What I did on my holidays
As a child at school I don’t ever remember writing the notorious “What I did on my holidays†essay (applicable to any primary school grade) but I would like to tell you now because, of course, it involves game development!
I’ve mentioned before that I was working on an entry Comp 12 by the Game.Dev community and this time I’ll happily share it with you (AdventureQuest2.zip). It’s mutated considerably from my initial idea and this was with the help of Geoff Burrows, an accomplished (in our hobbyist game development circles) artist, familiar with and proficient at a myriad of artwork tools and techniques.
The furthest I got with my original idea was with Epic Fantasy Adventure Beta 2 (EpicFantasyAdventure.zip) and on reflection we were much better off sticking to this game.
Our main reason for changing the game was because we needed original artwork for the characters. Geoff and I realized it would take him WEEKS to complete all the animations needed for the game and there just wasn’t time. Thankfully, Geoff knew of a vast set of free animations we could use (courtesy of Reiner “Tiles” Prokein) and we started using them only to find the camera perspective of the characters wasn’t working for us.
So we looked at Reiner’s tiles and saw we had an artbox of animations, backgrounds and scenery. All we needed to do was build the framework, most of which could be commandeered from what I’d already written. After a couple of drinks and smoke breaks throwing around ideas we decided to do it!
Let this be a lesson to you young Padawan “Don’t change your game because of your art assetsâ€. While you have cool ideas, rather just make the artwork work for your game instead of changing your game to match the artwork.
Geoff and I have done an amazing job though I say it myself. We’re both really passionate about Adventure Quest (behind which is an actual, serious, story) and we want to finish the game. We’ve taken a break for the rest of January and we both want to see what we can do if we start properly with the next competition starting February. But we’ll eventually get back to Adventure Quest.
I hope you enjoy the game, I haven’t put in a readme for Adventure Quest 2 (naughty me) but Player 1 uses the numeric keypad and enter and Player 2 uses Q,W,E,A,D,Z,X,C and spacebar.
