Supporting Material
The original concept was created after a brain storming session. It was when the question was posed by the author and answered by the author ‘What is missing in the gaming world?’.
The concept of this project is to create a game that appeals too both retro and modern video gamers at the same time. The initial process in the research stage consisted of analysing Flash versions of retro games on websites such as:
http://www.froggyville.com/frogger.htmhttp://www.neave.com/games/frogger/
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pacman.html
http://www.fetchfido.co.uk/games/donkey_kong/donkey_kong.htm
After looking at the retro games time was spent looking at the more popular modern game titles in order to figure out what makes them so popular. It was at this point research was conducted to determine whether it is necessary to have a narrative within the game.
Grand Theft Auto (GTA): Vice City was highly analysed because it is one of the few modern games to get a five star rating from Matt Fox the author of “The Video Games Guide”.
At present game developers harness the capability of powerful computers by making
mind blowing graphics, which are of a much higher standard when compared to the retro
games but they lack playability.
It was at this stage that the proposed project changed course slightly, in the original
specification there was functionality that would allow a user to switch from a modern to
a classic look and feel at the end of each level.
After consultation with the project supervisor it was decided the game would be more interesting if the users could change the look and feel at any stage through the game play.
From personal experience from using computer games, it is known that a human game
player represents more of a challenge than an artificial intelligent computer game player
because people can be less rigid.
The document specification was changed to allow the game to
have a maximum of two players at a time over a network connection.
In order to use a network connect numerous websites where consulted for multi-player tutorials. The vast majority of the sites didn’t have tutorials that encouraged Flash multi-player games, the one site which really stood out for there advice on multi-player network games was http://www.gotoandplay.it.
On the website there are several examples of how Flash can be used in conjunction with Server Side
technology such as Java. For this relationship to work between a Flash client and a Java server a
neutral language must be used to transfer data.
In this instance the neutral language was XML which stands for Extendable Mark-up Language.
In a sense XML is similar to HTML but where HTML describes a layout on a webpage, XML describes
the structure of a data object.
To get a better understanding of XML the following websites were consulted:
http://www.huikuri.com/flash/xml and http://www.w3shcools.com/xml.
On the http://www.gotoandplay.it website there was a tutorial which showed how to connect a Flash client to a Java server, this involved running and binding the Java server to an empty port on one machine. On the other machine the Flash client was used for connecting and sending messages via the server port and the XML Socket on a remote machine.
The first stage in the character creation involved a lot of drawing and research into how certain characteristics can give a game character a persona. For example, big eyes facing upwards may give the impression that a character is very innocent looking.
During the character creation stage it was decided that the characters in the game would all
have a cartoon like appearance. So several cartoon websites where viewed, such as:
http://www.southparkstudios.com
http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/
http://www.strawberrydragon.com/tutorial/inking/cartorial.htm
After using the game design tutorials on the http://www.kirupa.com and the http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu websites.
Research was conducted into the different types of environments that a hedgehog would be in as the main character is a hedgehog and using these environments brings a feeling of realism to the game. This research also helped with the selection of other game characters. It therefore makes sense to use hedgehogs enemy in real life as Spikey’s enemy in the game, this theme was continued thought out the other types of characters as well.