Game Design Document

Here's a game design document template to get you started on your awesome game...
http://www.drewfx.com/TAFE/iPhone/GameDesignTemplate.doc

Storytelling in MMO's

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/4409/page/1

Make MMO games at home

Just found this for those of you wanting to make your own MMO...

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2130

Magnificent Steve - D.I.R.T Final Documentation

PLAYER :we chose the player character as a bunny because it was the ‘cutest and the easiest’ to design and recognise on the screen. Seeing as our demographic was girls, we were hoping to implement ‘cute but kickass’ as demonstrated by the tween movement and girls who play videogames adopt.

‘ei, yeah im cute and ill kick your ass at halo’

The attractiveness of the main character is very important to girls, a flair of femininity helps but knowing that they aren’t any less powerful than other characters.

BOYBOTS: the enemies of the game are aimed to be the opposite of the girl orientated main character. The boy bots were designed to look vicious, almost viperish, one could even say bitchy. Mindless monsters who destroy because it’s the only thing they know how to do and without a parental figure telling them not to, there’s a sort of childish mindset to it.

THE UNSEEN HUMAN CHARACTERS: Although we were unable to implement the game in the finished product I wanted the player to be continuously aware of the unseen human element, namely that they were missing and the chaos they created could have been avoided if only from their input. The robots were created for a reason that no longer exists.

character- character concepts go long and wide, ranging from a a medieval fox to a futuristic detective.

Level- levels were desginded on the building blocks idea, or even lego aspect of building what you can from blocks, rearangeing them for quick, cheat and effective level design.

and progression concept drawings, how we got from point A to point B

Level- the building blocks the flow of the level, why it was desgined that way.

The idea of the level blocks came from the sentence of the brief that simply stated ‘must be cheap to product’ the blocks could be overlayed with better graphics and vectors to ‘snaz’ up a game.

Environment- space and scifi, why we chose scifi, and ecetera

Space is a relatively common scenario for games and scifi and general. Only because of its riged form it is easy creat in flash, you can go into credible detail if you wanted to or keep it simple and it woulod still look realistic.

Scifi opens to the imagination, but can be seen as not just kids stuff.

The acton is set aboard and abandoned spaceship, so we wanted the elements within the ship to appear broken and rundown. Parts breaking, pipes leaking and elevators sparking, to the point where the environment around you will either kill you or completely fall apart

Marketing – who is the target audience? (13-22 females) a market that could be a potencial gold mind. But could be completely off putting other players unless done right.

Females tend to find the games with outreaching storylines and visuals. People aged 13-22 tend to be a lot more obbessed with image, and get bored easily tso we tried to make an easy to play and visually pleasing.

Gameplay- simple jump and shoot, why we chose that format, the restrictions and the plan.

Sometimes you don’t need a totourial, people who want a quick fix or a 5 minute lunch time waster don’t want to spend half the time learning how to play the game. The greatest asset to a web brower game is one that is easy to play but hard to master.

The simple consept of jump and shoot, can be done by any player reguardless of age. But getting the timing right and learning when and when not to jump allows for the game to expand and grow on the player so they will want to keep coming back to master what they know.

Using these funda mentals people can jump right into the game without having to go through a toutorial.

Themes – the underlying theme of the game and what we wanted to accomplish.

The theme laying underneath the story is one striving for identity, to fight for what they know is right, not just good verses evil. The boybots are not destroying be cause they want to they are destroying because it’s the only thing they know. This leaves them open for pity or even a chance to repent their ways.

Accessability- how easy it was to play would it be free?

Team Awesome Market Info

Dead man walking is a 2d arcade game based on the tower defense formula, spiced up with some more immersive elements. The game was designed from the beginning to have a high difficulty level, the aim was to perk the interest of the many middle aged gamers out there who remember the old days of hardcore arcade gaming. To achieve this and avoid the usual arcade crowd we decided to introduce a controllable character who was able to fight off enemies rather than the usual god perspective of the tower defense genre. This not only adds more of a visual appeal but allowed us to add more of an adult theme to the game. The inclusion of a player character also meant more potential for game play variety and differentiated us from the tower defense crowd. The idea was to make a game where death was inevitable, the player must survive as many waves of increasing difficulty as possible, the aim survival. This direction would hopefully appeal to the nostalgic gamer who was looking for a challenge.

All in all I believe we managed to achieve most of our market targets however we fell short on the level of variety that we initially planned to have in our game, though this was a time issue and could not be helped.

Mouse wheel code in Actionscript 2 and 3

http://fcontheweb.com/articles/scrollwheel/#ActionScript2

Using the scroll wheel or mouse wheel with ActionScript

23 December, 2008

fcOnTheWeb's most popular articles:

1. Using the scroll wheel or mouse wheel with ActionScript
2. Get Social Networking icons/buttons/badges on your site!
3. How to adjust SWF quality with ActionScript
4. How to go directly to a specific frame in a SWF
5. An Introduction to AJAX

Flash allows us to take all sorts of inputs use them to interact with files. The mouse scroll wheel is one of the inputs we can use. And as you will see below, it can be very simple.
You can choose what language you want you are using:

• ActionScript 2
• ActionScript 3

ActionScript 2

Capturing the scroll wheel, or the mouse wheel as Flash calls it, is very easy. We do it with three lines of code.
The first is to declare a new listener object, the second is to handle the scroll event and the third is to add the listener to the mouse.
Check out the example below and then we will look at the code. Scrolling up and down in the SWF below will move the blue square up and down.

And here is the code we have used for this interaction:

var mouseListener:Object = new Object();

mouseListener.onMouseWheel = function(delta) {

if ((delta > 0 && box_mc._y < 270) || (delta < 0 && box_mc._y > 0)) {

box_mc._y = box_mc._y + (delta * 3);

}

}

Mouse.addListener(mouseListener);

As mentioned before, the first line declares the listener object we use to listen for when the scroll wheel is moved.
The middle section is the part that actually moves the square which we have called box_mc. First we have the event onMouseWheel which will be fired when the scroll wheel is moved. Inside that function we perform a few simple checks to ensure our square does not scroll off the screen. These parts are not strictly necessary for a regular interaction and are only needed in this instance.
First we check if delta is greater than zero. delta is a value passed in by ActionScript and is a positive or negative value depending on which way the wheel was moved. If the value is greater than zero the wheel is being scrolled forwards. If the value is less than zero the wheel is being scrolled backwards. So if it is being scrolled forwards (greater than zero) we need to check that the box is higher than 270 (270 plus the 30 pixel height of box_mc is 300 and the bottom of the stage). If it is forwards and the square is not at the bottom we can then move the square.
We adjust the _y by delta, which we then multiply by 3 just to speed things up a bit. Because the delta is negative or positive we do not need separate actions for each direction.
Similar to the check we just did, we also check that if delta is negative and the square is at the not at the top of the stage we can move it up.
Finally, we attach the listener object to the mouse to get it all working.
And that is all there is to it - the scroll wheel action captured with ActionScript. So now that you are aimed with this basic knowledge you can implement it in your project and have control whatever you want by simply changing the portion of code we have written to control the square.
You can download the source files for this interaction below:

mousewheel_as2.zip

ActionScript 3

Capturing the scroll wheel, or the mouse wheel as Flash calls it, is very easy. We do it with four lines of code.
The first is to get access to the mouse events. The second the second is to handle the scroll event and the third is to add the listener to the stage.
Check out the example below and then we will look at the code. Scrolling up and down in the SWF below will move the blue square up and down.

*NOTE* - You will notice in the interaction below that while the square moves up and down the entire web page scrolls as well. We address this issue below.

And here is the code we have used for this interaction:

import flash.events.MouseEvent;

function handleMouseWheel(event:MouseEvent):void {

if ((event.delta > 0 && box_mc.y < 270) || (event.delta < 0 && box_mc.y > 0)) {

box_mc.y = box_mc.y + (event.delta * 3);

}

}

stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_WHEEL, handleMouseWheel);

As mentioned before, the first imports the mouse events so we can have access to them.
The middle section is the part that actually moves the square which we have called box_mc. First we have the function handleMouseWheel which will be fired when the scroll wheel is moved. Inside that function we perform a few simple checks to ensure our square does not scroll off the screen. These parts are not strictly necessary for a regular interaction and are only needed in this instance.
First we check if event.delta is greater than zero. event.delta is a value passed in by ActionScript and is a positive or negative value depending on which way the wheel was moved. If the value is greater than zero the wheel is being scrolled forwards. If the value is less than zero the wheel is being scrolled backwards. So if it is being scrolled forwards (greater than zero) we need to check that the box is higher than 270 (270 plus the 30 pixel height of box_mc is 300 and the bottom of the stage). If it is forwards and the square is not at the bottom we can then move the square.
We adjust the y by event.delta, which we then multiply by 3 just to speed things up a bit. Because the delta is negative or positive we do not need separate actions for each direction.
Similar to the check we just did, we also check that if event.delta is negative and the square is at the not at the top of the stage we can move it up.
Finally, we attach the listener object to the stage to get it all working.
You can download the source files for this interaction below:

*NOTE* - As we stated above, this ActionScript 3 implementation has the bug of scrolling the entire page at the same time as the SWF. At the time of writing an adequate fix had not been found for this bug. There are several available which use JavaScript to pass the scroll wheel event into Flash, but these were not deemed suitable for this tutorial.

And that is all there is to it - the scroll wheel action captured with ActionScript. So now that you are aimed with this basic knowledge you can implement it in your project and have control whatever you want by simply changing the portion of code we have written to control the square.

mousewheel_as3.zip

ferrari_chris

For Team Awesome

I found this app which you might like to dissect as it shows something similar to your game and how well it works on the iPad.

Video - Tesla Wars HD for iPad