Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Zi

So it's been what, a month since my last entry? Close enough. Anyways. What have I been up to?

I've created a nearly complete game.

It's quite a shock, thinking about it... this is the most complete game I've made since I started this blog. Man, I've been in a RUT. I promise, however, that I'll be cracking down over the summer.
But I digress. Let us get to the MEAT of today's entry.

Zi v0.82b

I mentioned this briefly in my last entry, back when it didn't even have a finalized name. Now it's nearly a finalized game.
Zi is, like many of the great games of my generation, about colored blocks. You move the blocks around, then you click on them to make magical things happen. Let the screen fill up and you die. I'm being vague, but It really shouldn't take much more than a few seconds of experimentation to figure out the basics of how the game works. Play Classic before Trendy.

Zi is very much a game about getting points. Since the game never ends, it more or less has to be, unless I go into the Pretentious Artsy Games field. Or the Sims. The scoring system is described in some detail in the readme, but the general core of it is destroying lots of small groups of blocks in rapid succession, then destroying one big group for massive score. It's not the only way to play, but it works well for me.

Next week I'll post again after I finish my next class assignment (Zi was for my Game Programming class, it's due friday). It'll be a text adventure!

I'm not going to talk too much this time. Play the damn game!

3 comments:

Luthien said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Mollusk said...

Hi,

I'm Mollusk, an amateur DS programmer. A friend of mine made me discover your game a few weeks ago, and I found the concept quite unique.

I did a quick port of it on DS. I hope you don't mind, I didn't get the time to do some other graphics and all, just used the ones you had, resized for the little DS's screen...

Sorry for not asking you before, for no obvious reason I thought Zi was an old abandonned game ^^

Didn't find a mail to send you, either, that's why I posted here...

The DS port is over here : http://palib.info/blog/?p=9

Thanks, and keep up the great work !
Mollusk

Mollusk said...

Hi

Thanks for the quick answer !

For Zi, I actually coded it in 4 hours, so didn't get much time and feedback to tweak stuff that much ^^ I went to the fastest solutions, that's why I didn't include block acceleration (really important though) and why some speeds might be a bit off (I think the DS version makes you die much much quicker ^^). As for the multiplier, I had done a few tests and just couldn't seem to find a good value. With this one, it can be hard to have it go up really high, but if you organize your blocks it can work. When I tried a slower version, it was just too easy to have it climb to unreal values ^^

Thanks again, I'll work on it a bit more, adding the missing stuff and all :p

Mollusk