El Presidente by AlexVsCoding
Name of Game: El Presidente
Link into theme: You only have one target to eliminate.
Objectives:
Player 1 - Assassin has to eliminate the president by navigating through the crowds using the arrow keys.
Player 2 - Sniper has to use the provided polaroid to locate and eliminate the assassin before he can reach the president using the mouse to aim and clicking to fire.
Inspiration for project:
Where's Wally - When searching through a crowd of people in where's wally, there are always the most fantastic set pieces with tremendous amount of scale and variety which visually overwhelms the viewer.
Guess Who - Having a preset selection of features to work from allows the sniper to whittle down their audience for who the assassin is. To add, the assassin himself doesn't know who he is so he too can use this information to identify himself in the crowd without having to walk into open areas.
Ninja Convention - A fantastic flash game where two ninjas have to maneuver through a sea of identical characters to find and eliminate their opponent. I really enjoyed playing this game, specifically for how carefully you have to control your movement through the crowds since what gives you away is inconsistent movement (None of the AI move diagonally, so doing so will show your opponent where you are). I wanted to see how an asymmetric playing field would compare.
Features:
Polaroid that develops over time, revealing the features of the assassin:
This was achieved by creating a variable that chooses an animation between 1 and 100 called assassin appearance. Not only was this used for the character's attire but also as a mugshot for the sniper to use to identify his target. A duplicate of the assassin character was scaled up 500% and ensured that the ability to move and collide was removed. This provided a blurry image used as a mugshot (actually a side effect but made it harder to identify using the image). To add to the difficulty, the mugshot on the polaroid takes time for the colours to appear (achieved by slowly increasing the saturation from 0% to 100%, along with a slow increase in opacity, revealing the mugshot.
Modular Character production for the crowds and assassin:
To keep it simple, a basic structure for the faces of the characters was built. Skin colour, clothes, hair colour, nose shape, eye colour, facial hair and facial hair colour were all considered. for different faces alone we had around 3500 different varieties of face. This was way too many for the project, so a selection of random samples were taken from the main sprite sheet and rows of characters were created by stacking the head, body and legs up into columns of 3s (how you would build a snowman). These were all given the instructions to start at a random animation point (e.g. start playing animation at head number 429) and a series of screen captures provided the 100 different individuals in the crowds. Funnily enough, many simple nude character bodies were designed, but the final sprite sheet for body parts featured around 6 to 8 times' worth of nude body duplicates, meaning a lot of the characters in the game appear to be naked or with bizarre tan lines. Regardless, the variation in the crowds was achieved. With more time, going back and adding more variety would allow characters to be less commonly selected, making the job of the assassin a lot more difficult.
Members and Roles:
Game was built at Manchester Mad Lab over the weekend with some great folks. Had such a good time!
Alex Johansson - Art and Programming in Stencylworks
Luigi Renna - Programmer who I formed the idea for the project with and have worked with at the game Jam. Unfortunately, technical restrictions on his laptop prevented him from being able to bring the game into fruition (along with the fact he was using flixel for the first time).
Technical Notes:
I would suggest to play the game in as wider screen as possible as it only works when using the full width of the screen, so make sure your browser is maximised when playing!
Have fun and if you have any questions, they'll be updates posted to Tigsource. Please let me know what feedback you have, I'd love to hear about your thoughts!
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37638.0
Link into theme: You only have one target to eliminate.
Objectives:
Player 1 - Assassin has to eliminate the president by navigating through the crowds using the arrow keys.
Player 2 - Sniper has to use the provided polaroid to locate and eliminate the assassin before he can reach the president using the mouse to aim and clicking to fire.
Inspiration for project:
Where's Wally - When searching through a crowd of people in where's wally, there are always the most fantastic set pieces with tremendous amount of scale and variety which visually overwhelms the viewer.
Guess Who - Having a preset selection of features to work from allows the sniper to whittle down their audience for who the assassin is. To add, the assassin himself doesn't know who he is so he too can use this information to identify himself in the crowd without having to walk into open areas.
Ninja Convention - A fantastic flash game where two ninjas have to maneuver through a sea of identical characters to find and eliminate their opponent. I really enjoyed playing this game, specifically for how carefully you have to control your movement through the crowds since what gives you away is inconsistent movement (None of the AI move diagonally, so doing so will show your opponent where you are). I wanted to see how an asymmetric playing field would compare.
Features:
Polaroid that develops over time, revealing the features of the assassin:
This was achieved by creating a variable that chooses an animation between 1 and 100 called assassin appearance. Not only was this used for the character's attire but also as a mugshot for the sniper to use to identify his target. A duplicate of the assassin character was scaled up 500% and ensured that the ability to move and collide was removed. This provided a blurry image used as a mugshot (actually a side effect but made it harder to identify using the image). To add to the difficulty, the mugshot on the polaroid takes time for the colours to appear (achieved by slowly increasing the saturation from 0% to 100%, along with a slow increase in opacity, revealing the mugshot.
Modular Character production for the crowds and assassin:
To keep it simple, a basic structure for the faces of the characters was built. Skin colour, clothes, hair colour, nose shape, eye colour, facial hair and facial hair colour were all considered. for different faces alone we had around 3500 different varieties of face. This was way too many for the project, so a selection of random samples were taken from the main sprite sheet and rows of characters were created by stacking the head, body and legs up into columns of 3s (how you would build a snowman). These were all given the instructions to start at a random animation point (e.g. start playing animation at head number 429) and a series of screen captures provided the 100 different individuals in the crowds. Funnily enough, many simple nude character bodies were designed, but the final sprite sheet for body parts featured around 6 to 8 times' worth of nude body duplicates, meaning a lot of the characters in the game appear to be naked or with bizarre tan lines. Regardless, the variation in the crowds was achieved. With more time, going back and adding more variety would allow characters to be less commonly selected, making the job of the assassin a lot more difficult.
Members and Roles:
Game was built at Manchester Mad Lab over the weekend with some great folks. Had such a good time!
Alex Johansson - Art and Programming in Stencylworks
Luigi Renna - Programmer who I formed the idea for the project with and have worked with at the game Jam. Unfortunately, technical restrictions on his laptop prevented him from being able to bring the game into fruition (along with the fact he was using flixel for the first time).
Technical Notes:
I would suggest to play the game in as wider screen as possible as it only works when using the full width of the screen, so make sure your browser is maximised when playing!
Have fun and if you have any questions, they'll be updates posted to Tigsource. Please let me know what feedback you have, I'd love to hear about your thoughts!
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37638.0
Ratings
| Coolness | 28% | 1479 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.28 | 177 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.17 | 159 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.22 | 266 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.61 | 49 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.00 | 220 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.06 | 187 |
I miss some music or sound effects. Also, you could add some score board, so the assassin or the sniper know how many times they have won.
Really thanks for the comments, you gave some good ideas, and the game will be developed further.
Too bad we had such few time and so many issues with svn.
Good luck :D
1. For people who missed it, the score is on opposite sides of the window frame from each other. If I keep development going I'll make a custom graphic with the writing scratched in with lines e.g. IIII kills
2. I was going to make a 1 player mode but I much prefer games which encourage social interaction in the same environment. Also, there's that little thing of programming an AI...
3. There wasn't a sound designer handy unfortunately, but getting audio for the game is an absolute priority since it adds so much to the game.
4. There was a plan to add a speech that the president reads out giving the assassin a limited time to eliminate him. This would be displayed as a graphic similar to a karaoke screen, slowly passing through the words.
5. One thing I noticed from testing with my brother was that he spammed the mouse to try and find me in the crowd. Though the technique of his failed miserably, I'll add making a mouse click fire your bullet regardless of if you're on target. The crowd would run off, leaving the assassin exposed but since sniper's bullet has been fired, nothing to stop the assassin from killing the president. This would give a certain gratification to the assassin, as they could run around all they liked and taunt the sniper before killing the president.
6. May add in blood but might just make body limbs pop apart similar to lego instead to keep the game out of the mature section.
He loved it. I agree.
Your game is good !