Last Week’s Game: Eruption
Posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 11:18 am under: Flash, Game-A-WeekError Resizing Image: error_loading_image
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Last week was somewhat busier than usual in regards to the game-a-week project: I wound up with four separate ideas on the table before I was through, and at the last minute made something of a reversal to my plans.
The short version of this story is that, yes, there was a finished game for last week, but, no, you can’t play it just yet. In fact, the release schedule for these games will probably be lagging behind the actual development schedule for a while now (though updates to existing games will probably be an exception), though I do expect it to eventually “catch up”.
If you’d like to know more (and to see some screenshots of the most recent game), here’s the long version of the story:
I’ve been keen to do another project with flixel, particularly since seeing Adam Atomic’s flixel workshop (part 1 and part 2), so at the beginning of the week I started working on a single-screen, side-view shooter. I had some interesting ideas I wanted to try out in regards to surprising the player with sudden changes to the scenery and environment of the game, and replacing a normal side-scrolling or level-based progression with these dynamic changes to the environment. After working for a couple of days, it became pretty clear that there wasn’t enough time to get this idea ready for a release by the end of the week, so I decided to set it aside for the time being and look for another project that would come together more quickly.
In spite of having released a bunch of small games now, I still haven’t done any sort of shoot ‘em up, and it seemed like I could make some good use of flixel there, so I moved on to a vertical shmup project… and soon realized it also needed more time than I had left in the week. Beyond that, I also thought there was potential to build a game that was robust enough, with a progression of hand-designed levels and perhaps some upgrade process for the player, that it might be a good first experiment with pursuing a sponsorship. So, on Thursday this idea got set aside as well.
The third idea was a very simple prototype thrown together in an hour or so, and there really isn’t much to say about it, except to mention that it evolved, rather indirectly, into the idea that finally took hold for the end of the week: Eruption.
Eruption is essentially a mouse avoider game — set in an erupting volcano. The whole idea with Eruption was to create a game that would come together quickly (which it did), and then could be released hastily to fulfill the weekly game requirement so I could get back to either the shmup or the single-screen shooter. At the last moment, though, I realized I could use Eruption as my sponsorship experiment and it might provide a useful gauge for how to proceed with the other projects (both of which are considerably more involved). Deciding to pursue a sponsorship for Eruption also made it much easier to justify a bit of up-front investment for some snappy background music, too, which I think helps the game quite a bit.
So, at the moment, I’m holding Eruption back from any kind of widespread release to keep it fresh and new for any potential sponsors. Whether or not it will actually garner a sponsorship is very much up in the air, but I think this will be a worthwhile experiment in any case, and it does expand the scope of the game-a-week project in an interesting new direction.
You can has screenshots, tho:
Hey, I love this game. What’s the source on the music?