Tuesday 6 November 2007

my anti shoot em up game

I already have an anti shoot em up prototype working.. I decided to make a simple flash shooting game, except the aim is to avoid the targets. I'm basing it on Johnny Cash's 'I hung my head' lyrics directly, with the idea of him shooting his brother; only doing it in a somewhat comical way. Your rifle is damaged and out of control, constantly firing, and your job is to avoid shooting your brother and your father. The aim is to score a perfect 0 points; if you hit your father you lose points, leaning towards one set of bad rankings, while if you hit your brother your score rises, leading to another set of bad rankings. The higher the score whether it be + or -, the worse Johnny Cash yells at you at the end. While this scoring potentially means you could even out your score by hitting a different target, that would be far too tricky to balance to actually be done to any degree of efficiency, expelling risks of cheating for that perfect 0. Hitting Johnny cash's CD cover also raises your score by a significant amount.
At the moment you can cheat by simply aiming the mouse offscreen, and I don't know if there's a way to fix this. At the moment targets appear very fast and hectically, making them tricky to avoid, but there are still safe spots on screen to point the gun; something I must fix. I also should find the Johnny Cash 'I hung my head' song to add to it, at the moment I have Tom Green's 'I'm gonna throw the piggy off the hill' playing in the background. I'm certainly keeping the constant 'don't shoot Jebb!' and 'gosh you can't shoot poppa!' warnings I recorded, however.
As it is, I'm using poorly done images of actual people as the targets, although I may trace over them with vector graphics eventually to try and reduce lag; however, I like the cheap look fo it as it stands, its more humourous this way. I'm also fond of having Benny Hill music play at the end along with an angry image of johnny cash; although I need to find out how to edit the code to get a different ending to play when you succeed at the game.
The way I see it there are only really three ways to make an anti shoot-em-up. The first is: any genre that isn't a shoot-em-up, which doesn't rly count. Second, make a shoot-em-up where you fire non-violent ammunition. And third, make a shoot-em-up where avoiding the targets is necessary; I thought the third was the best course of action. I aim to finish the game using just flash and sound recorder, although if another program turns out to be more useful, I'll switch to it.

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