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Tech Mechs - Colorful Arty's Senior Project

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Colorful Arty:


Hello everyone. I've mentioned this in passing in IRC, and since the winter semester is starting soon, I figured it would be best to make a topic about this now.

I am making a Lemmings-like game for my final college project! :D

The name of the game is Tech Mechs! (tentatively) The game follows the adventures of the Tech Mechs: intergalactic explorers who need your help reaching the end of these planetary obstacles! It plays like Lemmings: the Tech Mechs come out of their base and need to reach their rocketship to blast to another planet. They wander around aimlessly, and you give them the tools they need to succeed.

How will this be different from Lemmings?

Although this game will draw many inspirations from Lemmings, there will be many differences.

First, I want it to be more contained than what we currently have. Ideally, I'd like this game to allow for playing packs/levels, creating levels/packs, creating/modifying graphics sets, and sharing your levels all in the same program. I feel like this will give users a much better, more intuitive, and simpler experience than what we have for NeoLemmix. (Lix does a pretty good job on doing this)

Not only that, but I'd also like to incorporate multiplayer into the game. Not competitive multiplayer like Lix, but cooperative multiplayer, allowing for highly complex puzzles requiring multiple people with different skills working together to solve. Each player would have their own Tech Mechs that only they can assign skills to, as well as a different skillset from the other player(s) and a different entrance. All players would share the same exit though. The idea of multiplayer is to encourage people to cooperate and solve puzzles together. :)

I also think having a level/graphic set database would be really cool, so people could design levels and new graphic sets, post them online, and have other people easily find them, similar to Super Mario Maker. This would negate the need to manually send packs online like we do on the forums, but would also be very complicated!

Finally, a lot of the skills will be different from the ones in Lemmings and Lix. A few skills I feel would have to be brought over from Lemmings, because they are so indispensable.

What will the final product be?

My final project for school will be a beta version of this game. Hopefully, most of the features will be completed in a rather crude manner, and I'd still need to polish it a lot and incorporate new features into it.

When the game is finished, I'd like to sell it on Steam, provided I think it is high-quality enough. The game would ideally attract both the people who grew up with and loved Lemmings, as well as introduce new players to the genre!

Will every level be outer space themed?

Absolutely not. Like Lemmings, this game will have graphic sets. I consider each graphic set to represent a different planet or celestial body. There might be a planet full of huge trees, a planet with red rocks everywhere, or even a planet with giant video game cartridges everywhere! The possibilities are endless, and are no different than Lemmings graphic sets; the ones I create initially may be more space-themed, but that's mostly just to give my game a "theme" for my project evaluators.

What tool/skills will be in the game to assign to Tech Mechs?

I don't have the list finalized by any means, but I'd personally like to incorporate the following skills:

Builder
Yeah, this is one of those skills that really cannot be missing from the game, due to its immense flexibility, power, and overall indispensability in solving puzzles. This will function more or less identically to its Lemmings counterpart.

Driller
Make no mistake, this skill is a basher, with its horizontal terrain destruction, but this one will quickly and smoothly carve its way through walls, more similar to the shoveler in Lix.

Jackhammer
It's the digger, digging straight down until there is no longer terrain under you.

Miner
You know what this does. I may rename it if I can think of a more futuristic thing to accomplish the same task.

Land mine
An interesting take on the bomber. Using this causes the Tech Mech to place a bomb on the ground and continue walking. The bomb blows up a few seconds later taking the nearby terrain with it. This way, it combines the best of both timed and instant bombers! ;)

Caution sign
An alternative to the blocker. This causes a Tech Mech to place a sign right in front of him. Any Tech Mech who reaches the sign will see it says Caution, and will turn around. If you destroy the Terrain under the sign, it will fall down, and Tech Mechs won't be affected by it.

Grappling hook
Like the roper from Lemmings 2, using this allows a Tech Mech to shoot a grappling hook in a direction of your choice, creating a straight line from where they are standing to the first terrain it touches. The game will pause until you select where you want to shoot it, and the range of the grappling hook should be marked by a circle. A much quicker and less tedious alternative to builders.

Laser blaster
Don't get nervous, this tool improves on the Lemmings 2 version by allowing you to shoot it straight up, left, or right. The laser blaster shoots through a single piece of terrain, ending if it breaks though, reaches the border of the level, or hits steel. Like the grappling hook, the game pauses until you choose a direction to shoot. This will allow you to destroy terrain at a distance, and quickly enough that Tech Mechs won't turn around in the tunnel while you're destroying it.

Hover boots
Functions like the floater, slowing a Tech Mech's descent twice as much saving them from fatal falls.

Energy jolt
Using this on a Tech Mech energizes them, making them move and perform skills twice as fast!

Anti-gravity boots
Something I've wanted in Lemmings for a long, long time. This reverses gravity for a Tech Mech, making them walk on the ceilings and perform tasks upside-down, allowing for tons of more puzzle potential! Using another pair of anti-gravity boots brings them back to regular gravity.

Timefreeze
Use this on a Tech Mech to freeze them in timespace. They stop WHATEVER they're doing until you click on them again.

Magnet boots
Lets Tech Mechs walk up walls, but not ceilings. (Anti-gravity boots are for putting Tech Mechs on the ceiling) Skills can be assigned to them while they are walking up walls.


Right now, I don't have all of the programming knowledge to implement all of this, specifically the wireless multiplayer and database for level/graphic set creation. My professor has suggested using a Restful API for making the server for multiplayer or even trying to make a serverless cloud for multiplayer, but I have no clue how to do either of those things. If anyone has worked with those or has alternative suggestions for how to send data across computers on different networks, than please let me know! Also, let me know what you think and if you have questions/suggestions! :D

Ryemanni:
Oh, I really love the concept, especially the skills! I wish you the best of luck and hope I can one day try this game out. :D

mobius:
My advice (without having gone to college myself, so maybe useless) is for; as of right now; make it as simple as you can. There will be plenty of time to continue this project after graduation and make it as big and complex as you want when your future no longer depends on it. :P Simon and namida/Nepster can take any risks they want because the only wrath they face is us :P  ( and won't lose funding).

Focus on making the game look really nice and run smoothly over puzzle design. While I don't think you should neglect puzzle design; I would bring with it at least a couple of nice puzzle levels (either new ones are maybe your best from Sublems or whatever) as demos; but You want to prove that you can make a working, efficiently running program over everything else (I'm guessing?)

Try to remove major game breaking glitches; but obscure glitches you might want to not bother caring about: I'm talking about things that might crop up like the old sliding glitch. This glitch was so obscure that many people (including myself) never discovered it on my own and even then; it was so difficult to pull off; I'm guessing that in the brief time your professor's or whoever test out this game aren't going to find these kind of things.

Now I know nothing about your class but even so; while this game sounds awesome; it sounds like quite a tall order for this project. I don't mean to discourage you but if you start struggling maybe cut some major things out to focus on the other major parts; like multi-player or the database. Don't get me wrong; those are excellent ideas that I support.

If your game goes to Steam I'll definitely support it! :thumbsup:  There's greenlight or kickstarter you could use.

The new take on the blocker and bomber sound nice. I'm totally ok with adding new stuff and making a new spin on the Lemmings Genre. For sale on Steam I'm guessing there's a host of things to consider; and things you ought to add or think about for the game to get more people interested in it. I would do plenty of research on that before attempting.

Simon:
Yes, this is very ambitious.

Definitely focus on the essentials. You have half a year and no typical problems of existing Lemmings software designs burned into your mind yet. D Lix with ~25,000 lines took 2-3 years to acquire 95 % of C++ Lix's features.

I've grown wary of pure movement skills for our existing engines: Skills that affect only the movement of the assignee. I encourage skills that alter the terrain, or that directly affect lemmings other than the assignee (blocker, batter). I'd love to see more creativity in these two categories.

But if you like pure movement skills, that's fine, it'll be a different flavor of skillset. I know mobius likes pure movement skills, too. Maybe pure movement becomes better design in cooperative networking even, you don't step on other people's toes so much.

There's always a side benefit behind larger projects. I've learned Lua in 2002 and wrote simple scripts that ran inside a host game. I began C++ Lix in 2006 to build a standalone program, and, as a side benefit, appreciated strict static typing and how that helps with refactoring. When I was forced to switch from Allegro 4 to 5, I ported to D to make Lix easier to maintain, and, as a side benefit, understood deeper ideas behind object-oriententation, functional programming, and the joys of automated testing. None of these side benefits were particular to C++ or D.

Watching software grow from scratch is exhilarating. Please keep us updated every couple weeks at least. I'll be happy to discuss technical ideas!

-- Simon

ccexplore:
With just half a year at least for the "school project" phase of things, I think it'd be good to aim first to get a demo consisting of just maybe 1-3 playable levels and a small set of skills and objects implemented (again maybe 1-3).  How long it takes to get to that point will help you determine your next steps afterwards.  It may be that things took longer than planned and the remaining time you had only allows you to add a few more levels or maybe 1-2 more skills.  Or you find yourself with still a few months left and can tackle larger features like the beginnings of a level editor.  Of course, you are free to continue to work on completing all the rest after the official school-project part is over.

Multiplayer is probably good extra credit for the technical challenges, but I suspect will be more challenging to both code and test than the level editor.

Simon will surely be invaluable in all manners of advice from design to programming.  Lix is very much made from scratch like your project would be, and he has put a great deal of thoughts into both game design as well as the design of the program itself.

Are you a good artist?  It may be worth considering trying to borrow as much pre-existing artwork as you can from any appropriately licensed sources to save time, at least for the school-project portion of it assuming the focus is more on quality of programming than quality of artwork.  Obviously for the eventual final product you will want to be less derivative and crude with the graphics, and its quality will certainly be very important, but for the beta and demos you can probably get away with things being a bit cruder.  Maybe the animation is more choppy with low framerate (by eg. repeating the same frame multiple times), but functional enough to allow the game to be played.  Maybe you start off with very basic shapes like squares and rectangles for terrain and only later expand the graphics to something richer, varied and more complete.

Anyhow, good luck and hope you have a lot of fun and learn a lot out of it! :thumbsup:

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