…

Okay so that’s quite a bit still, but here are some screenshots of what I’ve got at the moment:

Duck Alliance! A very Lemmings-inspired game that has you helping a bunch of ducks to navigate through a level to reach an exit.

The title screen. Has buttons to play the game and to open the level editor. The level editor may not actually be present in the final game and is just there for my benefit at the moment

This is the level select screen and as far as aesthetics go is a looong way off completion. Right now each level has a button for it but I’m considering having a map screen with each level being a location on the map. The red buttons in the corner are just for level creation uses at the moment.
If you played Lemmings, the level names might give some clues as to what your ducks will be doing…

This is the main game screen and, again, is pretty unfinished. The UI at the bottom is atrocious and the actual game graphics could use some tweaking.
This level has two ducks who need to get to the level’s exit (the blue square – yeah, that’s a placeholder). This is done by telling the ducks to dig through the ground to get to the lower area using the commands along the bottom.

Hooray! (Note: the duck is the red square – another placeholder asset)

The duck in this screen is flapping through the air, which lets the duck fly briefly, letting him cross gaps or jump over obstacles.
In Duck Alliance, the ducks don’t all spawn from a set start position and, in general, there are only a few ducks. This allows levels to be constructed where all the ducks start in completely different areas and have to take a separate route to the exit.

This duck is building a set of stairs. There’s a handy number above his head showing how many bricks he has left.

This duck has a balloon that will let him float to safety. You can always see which ducks have balloons by looking above their heads – the ducks are vain creatures and show off their fancy balloons whenever possible.

There’s a lot of work left to do but it’s going well. I’m hoping to get some sort of demo up soon and get some user feedback

Cloud Rising was released at the beginning of 2008. We’re now well into 2009. I haven’t released anything in that time!

There are a few reasons for this. The biggest of which is that I have significantly less time to myself now that I have graduated from university, owing to my acquiring a full-time job. Another reason is that my skills in ActionScript 3 have been rapidly increasing, meaning that whenever I look at some old code I spend a lot of time rewriting it to make more sense and ultimately achieve nothing!

I have been working on stuff, however! For quite a while I was working on Helix Defense 2, which was looking to be a vast improvement over the first (and I’m almost ashamed of how simple Helix Defense 1 is), but that was shelved temporarily while I started work on another project which I’ve been working on for the past few months. I’ll prepare a preview post soon giving a quick idea of what this new game is going to be like, but for now I’ll just say that if you liked Lemmings, you ought to be a fan of this!

The momentum after my first games died down, but it’s going again now. Let’s hope I can keep it going.

I like zombies, as people who read this blog have noticed.

I found a site that has a pretty good list of all zombie-related flash games: Zombie Games.

Had a blast playing Pandemic 2 via this site, which I’ve somehow missed before. I realise it’s not actually a zombie game but it’s still good!