Foresight ‘game’ and other stuff
Posted: September 17, 2009 Filed under: General Stuffs, LudumDare 8 Comments »
'The ability to foresee or prepare wisely for the future.' according to the wiktionary
so I had the idea when working on a time travel game a while back (dont groan, everyone h played around with time travel =p) and I figured why not be able to see what you will do as well as what you have done? its not hard to figure out what will happen in the future with a simple system, so I’ve played around with prototypes that let you see what will happen to you and choose to ‘change the future’ (so to speak) for a better outcome.
the latest prototype for this is available to play here
the trouble is I just dont know where to take it from here, so I’m posting it here in the hopes it might be inspiration for someone else, and maybe I’ll come up with something to make it more interesting to me and make a proper game with it, but its not likely.
oh, in other news I released Alpha 7 of Edward (a free flash platform engine for non coders) a little while ago. its very close to being feature complete so if you are into that kind of thing check it out.
also, I have a couple of smallish projects I hope I can finish this week and then I’ll get back to work on phantasmal (which I have been avaiding as alot needs redoing D:)
also also, I hacked at bits of my site yesterday, doing stuff like improving links and adding links to the forum. sadly I had to kill the gallery, the software for it was just driving me mad, if you are desperate to see my pics though there is always deviantArt 🙂
also also also, I hosted mini Ludum Dare last weekend and some awesome stuff was made, check it out.
interesting concept, but the floor is quite light and hard to see. is that the point?
Cool prototype and idea for premonition mechanic. I’ve messed around a little with some premonition mechanics myself but not down this path before. As I play the demo and run around I was trying to think of various ways to keep working within the theme of premonitions and destiny or path. It seems almost like within an actual game context it would be to distracting to have the huge string of clones and that maybe that detection or representation could be done in a more subtle way eventually. You could even extend the concept to all objects in the game. Depending on how you implemented the visual aspects you could make it more surreal or psychic seeming with “flashes” from the future here and there as you played and if the game logic detected that your character would run off a cliff it could “flash” some sort of microsecond warning to the player. That way.. it would more like the way premonitions are often described as an occasional flash or glimpse of what may come. If it is an impending enemy attack incoming from high above the player.. suddenly the player could “see” that an enemy was about to swoop down on them etc. Well, just a few thoughts I had as I played your demo. Fun fun!
@Allen: yeah the idea was you could only tell a hazard was available by using your foresight. if I took it further though I would have hazards other than falls, such as crushing traps or spikes shooting out of walls.
@HybridMind: I think the flashes make sense, it would definately be easier to fit that into a more traditional game. its something I’ll keep in mind 😀
Looking really nice. I like the still premonitions where the player runs into the frames of themselves, its a really nice effect I think.
My suggestion was to be similar to your intension you just replied “you could only tell a hazard was available by using your foresight” which might be interesting to push further.
Blind but psychic 😛
Interesting concept, I played around with it for quite awhile xD
There were a few decent games at the Mini Ludum Dare you hosted. I made one but it was garbage, kept having trouble with LÖVE (implementing the network part). Saw your twitter post, trying out Flixel out now right? As for your input issues, it may be your keyboard. I’ve never had that problem (I’m on a generic Microsoft keyboard if that matters). Check out the Mode source, that’s the basis of what I learned off of. Good luck.
@Allen: after a fair bit of experimentation and looking at the engine source with ChevyRay, it seems to be a problem with the flash players own input buffer, and not firing events in favour of some graphics stuff. also found that I dont have the issue in the browser, so thats something, though it only seems to be because flash runs faster in the browser, so computers a little older than mine will have the issue whatever. 🙁
still havent looked into love yet, but I hear good things about it 🙂
oh, well-Love is just something you would use to make something up real quick. I guess if you were super dedicated you could actually make a ‘full’ game with it but that’s stretching the engine’s limitations. Excuse me if I over-hyped it.
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/6171/wutm.gif (since when did you implement dancing in Edward? :P)
@Allen: gah, that glitch has been hanging around for the past few builds, I’ll make sure its gone before I hit the beta >.<