Bionic Commando and Main Menus

Hello everyone,
Hello again, it’s time for another update.
The day job has been really rough this week, but that’s okay because I have next week! I’ve been busy with Shuffle blocks when ever I could find a spare moment and I’ve jumped around a bit doing different things on that.
I’ve also been playing the new Bionic Command remake on XBOX Live. I’m really in two minds over this game. It one of those games where it really frustrates you to the point of wanting to throw the joypad through the telly (the down side to wireless joypads) and really liking it.
There’s lots of little things that annoy me about the game, such as not knowing if there’s a platform below you when you drop off, the control system can be really fiddly sometimes, the icon locations on the map menu could have been better so you could tell what each location was straight away and the graphical style is nowhere near as nice as the original arcade game (I know it’s an update to the NES version, but I liked the style of the original arcade version with the big chunky characters), but they are some nice little graphical touches in the game. I know I’ve just moaned about the game, but it is still a really nice game to play and I’m almost at the end of the main game now (there’s still loads of stuff to still find in the game (hidden sections and LOTS of time trial levels). It seems to step a really fine line between frustrating and making you want to continue in the game. I think it’s the buzz of been able to swing around the level, once you get use to the arm mechanic that makes the game. I also liked the music in the game as it has a retro 8 bit feel to the game and I don’t normally pay much attention to the in game music.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been doing project wise this past week.

Weekending 15/08/08
GoGo Digger:
I’ve spent a couple of nights trawling the web to find casual / freeware sites that review games and I’ve been told that www.casualgamerchick.com will review the game soon. If you have a website that review casual games and would like to review the game, please feel free =)

Lucky 7:
Isaac is busy with Lucky 7 and has got the profile system up and running and the start of the Arcade mode. If fact he has just send me an update of the game that I will try as soon as I’ve finished typing this.

Shuffle Blocks:
This week I have mainly been working on the Main Menu screen for the game. I’ve attached an early mock up of the screen, it’s using real in game assets, but it’s not actually taken straight from the game and there’s also a few effects that are not been shown from this. It’s been good, because it’s given me a chance to play with my Wacom tablet again, drawing clouds (which is really relaxing).

The plan is to have several layers of clouds scrolling by (the screen shot only has two layers at the moment (background and one semi transparent layer), with shilloetts of distant planes and air ships flying by in the distance. I’ve also animated the buttons which still need to be tested to see how well it works in game, but it will look nice I think and set the tone for the rest of the game. The way you select the game modes and options will also be a bit different I think and follow the style of the actual game which will be a nice touch. Not totally sure about the font for the letters, but I want something nice and colourful.

Dave has been busy trying different style of effects for the bombs in the game. I’m trying to follow the same object logic through out the games, so when you see a bomb, you already have a good idea how it’s going to react in the game from playing over BadBumble games and you know that a Star Ball is a good thing. It seems to make sense to do things this way and it’s the same kind of logic that worked for all the Mario games and if it’s good enough for Nintendo, it’s good enough for me =)

Right I need to get back to finishing off the other cloud layers for the menu and then I can have an early night (well get to bed before midnight).

Have a great week and I’ll see you need week I hope.

All the best,

Mike Moore
www.BadBumble.com

This entry was posted on 15/08/2008 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Shuffle Blocks, GoGo Digger, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.