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Team: Squirrel Pancake Studios
Duration: 2.5 months
Engine: Scrolling Game Development Kit
Team: 1 level designer, 1 artist
My Responsibilities: Game Co-Designer, Level Designer, Scripter, Sound Designer
TAC-B was my first project at the Guildhall. The idea was to create a two-dimensional shooter using a 2D program called the Scrolling Game Development Kit (SGDK). This was more difficult than expected, since the SGDK only provided a simple set of tools to import and place sprites and tiles into a game engine, then add specific rules to govern the interactions of the sprites and tiles. Essentially, the following list of features had to be added through a Visual Basic script:
- Vertical scrolling of game field so the player wouldn't have to continually move upward to play the game. Not only was this necessary to create the "shooter" environment, but it also made the game playable, since the plane would have to move close to the top of the screen to advance, thus making it nearly impossible to react to whatever lay ahead.
- The plane had to tilt and stay tilted when a player moved the plane left or right, then reposition to the center when the control was released.
- The plane had to fire bullets that traveled in a straight line.
- The enemies had to fire bullets with various conical spreads, from planes that fired in a straight line to halftracks that fired two machine guns in a wide arc.
- Enemies had to have varying numbers of hit points; for example, infantry would take one hit each, while the end boss would take hundreds.
- There had to be three difficulty levels, regulated by what level the player selected.
- Statistics at the end of the game would provide a nice hook for the player, to get them to try to get the highest score possible and thus improve replay value.
In the end, I was successful in making the game do all of the above (and more), and the sprites (created by artist Billy Thornton) looked wonderful in the game, so I considered the project a success.
Feel free to download this game from my Downloads page and try it out. Any feedback would be appreciated!
Here is a sample of the sound effects I created for the game:
For more information on the Scrolling Game Development Kit, visit gamedev.sourceforge.net.
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