DOWNLOAD the game right here:
http://www.chipcy.net/files/HuntedFortress.rar
Download and unrar to wherever you want. Start the exe file to play. Information on controls etc can be found in the main menu. XNA might be required for the game to run. Installer is inside the rar file as well.
If it doesn't work, you may need to install .net framework 3.5. Some users have reported that the game won't boot at all. Currently trying to understand what is at fault.
Concept:
Haunted Fortress is a 2D top down adventure game. Think inverted Pacman meets MGS meets LTTP. The Pacman comparison is because you play as the ghost, while trapped in a maze like building at night. The main gameplay feature is stealth focused, inspired by knocking on walls in MGS. And it's like LTTP because the game is pitch black like certain undergound areas where you have to use some sort of light to shine your way through the darkness. The library in the earlier parts of Amnesia: TDD is another source of inspiration for the environment. Except, you know, for kids.
A fortress ravaged by scary ghosts. But not all is lost, as you have ghost powers of your own.
What is that, you say? Never heard of it? No wonder. It doesn't exist yet.
Point of the thread:
As some of you may know, I'm studying game design at the University of Skövde in Sweden and this is a school project I'm a part of. I'm one of about 13 guys (not entirely sure of our team size yet), we're called Mindless Entertainment, and I thought, why not let GAF have a look at our development process, seeing how rare that is with regular commercial games, especially from the very birth of the idea? So far the game doesn't really exist outside of our imaginations and a design document, but during the next eight to ten weeks or so, we will go from concept to finished game, ready to be released from our hands, to you, for free. We are aiming for feature lock after four or five weeks.
So the idea of this thread is to give you guys an inside look at how our development is proceeding. With the consent of the artists, I'll be uploading concept arts of our main character and enemies etc. Maybe some audio files of our music and such. When we have a "company" logo and a main menu logo for the game, I'll be sure to upload those to this thread as well.
Background info:
Close to Skövde, there's a huge 200~ year old military fortress, created to protect us from a Russian invasion that never happened. The guys holding tours of the place have asked our school to update their tours to make them a bit more modern. The more experienced students are in charge of that, and this is more of an off-shoot, and is mostly setting the theme for our first official projects (there's ten different projects being developed right now). So our game is set in this fortress, at night, about 200 years in the past.
GAF might not be the target audience (unless you're 8-13 years old, give or take), but I think it'll be interesting to see this get made nonetheless. I hope so anyway!
Team structure:
2 game designers
2 sound designers
5 graphic designers
4 programmers (might be getting 1 more)
Pictures:
http://i.imgur.com/XD2ET.png
http://i.imgur.com/WxJn1.png
http://i.imgur.com/Y4mR7.png
http://i.imgur.com/UzuGq.png
http://i.imgur.com/lYBW7.png
If anyone have a question, just fire away and I'll try to answer to the best of my abilities! I hope you guys will have a good time. We will. Please wish us luck!
Edit:
OP updated: Company logo at the top.
Week 1 (Jan 24th): A small update on where we stand at the moment. We got our development schedule approved today by our committee of teachers. We were told to cut out a couple of level designs so we can focus on making one bigger and more awesome level instead. That wasn't that big of a deal since we had already anticipated that response and have been working towards that end since last week anyway
Predictable. We also have to cut some of the gameplay out (or rather, put it on hold until we're satisfied with the overall quality on what's important) but we fought for what we considered to be integral to the original concept (the stealth elements) and we won, so that's good!So far, we seem to be ahead of schedule. Our main character, Marie, needs to be fully animated and colored but we've come a surprisingly long way on those fronts since Wednesday already. I should have something to show real soon. We've also decided on a general art direction for our enemy designs. Unfortunately, they're all on actual paper at the moment but as soon as they are scanned, or when we've done some proper pictures, you'll be getting a look at that as well.
Soultron, since you asked
We will be using the GDI+ library for the graphics.Next up is getting started on the actual environmental designs, and start getting some tilesets out so we have something proper to prototype with (the engine is still a ways off, so we will be using Game Maker 7 for idea testing). We probably would've started with that already but we've had some technical issues with drivers and wacoms. I'll try to give a more detailed view of what the game is actually about above as well. Apart from that, it's time to revise the original design document and start figuring out exactly what each discipline need to create to make this thing take off
I don't think it's really needed at this point as we talk about pretty much everything together on a daily basis, so it's mostly for the sake of documentation.As for the way we work, most of us are sitting in half a computer class room (as we share it with another group). So everyone except the sound guys are in the same room, which has been really helpful so far (the sound guys have their own room next door, so they not far away either). We might be getting a 14th guy (programmer) in the next few days, but after that I think we're all set.
Week 2 (Feb 1st):
Another update
This time I have a few character designs we've decided on. They are not final by any standards (and they're supposed to be animated of course) but they are fine as placeholders and shows the direction our art is going for. At the moment, we have two female and two male characters in total. The intention was not gender equality, it was just kinda boring with an almost all-male cast, so to speak. The two shown characters are both enemies. The last link is a bit too big to paste into the post, so just click it. It's an early sketch of our main character. She looks quite different in-game though. There's also a close to final game logo up top. At the moment, we feel that this stuff will go into the game as it looks right now, but we intend to use the last couple of weeks or so, for overall polishing, so still, nothing is truly set in stone.As for scheduling, we are *still* ahead of our own preliminary iteration plan. It may be a dangerous way to look at it, but the numbers aren't lying to us at the moment, and it's not just me who believes this to be the case. The project just recently took off the ground, but we're still flying, with plenty of fuel reserves, and crashing is not an imminent threat, to either discipline. Unfortunately, the game has been scaled down, perhaps too much so gameplay and the general entertainment value will get hurt, but it might be necessary (it is, according to teachers) to land this aircraft
We are having internal discussions about re-adding gameplay elements (and some new ideas have popped up as well) if time allows it (programmers are saying it's easy so it's looking good at this point).We are still prototyping levels and puzzles in GM7. We might have our own functional prototype next week, according to the programmers. Our original level size was quadrupled pretty early on but seeing how few puzzle variations you can actually fit on a 4096*3072 grid (with a view area of 1024*768), we may have to change that to 8192*6144 to accommodate our desire to make the gameplay as varied as we want it to be. We've also changed the graphics design direction from LTTP to Lufia 2-esque, because it seemed like too much work to get the 3D effect from LTTP to work properly and this way, the work load for the graphics designers seem to shrink. However, reverting to the original style might still happen later on, as we just had to decide on one style for the prototype so art assets can start getting out to the rest of the team. It doesn't seem like it would have that much of an impact on the actual levels. We are still keeping the Zelda dungeon style of keeping the level pitch black, as it is integral to the gameplay. Personally, I find it interesting to have the graphics have such a major role on the end-product, as it mostly goes against my own beliefs on how games should be. Not sure how that actually happened
Week 3 and 4 (Feb 15th):
Oops, sorry for the lack of updates :/ We've been very busy with making the game, and our parallel course has taken up a fair bit of time as well. Unfortunately, that's not gonna change until this whole thing is done.
Last time, I showed some characters and talked about our art direction. Work on that front is progressing rapidly, and our main character and some of our enemies are pretty much completely done, on the animation end. The next step for the graphic designers is to make tilesets of these animations so the programmers can implement them in the real game. Since most characters are done, we're shifting focus from that to environments and objects (both interactive and non-interactive ones). If there's time, I should be able to upload some more pictures of the game and its characters, later this week.
Our prototype in Game Maker is getting more and more of the planned features every day. Apart from checkpoints, teleporters and good AI, it's actually looking like a real game now. I needed a small break from making levels/puzzles (it's not really my job anyway) so I've been writing some of the story that will go into the game. We've decided (or I have) that we should combine the story with the hint system. Of course, I don't want to talk too much about the content of the story at this time
It will be related to the events at Karlsborg though. Yet barely. Although it wasn't our intention, you can definitely see influences from both Amnesia, with its diaries, and from Bioshock, with its audio logs. Come to think of it, VO would be pretty sweet Will have to look into that.So basically, what we've been doing lately is creating environments in Game Maker while my level designer have been trying to implement the functions mentioned through code. We're ahead of the programmers since we get so much for free in GM
But the actual game is getting there, with no major road bumps so far. Of course, we're running into minor bumps on a not-so-regular basis, but it's mostly because most of us don't have that much experience in any of the fields. We're learning as we go, which is the point of the course. Our teachers pretty much wants us to run into as much trouble as possible, so we can learn from those pitfalls. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, we haven't been forced to scrap ideas so far (apart from the ones put on hold the very first week) and we haven't had any disasters worthy of mentioning at this point. The sound guys have been making sound effects for characters, primarily, but all groups are now shifting focus towards the environments, so a few effects, like opening doors etc, were implemented in the prototype today actually. As for the game itself, we're experimenting with enemy placements, graphics layers, balancing, and general design of the layouts so they fit with the puzzles. It's a lot harder than one might think. And when you're making games for 8+ year olds, it gets even more difficult to judge what would be too hard or not. I'm thinking of going to a nearby school and ask the teachers for guinea pigs
Maybe a bit overkill since the game isn't really intended for a release but still.If anyone have any kinds of questions about our daily routines, or anything, please ask. The whole point of this thread is to be more open
There are no NDA's here. Do you want more specific details?Oh, and if someone have any good ideas on where to upload audio and/or a prototype .exe, feel free to say something
In the coming weeks, we are supposed to make a trailer for the game as well, so look forward to that!
