WEEK5: CRABZ

Game Panoramica & History

I wanted to make a Worms style game where players controlled little symbiotic creatures and had to take over NPC humans. Once they had taken over a human they would be able to fire organic weapons a bit like the Goo Gun in Unreal Tournament.

Getting the arcing shot and turn based stuff working took up a lot of my time, so what I have now is a turn based game where two players can float about and try and take each other out with bouncing shots.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Turns out there is a lot of maths involved in getting arcing shots and bouncing working well. This week I learned a couple of things.

1) You need a certain quality level to really test if mechanics work. I had a super hacky implementation of bouncing but if 50% of the time it clips through the wall it’s hard to tell if it works or not. A large part of this is just my skill with Game Maker but I definitely feel like it’s taking me less time to implement the features I want.

Release & Industry Impact

2) NEW RULE: If I have it in and working to a decent standard I can’t touch it. I had two individual player objects and a working turn system. I wanted to set up a player parent object and ended up breaking everything. I wasted a day just getting back to where I was previously.

Overall i’m quite happy with this one. I actually did a bit of two player play testing and it’s the first game-a-week prototype where I thought “yeah, there could be something fun here”.