In the foundation of the project I'm currently working on lies an arcade game called Tainted Woods I developed to refresh my knowledge and some skills. Thanks to my work on it, I managed to get back into game development after a long break. I took on game design, UI, programming and graphics and asked my friend Andrii Kapustenko to help with the sound. Andrii is a DJ from Kiev, Ukraine, who makes dance music and who agreed to try himself as a sound designer for the videogame. Which is, by the way, written on agonizing Flash (AS3) – simply because that was the way I used to make games back when this technology was relevant.
I failed to unfold the idea of Tainted Woods in full due to lack of skill, time and Flash’s constraints. Nevertheless, it’s core mechanic stayed intact. It’s concept lies in frequent unavailability of necessary weapons to the player, which forces him to make good use of those he currently has access to. He also has to make decisions quickly, as the enemies continually advance towards him, while looking aside for other gameplay features like bats that sometimes fly across the screen that grant bonuses when hit. To make it short, the game was projected as a somewhat fast-paced puzzle. This idea made it to the mobile version, but to suit the local audience had to move to make space for a simplified mode where the victory is possible without careful selection of projectiles.
As a conclusion and my personal advice to beginning game developers, I’ll say that prototyping a game is ESSENTIAL. Development of Flash version, aside from proving the core mechanic applicable, helped generating many ideas, which take place in the mobile game. Nevertheless, using ActionScript 3 for game development today proves to be quite a time-consuming task, so I recommend resorting to game constructing software, which lets you build a proper prototype literally in minutes, but I’ll get back to those in my following posts.
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