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My partners and I sat back and thought about what we would like to do next. Being a tiny-indie-hobby-company, we decided we didn't want to bite off more than we could chew. Technology is advancing, while retro-gaming and arcade style games are becoming more and more popular via mobile devices and even desktops computers once again.

The question we posed next was, "Well, now what?"

We decided we wanted to make a selection of smaller games. While sure, we'd love to make a major blockbuster hit. We realize we have not the time nor assets to do so. Thinking realistically, we decided to look around for the best bang for our buck. Enter, the App Game Kit.

It didn't take me long to grasp the full potential of the AppGameKit, and within hours was working with a playable 'demo'. (Albeit, none of us have any artistic ability. Thus; excuse my poor MS paint skills and obvious rip-off soccer player sprite by TGC - We'll change it later, I promise. Seriously.)

Our goal for our first game, is a 'top-down' holy-poop-this-game-will-make-you-jump-off-of-your-seat-"horror" style game for all platforms.

The premise is quite simple. Survive.

Players are thrust into a randomly generated world to survive the longest and compete for Top-Scores or through campaign mode (1-20 levels), surrounded by pitch black, entrusted with nothing but a flash light. Eerie music, sound effects, flickering lights, lightning, all haunt the players senses. With the flash-light only allowing you to see a spectrum infront of the player (again, top-down), the player may suddenly face the opposite direction and be eaten alive by horrible monsters (think of the game 'Slender' - but a little more whimsicle). Interactable objects in the world will increase player scores. Becareful not to step on any traps that would kill you in horribly gruesome (but also hillarious for 2d-top-down) methods! (You'd hate to be impaled, wouldn't you?)

I've whipped up a quick map editor, (Thanks VB2010)



And you can see how the map can then be loaded into our AppGameKit game.



I've tackled some of the bigger features, like movement, collision, lighting, score, timers, load map files etc. This is going exceedingly well! I love AppGameKit!

So far, so good!

I will continue to post updates as I develop the game!


Cheers

Rob Janes
Lead Developer
Samu Games LLC

Hi Rob,
just curious, how you did the torch/light effect? I'm looking for something like this and It looks great!

Thanks!
Regards.

The flash light is a simple large PNG file that overlaps everything else and rotates on the same angle as the player.

I thought this method would be slow, but I see no... Hmmm...
Thanks for the info and good luck with the game!

SamuGames, you mention this is for all platforms, presumably this includes Android? Have you prototyped this on an Android Device yet? I fear your lighting approach may have significant performance issues on many devices. Most (some??) devices can only support a fill rate of up to about 1.5x the screen size before you experience drops in framerate. As you are using a large sprite on top of an already filled screen, your fill rate will be 2x the screen size and you may already experience issues...

I just wanted to make you aware of this sooner rather than later

Actually haven't tested that yet Funnel, thanks for the heads up.

I'm curious as to how it'll perform now.

At the moment, my rendering method works like this, (bare in mind this is all done using T1 and basic sprites)

1. The 'map' itself is one large sprite.
2. Any map objects are additional sprites
3. If any object is outside of the 'Viewer' / Camera it sets their visibility to false. Basically, when a player moves, it updates the viewer X/Y to be the players position on the map minus half the width/height of the screen.
4. The player essentially never moves out of the middle of the screen, thus, the flashlight overlay PNG that sits ontop is just slightly larger than the screen-size itself (to support rotating around by the center axis)

I will try out some mobile devices and get back to you!

Just a thought but perhaps setSpriteScissor might help with that? I haven't tried it but it might...