Trident

Trident is a 2D beat-em-up fighting game made with Adobe Flash using ActionScript 3.0.
The story revolves around the titular Trident of Rudra which has been stolen from its keeper Aloka by a mystic known as Aaghori Tantrik. Aaghori wishes to use the Trident to summon his master Satan, while there are others too who wish to use the Trident each for their own purposes. The game features five playable characters with multiplayer gameplay on a single system using keyboard and mouse. The mouse input system consists of a dial on screen which has various actions preset like move left, move right, run left, run right, etc. The player performs the action indicated by the icon by hovering over the button. For attacks, a single click performs a light/medium attack while a double click performs a heavy attack. Having a completely separate input device for the second player, ensures that during multiplayer, both players have an equal opportunity and do not miss out on inputs not being registered in the case when both players use a single keyboard.

Title Screen

Mode Select

Character Select

Jungle Level

Game Over

To know more about the game head over to the project blog at http://aaghorigame.blogspot.com

Gameplay and Control Systems in Arcade Fighting Games

I am currently writing a research paper on the topic which is basically a comparative study of arcade fighting games in terms of how their gameplay systems work and how their control systems are implemented in relation to those rules. I will also be making a Flash prototype that would determine whether it would be feasible to have more than one type of control system for the same gameplay system. Sure there would be certain compromises involved in terms of gameplay but this is to check if those compromises are worth it or not. Do these changes still keep the fun element of the game or does it make players lose interest just because things might seem to easy now that anyone can play it?

I would be very grateful if you guys could fill up a small survey for me (<10 questions) which can be found at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2WBDRCD .

Any suggestions or additions to the survey would be very appreciated.

UPDATE: Survey is now closed. Thanks for all the feedback.

Direct X - 3D Game

Things on Wheels is a car racing game that combines the classic Bump and Jump concept with the new-age  powered-up racing game Blur. This was a group project that involved three persons. My role in this project was to provide the underlying framework on which the game was to be made. Due to my prior experience on the 2D game, I had a good idea of what would be the systems required to make the game. The framework contains a lot of generic classes for making any type of game and then there are those classes which inherit from the generic ones which are suited for the racing game genre. I felt that I did a good job of creating a user friendly and functional framework somewhat similar to the GameCanvas related classes present in J2ME.

While this game features some of my best game engine programming, I still have a long way to go to catch up with the studios that have been making AAA polished games for the past eight years using the very same DirectX 9.0c API.

Title Screen

Note: Will post a game screen later.

J2ME - 2D Mobile Game

While the concept is the from the desktop version of Go!O>, I am proud to say that this game is the one of my projects closest to 100% completion. The game has everything from AI, to ramp jumps, and collision. The reason for reaching such a level is due to the fact that I was able to spend more time programming the actual gameplay systems rather than doing low-level programming for a sprites,etc. This was my first run with Java and J2ME since I previously only had a background in C++. Working on this game allowed me to understand better what was lacking in Direct X in terms of a framework.
 

Menu Screen

Game Screen

Direct X - 2D Game

Go!O> is a Excitebike clone that I wanted to make because I felt that it was one of those racing games that people of any age can enjoy. This project helped me realize that even that 8-bit game released so many years ago had so many things going on at the same time. This game was built using very wrong techniques and so I was not able to finish it on many accounts but it was mainly due to the bad references given to us that employed those wrong techniques. The output is basically a bike that accelerates, has inertia and can change lanes. The bike does not jump but collision is detected. Overall it was more of a learning experience on how the Direct X APIs interact with each other. That and how to make a bad game.

Main Menu

Game Screen

Flash Physics - Airplane Demo

The aim of the demo is to show how physics affects the way in which the plane falls after being shot down and the velocity of the missile shot through the cannon with angle set using the mouse. The missile only travels to the mouse pointer's position when the left click was pressed. On reaching that position it will begin descent and will re-orient itself to the ground. Depending on the where the plane was hit, it rotates in either clockwise or anti-clockwise direction based on weight distribution.

Flash Game - Ultrabot

Ultrabot is 2D fighting game in which robots from across the cartoon and anime universe have been summoned to battle for the title of Ultrabot. This project was my first experiment with Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2.0. Ultrabot was designed for the Nintendo Wii platform as a prototype flash game.  Since the game does not feature any blood or detachment of body parts I feel that it would be suitable for those who just wanted to see their favorite robot characters duke it out one-on-one.

The game does not feature gesture support but the button control scheme is setup so that even a five year old could play the game. The white pillars in the screen shot are actually the collision boxes so that the player does not go outside. the screen. Even though the code for making the characters move, jump, etc. is essentially the same, the character on the right stretches automatically. The game also has another bug that I have been unable to fix. After the match when the player hits RETRY, the countdown timer goes faster each time by a factor of 2x. The code for this works fine in other projects but has been seen to perform the same in some of my friends' projects as well. I was very lucky to have actually got a working prototype since Flash made a lot of the animation work easy. I realized this because I know for a fact that in Direct X, I am going to have to code my own animation system from scratch.

Note: Will post screenshots later.