The guy who came up with the title is simply genius (and no, it’s not me)
Hello again with me in another progress log for my OneGameAMonth entry. In case you don’t know, OneGameAMonth is a community that encourages people to create one game every month. This series of progress log will detail my OneGameAMonth entry for the month of June, and if you’re interested in my past endeavour, feel free to check out the previous logs here.
Some of you may wonder, what happened to my May entry? After all, on the last log I said that I’m gonna work on it some more. Well, there isn’t any need to worry, that is still the plan. However, the end of June is getting closer, so I decided to postpone the May entry for a bit and start working on my June one.
Fortunately, like last month, I’m not doing this entry by myself. A friend of mine has just finished a rather large game and is now hoping to increase his mastery of Unity3D. Well, OneGameAMonth seems like a perfect fit for it, so he decided to help me with my entry. At the moment he has some other project to work on though, so who knows how much he’ll be able to help.
Wait, did I just mention Unity3D? Yep, this month my tool of choice will once again be Unity3D. Unlike my February entry though (which also uses Unity3D), my entry this time will be a simple 2D game. So, to ease the development process, we decided to use a third-party 2D framework for Unity3D.
To my surprises, almost all of the available 2D frameworks for Unity3D are paid ones. Geez, I’m not planning to go commercial with these games, there’s no way I’m gonna pay. Fortunately, one of them, Futile, is not just free but also open source, so that’s what we decided to go with.
And besides, my Twitter timeline has been full of praises (mainly from the NimbleBit guys) for Futile, so I’m also kinda curious about it. Well, how is Futile, then?
I’ve created a really simple prototype using Futile, and so far I found myself really liking the framework. Mind you, Futile is very code-centric and doesn’t use a lot of Unity3D editor integration, but that’s kinda the point. With the inflexible Unity3D I feel like I’m the one being controlled, whereas with Futile I feel like I’m the one actually in control.
Hell, Futile is so flexible that right now the way I’m using it is really similar with the way I’m using my own game framework. Even now I’m kinda tempted to port my framework to Unity3D using Futile =/
Anyway, enough talk about Futile (for now), what about the game itself?
Pictured above is the basic concept of the game. And as you may have guessed, it’s a game about water skiing, hence the title “2 Wet 2 Furious” =D
The game is simple, the player has to go through a water ski course while dodging various obstacles. Every few meters or so the player will encounter a ramp which will let the player enter the trick mode and increase his score by doing tricks. Also, the score he gets will be multiplied by how much speed he has accumulated during his run in the course. Well, that’s the game in a nutshell, and it will end if the player hits too many obstacle.
To be honest, originally the game is about skiing instead of water skiing. But then I realized that winter isn’t going to come any time soon and the control scheme I thought of actually makes sense for water ski, so I modified the theme a bit. Not to mention that a game about water skiing is much more rarer than a game about skiing.
I actually came up with the original idea several months ago. At that time though, I was in the middle of working on my April entry and something else also came up in the next month, so I only got to work on this idea now. Fortunately I have recorded a detailed note about the game idea on Evernote, so now I don’t need to worry about forgetting some crucial gameplay element.
Anyway, it’s the last week of June, how far has the development progressed?
Well, not far. We have just started working on it pretty recently after all.
I managed to work my way through Futile pretty quickly and came up with a really simple prototype, which can be seen above. It’s pretty basic at this point, just a couple of scrolling sprites (no collision detection yet) with a character that you can control. Not much, but enough to imagine how the game would feel.
The most surprising part is probably how much I dig the control scheme. Basically, you don’t control the character directly but instead you control the boat that’s pulling the character by dragging your finger around. If you thought about it, that kind of control scheme isn’t very precise, but that’s exactly why it provides a much more hectic and intense game experience.
The control scheme is so fun that I’m contemplating to remove the trick part and just focus on the obstacle-dodging part. To be honest, the original idea hangs on the concept of rewarding player with the trick stuff, so I’m not so sure about eliminating it yet. However, the end of June is approaching fast, so simplifying the game is probably a good idea.
Well, there’s definitely still a lot of things to work on, wish us luck!
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