Game Art

As it is Chinese New Year right now, I decide to develop this game with new year festive theme, and using Mahjong as the puzzle tiles. If you are not familiar with Mahjong, you can use to the image below as a quick reference.

The Mahjong tile pattern was originally draw by Jerry Crimson Mann. But I need a 3D rotating Mahjong tile for my game, so I quickly model a low poly Mahjong in Blender and render the rotation sequence. Then, some final touch up was done in Photoshop to give it a pixel art feel.

Play The Game

A sequence of numbers will be shown for a brief seconds. Remember it and click them in ascending order. You can play “Mahjong Memory Game” in my labs page.

The idea of loading data dynamically is not new in game development. Peoples had been doing it since long time ago with a more sophisticated approach. They develop in-house tool where the user just draw some flow charts, or even implement a scripting interface for the designers to code the quest logic. The Flash I did here is still in early stage and basic.

View the Flash

Click on the image to view this basic XML RPG dialogue system. Instructions are found on the page. You can view the XML file here.

The Tower of Hanoi or Towers of Hanoi is a mathematical game or puzzle. It consists of three rods, and a number of disks of different sizes which can slide onto any rod. The puzzle starts with the disks in a neat stack in ascending order of size on one rod, the smallest at the top, thus making a conical shape. The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod.

Game rules

The description from wiki might sound confusing, but the game is actually quite simple. Let’s look at the pictures that I quickly draw. The game start with 3 rods, A,B and C. Initially, all disks are stack on rod A, and you have to move all the disk in ascending order on rod C to win.

Of course, there are few criteria or rules when moving the disk around. First, only 1 disk can be move at a time. Second, only the top most disk can be move. Third, disk can only be placed on top of a larger disk.

Gameplay Programming

After looking at the game rules, you will find out that how easy the game logic can be script. Use 3 arrays to represent the 3 rods, which contain list of values that represent all the disks. The bigger the disk, the larger the number (or the other way round, depend on how you do the condition statement later). Then, use array/stack PUSH and POP function to “move the disk around”. In this case, the PUSH and POP function work exactly like what we want, removing and adding items from the top of the array/stack. Last, just do a condition check to see if a disk can be move on to another rod base on target rod top most disk size. To check the top most disk size, just POP it.

Recursive Solution

The puzzle can be solve by using a recursive function using the following algorithm. Assume N equals to total number of disks.
STEP 1) move DISKS N−1 from A to B.
STEP 2) move DISK N from A to C.
STEP 3) move DISKS N−1 from B to C.

Play The Game

You can play “Tower of Hanoi” in my labs page. I have include the recursive puzzle solving function as well.

Download

If anyone is interested, here is the Flash CS4 source files. Code might not be most optimized and tidy, but can be a good starting point for your project. This source is without graphics and music.
Tower of Hanoi FLA Source – 20KB

Reference

Tower of Hanoi Wikipedia Entry
Recursion: Towers of Hanoi

Early screenshots

Before starting a project blindly, I need to refresh my memory on Source mapping. When I was using Hammer ages ago, it is known as Worldcraft. So, I decide to develop a short campaign for L4D2 as my exercise. Below are some early WIP screenshots. Click to them to enlarge images.

Currently, I had done a bit on the starting area. I know I should have plan out the whole map before putting details in it, but I just like detailing and can’t resist. Maybe the flow and game play of this map will end up like crap because of that.

Commands to hide HUD and Viewmodel

Anyway, to take screenshots without HUD and viewmodel for Source game. Type the following command in the console. (This is just a reminder for myself)

sv_cheats 1
cl_drawhud 0
r_drawviewmodel 0
r_drawvgui 0

Ben, a game designer asked me about the progress on my game. I told him my situation and we decide to join forces for this project. We also manage to grab another friend, Adrian (game designer) to the team.

Everything seems to be good after the team is build but there is only one minor problem. We start late and just have like two weeks to work on the game before deadline. So, we meet up on one Sunday afternoon to brainstorm about game design, art styles and lock down all major decisions. After that, all communications were done online via messenger, and emails.

Game Introduction

Our game is known as “Life’s a Game: Live Borderless”, which is designed based on LG’s “Life’s Good” tagline. It is a mash-up of quick & whimsical mini-games depicting everyday life. On a side note, we only have this game title on the last day before submission.

Pixel Art

One of the issues while developing this game is deciding the art direction . Three of us in the team have different art style. If I forced both of my friends to follow my art style, I think the final work would not look good, as different people have different drawing stroke. So, we decide to go for pixel art since it is easier to imitate each other work in pixel art. More over, pixel art give a nostalgia feel of old console games.

Game Play

When I first read about this competition, the first idea that came into my mind is to develop a game base on LG’s “Life’s Good” tagline. And the most obvious way is to develop a game base on everyday life. Ideally, we want to have lots of mini games base on daily life activities. But due to time constraint, we lock the number down to 17 mini games/levels in this Flash game. Most of level is quite straight forward and simple in game play. For example, you need to shave your facial hair by clicking left mouse button for the level show in the image below.

Popular References

We also include some popular references in certain levels such as Revoltech, Danboard, classic batman & robin. For the level show in the image below, there are Mario and Luigi poster at the wall.

Easter Eggs

During final hour of development, we decide to include “easter egg” in some of the levels. In our game, “easter egg” are just hidden easter eggs. You can collect these eggs by clicking on them and it would trigger a slightly different ending if certain amount of eggs is collected.

A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page or video game. – wiki

Wisdom Quotes

Another thing we decide to put into game during the last minute is the wisdom quotes scene. When the game ends, a wise old owl will tell the player some wisdom quotes from famous people base on their grades. Initially, we were only using quotes from famous real life peoples such as world leaders and politicians. But we found out certain quotes from cartoon characters is quite good as well, so we decide included them too.

Awards and Recognition

This game had won the following award
2nd Place for LG Casual Game Competition
Finalist for Mdec 2010 Kreatif Award.

Play The Game

You can play the game by visiting the link below. If you love the game, please vote for us. Click on “Launch Game” button on that site will open a pop up containing the game. If you didn’t see anything after clicking the button. It is most likely the browser is blocking the pop up.

Play this game at LG site – 612KB
Play this game here