Now, Pillage is still pretty early in development, but things are starting to come together. The underlying engine is mostly complete, which is quite a thrill. I'm an animator first and foremost, and for me, flash has always been an inherently static environment. I draw something, it's there. If I don't draw it, it's not there. It always amazes me when Pillage pulls the next piece of background out of library and attaches it onto the appropriate place. Sure, it took a while to program, but I still feel that I've somehow enslaved flash to do my work for me.

What's even cooler is the ground/gravity engine. For the noobish programmer that I am, getting Flash to attach the appropriate ground segments in the appropriate places was quite a challenge. It was even harder to make all the sprites know how to react with all these pieces of ground. Harder still was working out the myriad of glitches involving hit detection and camera movement. Things on this front have, at last, been smoothed over, and it's pretty fun to watch the game handle itself. Sometimes an AI chraracter will run down a flight of stairs to greet you (kill you), and it never ceases to blow me away that these little guys can navigate stairs. Cooler still is that when I want to change how the sprites react with the ground, all I have to do is draw, no more codng required. I want them to climb over a hill, all I have to do is draw a hill, and they'll do it. All these things that gamers take for granted I now see in a new light.

I've been working on a side project for the past week; a game called Old Man Timerberwoller. You just want to make it to Canada to buy your prescription drugs, but unfortuntely, you're ambushed by crack babies and nazi seals. In the ensuing game, you get to club seals and kill nekkid crack babies. I honestly don't know what more you'd want in a game (I kid, I kid). It should be done soon, and will be good for some laughs.

Sunday morning I'm going to Seattle for a week, which should hinder my already sparse updates quite a bit. However, I'm bringing my laptop, so if I manage to find some wifi, I'll post any updates I've made on my game. Speaking of which, I figure I may as well give you another little glimpse of Pillage. Here's the first enemy you meet in the game, in all of his farmer goodness. He may look wimpy, but he can dish out the hurt with his trusty pitchfork.

Oh, and has anybody picked up the World in Conflict beta? Oh wait, that's right, nobody reads this ;p

I'm out.

Instead of chronicling my adventures in numerous threads across numerous forums, I've decided to have this blog be the sole outlet of information regarding my up and coming project, Pillage. I intend to chronicle the trials and tribulations of designing, animating, and coding a fully fledged Flash sidescroller.

I suppose that my game needs somewhat of an introduction. Pillage will be my second completed game. While animating is my true hobby, I've had to learn actionscript in order to make my games. On a side note, if you're some kind of Actionscript genius and you may want to collaborate in the future (or if you just want to chat), my AIM screenname is Pyro786, while my MSN screenname is pyro786@comcast.net (I like to keep these things simple :p). Anyways, back to what I was saying. I started up on game design while I was in school, figuring that it would be a good use of my free periods. My few hours of work with a Mini Mac and a mouse cumulated in Cloud Dodger. I was astounded that people enjoyed this game that I had developed solely at school over a few weeks. I realized that if I could achieve this level of success with something that essentially amounted to a distraction from my school work, that I could likely make a somewhat impressive fully fledged game.

Out of this, Pillage was born. After a few days of brainstorming, I decided that Pillage, not the untitled game entailng the adventure and plight of an extreme pogo-sticker, would probably make the best game. This leads to the obvious next quetion: what exactly is Pillage?

Pilage is a sidescrolling beat 'em up adventure game placed in a dissolving feudal kindgom. You are a knight without a lord, and you do what any good knight without a master would do; Burn, Pillage, and Grape. Yes, grape. It's like rape, but with a G. This "graping" is actually an important game mechanic, and it's certainly amusing to watch. If you want to really rack up the loot, you can even "grape" dead bodies before they dissapear. Yummy.

Pillage will solve an issue that many otherwise great flash games have fallen prey to. I'm sure you're aware of the feeling you get when you first open a comlplex flash game, and feel like a fish out of water. You have no idea where to start; you have these great complex moves at your disposal, but you're overwhelmed. If you know what I'm talking about, Pillage is the game for you. I didn't want to have a shortage of cool moves in Pillage, but I didn't want them to be overly difficult to pull of. Quite unlike Anthem, Pillage is not a fighting game. While complex, keyboard crunching combos may work fine in that type of game (read Gel's post on his Anthem blog about the gratification of pulling off a combo), it's not what I wanted for Pillage. However, I still wanted you to be able to pull of crazy cool **** including disembowlment. Yes, disembowlment is planned. The use of special attacks in Pillage is far more about the strategy. Without revealing too much, there is "special bar" type of gadget, which loses power when ever you use a special move. However, if you kill enough enemies with your power move (some power moves will only require one dead enemy), you will have a net gain on your power bar. The higher you can get your power bar, the better power attacks you can pull of.

Here is where it gets interesting. You still have all these power moves at your disposal, and you have no idea how to use them efficiently. It took me a bit, but I finally figured out how to solve this. It's a pretty simple solution, but I feel that it works pretty well. You start out Pillage with only one or two of these power moves. Like I said earlier, if you successfully pull off a power move, your "special bar" will increase. If you manage to fill your power bar all the way to the end, you'll aquire a new power move along with an elegant tutorial explaining how to most effectively use it. With this system, you will only gain new power moves when you've mastered the ones you already have.

There's one more level of complexity added to the system, which makes an interesting game of risk vs reward. In addition to your power moves, you'll also get magical abilities. Yes, he's a magical knight, taught my wizards 'n **** The story will be fully fleshed out later, don't worry. These magical abilities stem from the same special bar that the power moves do, but with the catch that the magic moves won't increase your special bar, no matter how many innocent civilians you vaporize. Suppose you're fighting a tough enemy (or a few), like the Hannibal mask wearing explosive archers. Do you use your magic to defeat these bonafide badasses, or do you try to fill your power bar by killing the surrounding civilians in order to learn a new special move? Maybe there's something even tougher down the road which will reduce you into a steaming puddle of liqiuified flesh. If you don't have sufficient "special", you might not be able to magically defend yourself from it's goo-ey burning. You'll have to decide at what moments you want to push your special bar all the way to acquire a new attack (and deplenish your bar quite a bit), when you want to use your magic to save your sorry ass, and when you want to stockpile your special for something even tougher.

While these choices will determine if you survive, there are a couple things I've done to make the system a bit more forgiving. First of all, pretty much everwhere in the game you go you'll come across slaughterable civilians. If you used your magic at a horrible time, chances are that you can pull of some power moves on the civilians to push your "special bar" back up before you get destroyed. If you really mess up, so badly that don't even have enough power to pull of a power move, there's still a move that you can do to increase your "special bar", which doens't cost any special to pull off. Lastly, the game is pretty easy in the beginning. Much of the joy in this game is going to revolve around killing people in especially awesome people. Even if you hit the "old man" civilian with just the basic, non power attack, his entire side gets sheared off, and you can see his heart beating inside of his chest while he falls. You can catch a glimpse of this sprite in the banner on the top of the blog.

Thanks for bearing with me in this insanely long post, guys. I promise the rest of them will be lots shorter.

Peace.

Hello all. It's currently 2 am in the morning, and my body wants to sleep. I suppose the first real post will have to wait until tomorrow. Anyhoo, for the few that don't already know, this blog is devoted to chronicling the development of my up and coming game, Pillage. It's first details will emerge on here, tomorrow, but until then I'll direct you here, to my friend Gel's development blog. Not only did he "inspire" me to make a blog of this nature, but game is looking pretty kickass and you should check it out.

God speed.