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Running Free again
Feb. 11th, 2012 10:58 pmIn August last year, I posted a Flash prototype called Running Free. Some experimentation with Clickteam's iOS exporter led to it being adapted into an iPhone game, and then like most everything I create these days it got left on a shelf after that. But now I've picked it up again and it's looking like it'll be the next game I release - the first on iOS. Then I can adapt it into a Flash demo.
I've been making a serious attempt to do what I utterly failed to with Crystal Towers 2, to get the game into an actual finished state before spooning in the content - in this way, it can be released in the event that I get sick of it. The game's main problem before was that I really didn't like what I'd done with its interface, but after passing my phone around to a few groups of people and seeing how fascinated they all were with the way you could manipulate the gravity, I knew I had to finish it - and after spending some time this week trying to understand the utter tangled mess of events I'd left myself, I've wrestled it into something much more pleasant to use.
In the last post about it, I had a list of possibilities for what the objective of the game would be, and in the end I sort of went for all of them. The idea of collecting stars stayed - in each level, you have to collect three red stars and get to the exit by changing the gravity to guide your blindly running man to where he needs to go. Turning the phone when on the ground changes the direction of gravity in 90 degree increments - to change 180 degrees at once without it interpreting it as a 90 degree turn halfway through, you can either tilt the phone backwards, or pause the game first.
Each screen also has a yellow star, which is usually trickier to get to - and you can earn a blue or a green one for completing a level quickly or within a par number of flips. Collecting stars advances you through the levels - just getting the three standard red stars will open up the next level, but you can skip ahead if you've collected some of the special stars as well.
Other game elements you encounter on the graph papery levels are curves, which force you into changing the gravity and prevent you turning around - and red Xs which I tend to refer to as 'spikes' but my mum called 'barbed wire'. There will possibly be some sort of moving enemy as well, but I'm trying to keep the scope of it down now - every time I try to make a simple game it becomes complicated very quickly.
I've been making a serious attempt to do what I utterly failed to with Crystal Towers 2, to get the game into an actual finished state before spooning in the content - in this way, it can be released in the event that I get sick of it. The game's main problem before was that I really didn't like what I'd done with its interface, but after passing my phone around to a few groups of people and seeing how fascinated they all were with the way you could manipulate the gravity, I knew I had to finish it - and after spending some time this week trying to understand the utter tangled mess of events I'd left myself, I've wrestled it into something much more pleasant to use.
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In the last post about it, I had a list of possibilities for what the objective of the game would be, and in the end I sort of went for all of them. The idea of collecting stars stayed - in each level, you have to collect three red stars and get to the exit by changing the gravity to guide your blindly running man to where he needs to go. Turning the phone when on the ground changes the direction of gravity in 90 degree increments - to change 180 degrees at once without it interpreting it as a 90 degree turn halfway through, you can either tilt the phone backwards, or pause the game first.
Each screen also has a yellow star, which is usually trickier to get to - and you can earn a blue or a green one for completing a level quickly or within a par number of flips. Collecting stars advances you through the levels - just getting the three standard red stars will open up the next level, but you can skip ahead if you've collected some of the special stars as well.
Other game elements you encounter on the graph papery levels are curves, which force you into changing the gravity and prevent you turning around - and red Xs which I tend to refer to as 'spikes' but my mum called 'barbed wire'. There will possibly be some sort of moving enemy as well, but I'm trying to keep the scope of it down now - every time I try to make a simple game it becomes complicated very quickly.
