In RAD you control the Efusjonaut, and must absorb eFusjon to neutralize free radicals while avoiding toxins. The Efusjonaut is controlled with the mouse, and can switch between an offensive toxin-eliminating mode and a passive free radical-neutralizing mode.

I came up with the gameplay concept and led the project. A graphic designer came up with the look and feel for the menus and an animator/artist created the main game art and sprites. I incorporated everything into Flash, set up the overarching code structure, and programmed the gameplay and scoring. Other developers worked on the leaderboard score submission, some of the menus, and the instructions. After some testing showed that people were confused about how to play, I came up with and implemented the idea of adding pop-up tutorial messages in-game explaining things.

Links:

• eFusjon Gaming is the official game website, including details about the promotion
• eFusjon RAD is the page where you can play the game. Registration is required because the game is part of a contest.

Let’s Shooting Love is a Geometry-Wars-style arena shooter about a lonely robot looking for a girlfriend. It was created in Multimedia Fusion, which we decided to use since one of the team members (Sebastian Jansiz) was an expert in it and promised even faster prototyping than Flash.

I was responsible for designing and implementing the enemy behaviors. I brainstormed a lot of potentially interesting behaviors and played other arena shooters for inspiration. Then I had to figure out how to implement them in Multimedia Fusion, which I had never used before the Game Jam.

I created both enemies and enemy generators, setting them up so that Sebastian could easily adjust parameters such as speed, hit points, and generation frequency. I made a wide variety of enemies, including ones that travel in V formation, ones that circle-strafe the player while firing shotgun bursts, and ones that break apart into smaller enemies when defeated.

Links:

• Gameplay Video
• Official Website
• Download

I functioned mainly as a programmer, implementing most of the user interface. I also composed music for the game and created and placed the sound effects.

Links:

• Project website
• Game download (58 MB ZIP) – requires a graphics card with a 3D accelerator. To play, unzip contents to a folder, and run Endo Patrol\game\runWorld.bat

Music:

These are the files used in the game, so they’re set up to loop.

• Chemical Gradient
• Hydrology
• Inflammation

The goal was to make an online version of the game show with new songs available every week. In addition, the game would allow players to upload videos of themselves performing the songs featured for that week. The video upload functionality was provided by Brightcove.

I was responsible for the overall structure of the code, as well as implementing the initial framework and several of the sections. This included the main game interaction of listening to the song and inputting the answer.

Play the game

Play The Admirer’s Secret (Be patient–the SWF file is 7.5 MB, and there’s no pre-loader since it was meant to be played locally)

The structure of the piece is basically a choose-your-own-adventure. Players choose which of the five suspects to visit, and after visiting them all, the culprit is revealed. There are five endings.

Implementation Notes

Streaming

This was my first experience with streaming media in Flash. There’s a lot of audio and video in the project, and I didn’t want to have to wait to load all of it at the start, so streaming was the obvious solution. It does make it a little more difficult to move the files to different directories, since the directory the SWF file is called from has to be the same as the one all of the media files are in.

Templates

Since the structure for each of the suspect visits is the same, I decided to create a single template with slots for suspect portrait, description, audio, and transcript. I used a naming convention and the eval() function to pull the correct files and movie clips in when requested.

Ending Mechanic

The ending a player receives is determined by which suspect the player visits first. Since the ending is revealed only after all suspects have been visited (with one exception), most people have forgotten who they visited first and the identity of the culprit comes as a surprise. On the other hand, it means that anyone trying to systematically get different endings by varying the order of visits will take a long time to see them all.

I had two main goals when adjusting the game difficulty:

1. The two modes must have similar difficulty levels
2. Both modes must be winnable by people who don’t play games that often

I adjusted difficulty by changing the spawn rates of enemies, asteroids, and ore/hulls, and by changing the number of starting shields.

While I managed to strike a fairly good balance for the project deadline, I feel that it could still use some work. However, there are some more fundamental design issues that need to be addressed first:

It’s possible to get stuck in the game

The way the game works, level advancement is based on how many ship upgrades you have. When you run out of shields, you restart the level with the same number of shields and the same upgrades. This means that it is possible to get to a level that is too hard for your skill with few lives. Unless you can collect enough ore or hulls to return to base, you cannot gain enough lives to clear the level.

One possibility is to always grant a minimum number of shields to the player on starting a new level. e.g., if we have determined that the third level should be beatable with 6 shields, then the level-change code will also set the player’s shields to 6 if the player has fewer than 6 shields. Any other fixes to this problem will probably require a change to the current level mechanic.

Level advancement uses an unusual mechanic

I got comments from several people that the level mechanic “seems a bit weird.” It has the bonus that at a given level, you always know the ship has a minimum number of upgrades and should therefore be able to handle things. It’s just not what most people expect.

The “boss” for the ambassador mode doesn’t fit in

The “boss asteroid” requires a method to defeat it that never shows up elsewhere in the game. I’d like to change that, although it might “spoil the surprise”. On the other hand, there’s no such surprise for the Exterminator mode.

I want a scoring mode but don’t know how to do it

Scoring for the Exterminator mode is pretty straightforward. Just count shots fired, enemies extinguished, that kind of thing. But what’s the equivalent for the Ambassador mode?

There are some statistics I could keep score on: number of times levels are played, total time spent on a level, amount of ore picked up. For all of these, lower numbers suggest more player skill, which can result in slightly weird scores.

Unfortunately, the game was never finished as the term of the project ended.

Links:

• Official project page
• Announcement thread on the AGS forums