HelixFox | Games by Kyle Rodgers

So the game I’ve been working on for the past few months is a platformer titled “Bread Duck” with the somewhat silly subtitle “The Duck Who Is A Loaf Of Bread”

I’ve taken the liberty of interviewing myself to give you a bit more info about the game!

So what’s the basic premise? What do you do?
I’m loath to say it’s your basic “go right” platformer with a twist, but it is essentially your bog standard platforming adventure wherein your character must constantly move vaguely towards the right of the screen. With a twist.

So what’s the twist?
Bread Duck has friends dotted around each level that need rescuing. By themselves all they can do is walk forwards, turning around when they walk into something. Very Lemmings-esque AI, there. To help these guys out you’ll need to take out any enemies that might attack them, flick switches to open doors and destroy obstacles that are in their way, eventually leading them towards the exit. It’s a puzzle platformer, with the puzzles being how to get these guys to their goal.

Each level is made up of puzzles then?
Only somewhat, and the puzzles themselves are going to be fairly tame. I want the gameplay to be partially Bread Duck rescuing his friends but I also want there to be parts where it’s just Bread Duck going solo to mix things up. I don’t want the player to have to worry about where another entity is 100% of the time. In fact, they don’t have to worry at all if they don’t want to, as rescuing companions is only a secondary objective (unless they are needed to open Bread Duck’s way to the end, which is sometimes the case).

What would you say have been your main influences when designing Bread Duck?
My main influence by far has been the early Sonic games. Specifically the first three on the Mega Drive/Genesis. I played the hell out of them as a kid so there’s a lot of untapped nostalgia for me there. Also, I feel like a lot of modern indie platformers are more inspired by Mario than Sonic so I wanted to tip the scales a little bit. The early Sonic games were always a fairly mellow experience where you always knew exactly where to go and how to get there, so you could relax and just cruise through the game. I want to replicate a similar feeling when playing Bread Duck.
Other influences include Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV, which are both fantastic platform games.

Is anyone helping you with the game or is this completely solo?
All the coding and graphics work is being done by me, yeah. Music is being handled by Whitaker Blackall, who has come up some amazing stuff so far.

When will the game be released?
Most of the heavy lifting is done. All that’s left are little things like small tweaks, last minute graphics additions and level design. I’m hoping to have the game out in the next few months, but it’ll definitely be out before the end of the year.

Thank you/me, Kyle for allowing me/you to interview you/me.
Thank you/me.

I’ve finally got around to uploading my last published game, Outerspatial! Go play it!

Outerspatial is a top-down strategical shooter/management combo. The main gist of the game is placing down ships to fly around and attack enemies, protecting your capital ship in the centre of the screen. The aim of the game is to survive for as long as possible, with each attempt giving you experience and access to upgrades to help you last longer.

The main experimental thing I tried with this game was to have an upgrade tree of sorts, but make sure that you could never get all the upgrades. That way you had to pick and choose which upgrades you wanted to get, forcing the player to think about whether they preferred damage upgrades or health upgrades, and pick which ships they wanted to use.

The main failing of the game is that it’s kind of annoying how it keeps pausing to let you create a ship. The idea of the pausing is so that you have time to think about where you want to put the ship, but with you operating the capital ship’s main cannon you don’t tend to pay attention to when the next pause is so it often catches you unawares. I think what I would do in a sequel would be to introduce two modes: one without the ship cannon and pausing intact and one with ships being created automatically, letting you focus on firing the cannon.

All of that said, I’m pretty happy with how this game turned out.

My next released game will be Bread Duck, a fully finished and polished version of the prototype I did a few months ago. I’m hoping to have a preview post of that up tomorrow!

You may have seen my GPCv4 entry, Sunshine Hurts already (If not, go play it!). Developing it was an interesting experience, so I’m going to write some words here about the whole process and Wot I Think about it all.

First off, this is my third project using my “Jam” platform engine, which I originally started during the Global Game Jam in January. Considering the entirety of its development has been during a 48 hour game jam and a couple of week-long challenges, I’d say it’s pretty technically robust at this point.

As in GPCv3, I ended up with a basic platform game with some mechanics and effects in place, but little in the way of level design. The engine, at the moment, is very awkward to create levels with, as I have to place down each individual object by hand with a line of code. It’s not very intuitive and takes freaking ages to just place down a few crates (crates return in this game, you may have noticed).

What I need is an editor.

Sadly, coding an editor is a pretty big undertaking so I wasn’t able to get one done for GPCv4, but I have every intention of building one to be ready for GPCv5. My goal is eventually to have an engine so robust that I can create platform games just by dropping graphics in, tweaking a few mechanics to fit the theme the game is going for, then just building levels in the editor.

However, after looking through some of the other entries, I think I may be focusing too much on gameplay mechanics and ignoring the possibility or just telling an interactive story (as some other dudes did). I could have dropped some NPCs or other story objects in the game to tell some kind of basic narrative, but I didn’t think of that until just now! Maybe next time.

You can always make up whatever story you like about the game as it is. Perhaps that’s more fun, letting the player’s imagination go wild? Who knows.

I flexed my pixel art muscles again for this project and I’m quite pleased with the result (I have no illusions about being any good at pixel art right now but I think I might get pretty good, given enough practice). I’m also surprised with how much I enjoy drawing pixel art; I’m enjoying it much more than most of the programming work I’ve been doing lately. Perhaps I’ve missed my calling!

The colours used for the artwork are very deliberate. I wanted to use colours fairly true to life and, in fact, the beigey colours used for the environment are based on images I could find of the International Space Station’s interior (white for the astronaut and fiery colours for the sun should be obvious, I hope). Also, the colours in the foreground are deliberately muted to emphasise the brightness of the sun in the background and the danger it represents (also it’s very pretty).

The film grain effect from GPCv3 returns to cast a dark ambience onto the game, to great effect I think. The game feels quite dark and gloomy because of this. Added to this are the glitching TV screens on the wall, offering instructions. I had originally planned for there to be more of these, but alas. The gloominess and glitchiness along with the fact that your character is all alone hints that something isn’t right here. Come to think of it, the fact that loads of wall panels have been torn to pieces might also indicate this.

Another effect I added into the game was to use this glitching effect from Soulwire. When you die, the game renders the current screen to JPEG data then runs it through the glitching effect, which corrupts the data to warp the screen. Why is the screen glitching out like a computer when the player dies? I’ll let you ponder that one.

As for the themes “burden” and “sunshine” I should think my implementation of sunshine is obvious.

I had plans for the player to have to carry a second astronaut (who would be unconscious) throughout the level. Carrying someone else would slow you down and reduce your ability to jump. That was going to be the (literal) burden in the game, but time restraints and all that!

All in all, I’m quite happy with what I ended up with and I think I’m going to develop this game further (at least until GPCv5). I smell potential.

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!