Tiny Tim Games

Here’s a feature I’m pretty excited about: the mod system. Now, mod systems are nothing new. We tried to implement one for Ratchet: Deadlocked. In fact, my buddy Nathan Fouts over at Mommy’s Best Games is implementing somewhat of a mod system for Serious Sam: Double D. They come in all sorts of varieties, but I wanted to boil the idea of a mod system down to its purest form.

As it is currently prototyped, the mod system for (still tentatively titled) Sol Defender works like this: The player’s ship has a singular source of energy that powers all of its critical systems. This includes weapons, propulsion, shields, and even the item pick-up radius around the ship. As the player “levels up” his ship over the course of the game, more of this energy will be unlocked. The player can then equip mods to funnel this energy into any of the aforementioned systems in any manner he desires.

That’s the gist of the mod system, but to put it into more practical and tangible terms, I’ll go into a few examples.

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First of all, I’ve settled on a name for the game that has so far been called “Sol Defender”. You’ll hear more about that later for the official unveiling.

Since my last post, a lot of work has been done in a variety of areas, but I’m only going to focus on one for this post: the Shockbomber! If you’ve played Geometry Wars, then you know that sometimes you can just get overwhelmed by the massive amounts of enemies on screen, and sometimes you just need some help. The Shockbomber essentially fills that “screen killing” role, with a bit of a spherical world twist.

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It’s taken a bit longer to write this post than I initially anticipated, but I have a pretty good excuse: My wife and I welcomed our daughter Guinevere Katherine into the world on March 22nd. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind around here ever since!

As I mentioned last time, enemies are next on the agenda. While writing enemy AI on a spherical world is mostly the same as it would be on a flat plane, the biggest difference is determining where the player is and then finding the shortest path to him. Since the planets in our game aren’t going to have any obstacles (at least, not yet), all enemies simply need a direct path to the player. But how can you get a straight path on a sphere?

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Now that we’ve split the News and Blog sections of the site, I feel more at ease talking about more of the stuff we’re working on without feeling like everything is some big official announcement. Just warning you up front, the games/projects displayed on this blog may or may not ever be finished or released. Think of it as a development diary, where you’ll see the creative process in action.

As promised, here is the first in a series of posts talking about another of our games that we currently have in development. This one doesn’t have an official name yet. We’ve been calling it “Sol Defender” for the time being, though it may not ship with that name. Here’s a very early screen with some temp art to show you what we’re shooting for:

Click to enlarge

As you can probably tell, it’s a dual-stick space shooter (stay with me) set on spherical worlds (like Super Stardust HD, Super Mario Galaxy, or Ratchet & Clank). We’ve got an interesting gameplay twist that we’re working on that uses the spherical worlds in a neat way, but I’ll save that for another post. For now, I want to give a little background on the project itself, along with some code that shows how we’re pulling off the spherical world effect.

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Today, we’re pleased to show off a brand new look to our site. The new design keeps our games front and center, while also separating the News and Blog posts into their own sections. This means that more “announcement-y” type posts will be featured in the News section, while my crazed and incessant ramblings can be found in the Blog section.

We’re also debuting our new logo! Have a look:

We felt it was time for a change, and while simple I think this new logo is quite a bit more distinct than our last one. It also looks nicer on a variety of backgrounds. The new logo will be finding its way into our games shortly.

Lots of exciting things are happening here at Tiny Tim Games! Be sure to check our Blog regularly to find out all about the new games we’re working on.