Saturday 23 February 2013

John Die Hard: Police Cop - Starring John Die Hard

Following the fun of the Montreal Game Jam and the creation of our little game, Hjarta, I decided I’d try my hand at making something else. Pushing myself to learn as much as I can – a solo effort of sorts. Construct 2After seeing the quick iteration time in a friend’s project, I decided to use Construct 2, an HTML5 game engine.
Working in Construct 2 is pretty smooth, you have a number of pages within a project that either contain a layout or an event sheet. The layout contains what the player will see on screen (a level editor of sorts), and the event sheet contains the script that will power the game and layout. Each layout can reference multiple event sheets and I’ve yet to hit a limit on how much I can place in one layout (not that I’ve tested it’s capacity or maximum size). The engine is quite well documented and the community around it keen and friendly. There are some great tutorials to get through and after a few hours you’ll have something playable, though nothing innovative or likely to blow the world away.
John Die HardAnyway, for my first effort in this engine, I’ve decided to try my hand at an old idea. For a while I’ve wanted to do a tribute to action movies and video games of the 1980’s and early 90’s. Die Hard in particular lends itself well to video games of that era – a lone hero, an iconic location, high action, a voice in the ear (Alan) and set at Christmas. Scrub the last point, but it’s something I’m rather fond of. I was actually pushing to have Streets of Rage 4 set at Christmas but that’s another story…
Mission: Impossible NESThere were a bunch of awesome top down games back then, in particular I’m talking True Lies on the Game Boy and Mission: Impossible on the NES. Two random licensed titles that I ploughed hours into. So I’m going to try and build a game a bit like those.
I’ll be leaving any updates to the game using the following tag; One Day From Retirement, the working title for the game.
Here’s what it looked like after a day. Day one.
Here’s what it looked like a few days later. Day three.
And just over a week later, the latest version, here.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Construct best supports Chrome. Internet Explorer is flakey at best and Safari struggles with some features (such as audio). I’ve no idea how Firefox performs (let me know?). I’m going to keep working on this daily, something I’ve managed to stick to so far… but I’ve been a little slower since having my wisdom teeth wrenched out.

Thursday 21 February 2013

Watch Dogs shown at PS4 reveal

We finally got to show some open world content for Watch Dogs at the PS4 reveal.

So now there’s more footage out there for people to piece together what kinda game Watch Dogs will be when it releases later this year.Aiden Pearce

There’s also another video featuring commentary by our Creative Director, Jonathan Morin available here.

Can’t say much more that that. I’m honoured to be a part of something so anticipated, and can’t wait for people to see more.

You can keep up to date on Watch Dogs news at it’s Twitter and Facebook pages.

I’ve been working on something of my own in my spare time (not Hjarta), but I will show that when it’s a little more ready for public consumption. Now back to the sofa to watch Breaking Bad and nurse my jaw, post wisdom teeth removal