Wednesday, March 29, 2006
In the beginning..
Hi. welcome back to the pixeljam game blog. I'm your host Rich Grillotti. Today, I'm going to be giving you a tour of the original files that Miles began his game programming tests and experiments with. A little glimpse of how it all began.
But first, I've got to mention Gamma Bros progress briefly. to be honest it becomes more and more amazing to me every time Miles programs new stuff for it, and last night I came home to a Gamma Bros with SOUND FX!!! Oh my god. I can't even explain how incredible it is to play with the awesome sound fx Miles added to the game. They're amazing, and mostly based on sound fx and an 8-bit jam session (or two) by Mark DeNardo. Mark provided the raw material, Miles finessed them and added them to the game, attaching them the the most appropriate events and actions. The background space ambience is such a nice effect. He's made it through Level 1 with sound fx, and he added Mark's 8-bit instrumental song "Motherbox" (I'm pretty sure that's the name) to the first boss battle. It rocks!!!! I was pretty amped playing the game before, 'cause it's constant action, but the music and sound fx in that battle made it feel epic! I was really pumped up and blew them away with joy. ahh.. you'll see. It will be FREE and It will be ready for beta testing very soon. :)
So, now let's go back in time, maybe 2 years? or a year and a half? A while ago, when I first had this impulse to design an alternate version of the old Atari 2600 game Adventure for fun. I used to LOVE adventure. I still do. It's amazing, and maybe the first game ever with a secret and a hidden area. The first role playing video game too. It really stuck with me, and I wanted to expand the universe of Adventure, so I started to design some new areas for the game, and Miles was going to use it as an opportunity to try to program a simple game for the the first time, using Flash/actionscript. The following are the first few experiments of his, in order. You can move the little block/character around with the arrow keys, however once you click on a thumbnail below and a new window pops open, you've got to CLICK IN THE GAME AREA WITH YOUR MOUSE. Otherwise the arrow keys will not do anything. It has something to do with defining the "focus" to what's in the browser window.
 make the block go into the other room. don't forget to click in the game area first. |  pick up a key! move around with it. don't forget to click in the game area first! how annoying. |
 this one doesn't work so well.. |  pick up keys, watch one disappear. |
 similar to the last one. |  pick up a bunch opf keys. They don't disappear. |
 pick up keys, drop them with space bar. yellow key doesn't open door yet.. |  yes! Open the yellow door with the yellow key! drop keys with the space bar. |
 open the yellow door again.. |  attack of Miles' first enemy! |
well, that's all for now. I would love to share some of Gamma Bros with you, but maybe in a couple weeks, and you can see some screenshots in my previous blogs here. If you want to request to be a beta tester, you can email us at games@pixeljam.com. Maybe describe a little about why you think you'd make a good beta tester.
See ya!
-rich
