Tiny Tim Games

I essentially grew up listening to video game music. From the 3-second stingers in Pitfall, to the iconic Super Mario Bros. theme, to anything and everything by Nobuo Uematsu, to say that game music is my primary “genre” of choice would not be inaccurate. Oh sure, I learned to play the drums by watching Bon Jovi videos, and there were those odd high school years where I listened to whatever the kids were into those days, but game music is what I love.

I’m sad to say that in all my years, I’ve never tried to sit down and learn to play or write music. I knew I wanted to make my own games, but I just assumed someone else would write the music. After all, they have the talent… whoever “they” are. But I’ve been studying music for a long time. I enjoy the music I listen to, but oftentimes I’ll just sit, listen, and study the reason why a particular piece of music makes me feel the way I’m feeling.

Cut to January 2010. Shannon and I are working feverishly on Word Monkey, trying to tie up all the loose ends before sending it to the gatekeepers at Apple. One of the last things on the list is to find some music. I had assumed we would just license some music online, but after many days of searching, I just hadn’t found what I was looking for.

Then Shannon, wonderful wife that she is, decided she’d take a stab at making something in GarageBand.

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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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