It's getting to be time for a new game (well past time, you might even say!), and in the interest of doing a game that can reuse our existing technology (and therefore is more likely to get done in short order), I've been using on how we might do a prequel to LRS.

Given that LRS was successful as an "open" development process, I'll lay out some initial thoughts right from the beginning, and am interested in any comments you may have.

Last Robot Factory is inspired by RoboRally, created by the guy who did a little game called Magic: The Gathering. I'm thinking of it as a merger of LRS and RoboRally.

It is another turn-based board game. The board is a factory floor where the robots of LRS were originally created. Factory floors are dangerous places...there are conveyer belts, machines that flatten anything that passes through them, laser beams, etc. The goal is to be the first robot out of the factory, so you can go on to be the Last Robot Standing.

Robots can shoot at other robots in line of sight (it may even happen automatically), and there would be little portals or "modification rooms" of some sort that would give your robot special bonuses, which could be a movement bonus or a new power. Probably only the first robot to reach a portal would be able to get the bonus.

My main question at the outset is whether to use the movement concept from RoboRally. In that game you get cards that have "Move 1" or "Move 2" or "Turn Left" and the like, and you put down a set of cards to "program" your movement for the next turn. Part of the fun is finding out that you screwed up your program and seeing your robot go awry...

Or perhaps for a video game it's better just to have you do the movement as the turns occur, as a more direct action thing. If so, it does remove the "programming" aspect of the game...

Any comments welcome. Does it sound like a game you'd play? What would make it interesting for you?

While we were developing LRS, I did a goodly number of in-depth posts on the process and reports of the very first games played, over on my blog, before there was a DDT blog (and before there were guilds or blog contributors).

It's always annoyed me that people who might be interested wouldn't find those posts on the DDT blog, and there was no good way to get to them on my blog other than to dig through dozens of old unrelated posts or try through searching.

Now, thanks to Mike's wonderful addition of keywords to blogs, there is a super-simple way to do it: I've keyworded all the posts, and here is a link to them:

Deadron's LRS posts

Man, the game started out ugly! (Thanks to the patented Deadron Graphic Development process...)

While doing some updates between the Arcade guild sessions today, I noticed from the code comments that we originally did DragonSnot in 2000...seven years ago!

Yow!

And while playing, not having touched it in a long time, I was continually blown away by Guy's wonderful graphics and Gazoot's great music. They both did such a great job on this.

Here are a couple of screenshots from the evening session:





The BYOND Arcade guild events were lots of fun today. Check out their forums for schedule info and to suggest games to try out...

The new BYOND Arcade guild is playing DragonSnot as part of their first gaming event tomorrow.

This inspired me to finally update some ancient code:

- BYOND Members now have access to the full game (as well as people who subscribed through the previous method).

- Resources are now preloaded using the new-fangled (what, only five years old by now?) preload_rsc functionality in DM.

Otherwise, gameplay stays the same. And, ya know, it's a pretty fun little game!

Hope to see you at the event tomorrow.

What does a week get you in game development? Well look at the amazing progress since our last installment:



Those Gears of War guys got nothing on us!

The careful observer will notice our blue hero hiding behind a tree (not too successfully, given his blocky gray halo there...that'll be gone for release!)

This is proof of concept of two things:

1. Use of Shadowdarke's library to set the density and layer handling of both dynamic and map-placed multi-tile objects.

2. The core concept of the game, which is to give you fun ways to hide from each other. The original game did this by calculating whether you should be visible or not to other players, and sending your image() to them individually based on the calculation. The new version will attempt to handle this by actually letting you obscure yourself enough that people might miss you.

As in the original you'll be able to crouch or crawl...letting you hide in grass and such.

You can't stop progress!