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.

Hello there, friends. Once again I’ve created a game prototype for the Game Prototype Challenge.

You can play it over here.

I’ll also be typing up a post-mortem at some point, which will eventually end up underneath the page I just linked.

Go play!

I made a game for the third Game Prototype Challenge!

As with my entry to the last challenge, I didn’t manage to finish this one, but I got my platform game engine very polished mechanics-wise. I just didn’t have enough time to add all the content I would have liked. Here it is: (Make sure you click it to enable keyboard input)

(The game unceremoniously runs out of content just after the moving crate. By the way, you can jump off walls!)

The themes for this contest were loneliness and dimensions. I didn’t quite get them across with what I ended up with – I was going to rely more on the content to incorporate them. I didn’t have time to add more content so I just filled the thing with floating crates. Everyone loves crates.

I’ll just ramble on here for a bit about what direction I was heading in.

I was going to have a basic plot of a university student late for his class and having to run through the streets to get there. However, he would soon notice that the streets are completely abandoned and find himself wondering what had happened to everyone. Cars would lie in the streets, left behind, perhaps some fires, etc.

As the player continues on, the world would subtly change, eventually becoming more and more bizarre and twisted (in Silent Hill fashion). The sky would turn to night over time and darkness would creep in from the edges of the screen until the player could barely see what they’re doing. (This is kind of implemented with the vignetting – it gets stronger as you move to the right).

I hadn’t settled on how I wanted the game to end, but my main goal was to freak the player out by starting the game light hearted and then surprise them by having it turn dark. I wanted to subtly alter the game world without them noticing until way into the game, at which point they say “hang on… what is happening??”.

Sadly, I ran out of time, but this is a concept I’m definitely going to come back to in the future. At the very least, I now have a very solid platform game engine to use for any future projects

I recently found out about the Game Prototype Challenge, a week long challenge to produce a game prototype based on certain themes, which are immortality and thin ice for this particular challenge.

I decided to knock something up for the challenge. A work colleague suggested having a vampire be the main character and discussion led to the idea of having a vampire ice skating. I started work on the prototype and eventually had a little game where you control a vampire who can skate across a 2D screen, kicking up ice when he changes direction. Other skaters roam the ice and the idea was going to be to get rid of them by bumping into them or by spraying them with ice.

However, my experimentation with this concept didn’t really lead anywhere in terms of making the game fun. I messed around with a few concepts but ultimately moving a vampire around a simple environment doesn’t offer enough gameplay variety to really engage potential players, so I’ve decided to abandon this idea for now. I might revisit it again if I come up with some way of adding depth to the gameplay.

Here’s what I came up with anyway, for anyone interested:

Things I was going to include:

• More character graphics including animations for the enemies being hit.
• Earn points for chasing off enemies, including multipliers for doing it without bumping into them.
• Time limits for each game session, presented as nights. E.g. The game would start at 6pm and end at 6am with it being about how many points you can earn during those twelve hours (which would obviously not be twelve real hours! Probably more like two minutes).

However, I don’t believe this prototype works very well, so I will return my attention to other projects, but this has been a fun diversion

Hello friends.

For August I was working on a simple Tower Defense game as my monthly game, but as I was moving that month I didn’t get to finish it in time. So I decided to spruce it up and turn it into a full-fledged game, complete with (gasp) polish and features and all that good stuff!

Here are a few screenshots and some words about how the game is going to work.

Here’s the title screen. Right now the logo says “Helix Defense 2″ but that’s just a working title. Most likely the game will be called Helix Defense with a wanky subtitle. These pictures were taken at 640×480 but the game will support any resolution (within reason – 200×200 might not work too well :p).

This is the level select screen, showing a few sample levels (mostly in place for testing purposes at the moment). Clicking a level shows the detailed view at the top, including your objectives and a bit of narrative text explaining a bit of backstory for the mission. Objectives will usually include “defeat x number of waves” but can also include things like “end with x number of resources” or “defeat x number of enemies” (for levels where enemies can escape).
Completing a level will give you a certain amount of points, with additional points earned by doing well in the level.

Here’s a typical level:

There’s a path clearly obvious in the level leading up to the reactor sat in the middle. Enemies will travel along this path to the end then begin to attack the reactor, which will be destroyed after taking enough damage, making you lose the level. To defend your reactor, you must build towers!

Towers can be built using the buttons in the lower right corner of the screen. There are three towers for this level: the Gatling Tower, the Slowing Tower and the Mini-Reactor. These towers cost resources to build, which can be obtained from your reactor (and any mini-reactors you have), which will constantly be generating resources. Some levels may also reward resources in other ways, such as destroying enemies.

Towers can be placed down anywhere near the path (but not on the path itself) and will automatically attack any enemies within range.


(Enemy graphics are currently a placeholder!)

Here’s another level. This one allows you to manipulate how enemies move throughout the level, with their initial path shown below:

The enemies will always take the shortest path they can towards your reactor, which isn’t very good! To remedy this, you’ll be able to build at certain key points to force the enemies to take a longer route (giving you more time to shoot at them!). Here’s the same level with two towers built:

For this level, eventually you’ll force the enemies to travel around the entire spiral, giving your towers the maximum amount of opportunity to blast them out of the sky. Some levels will have dangerous lava tiles that will do damage to enemies, whereas some might have tiles where enemies are protected from certain kinds of attacks. It’s up to you to manipulate your enemies to your advantage!

There will, of course, be levels with large open areas, letting you create mazes for enemies to move through! With this variety in how levels are built, along with the different objectives and a drizzle of story, I’m hoping to have quite a diverse set of levels for players to go through!

All in all, development is going pretty well. At the current rate I’m going at, I’m hoping to be mostly finished with the game at some point during October. Distribution channels are yet to be decided but expect some more news here soon!