Panic at the Zoo trailer!

Here it is, the Panic at the Zoo trailer!

Keep an eye out for the free Panic at the Zoo game, when it releases next week on all major portals worldwide!

-- Erik

Panic at the Zoo trailer and GDC 2011

This week I’m working on the trailer for our upcoming time-management game: Panic at the Zoo. I’ll make sure to do a dedicated post here once it’s actually finished, with a link to the youtube video on the Xform channel. The video is turning out very much like the game; hectic, but a lot of fun. As Xform is a company dominated by male employees, I’m very curious what the ladies think of this time management game (known as a genre dominated by female players) and the trailer I’ve made. Xforms’ strength lies predominantly in the production of arcade type genres, but definitely shouldn’t be limited to only these racing and shooting games. The true test will be when the game hits the portals next week and everyone will get a chance to play the game.

I’m also working on a Xform show reel for the upcoming Game Developer Conference 2011. This will highlight some of last year’s best Xform releases in a very short trailer. If you’re planning to attend the GDC, please visit the Holland Pavilion for a glimpse of Xforms’ latest work or if you have any business you would like to discuss, contact us at directly info@xform.nl

Stay tuned for the Panic at the Zoo trailer!

-- Erik

Stick to the path

Dear readers,

As I mentioned last week I'm continuing work on the boss level of our platform game. One particular problem I was facing is that the boss has to follow a certain path. This path is shown in the image below.

The purple line shows the path the boss should follow in this level

In physics straight paths are fairly easy to do, but paths like this are a lot harder (as far as I know). You might apply the correct forces at every point on the path so the boss exactly follows the path, but when the player character is blocking the path, the boss will slightly be pushed off the path. Then you'll have to compensate in order for the boss to continue to follow the path. I suppose it's not impossible, but I do foresee many fine-tuning problems. Therefore I chose to use a spring-like solution. But first we have to get the path into our program. For this I use a bezier curve. Unfortunately the program we program in does not support bezier curves. Instead I create the curve in a 3D editor (the same with which we design our levels) and at every X distance along the curve place a marker.

Markers placed at every 0.1 distance along the curve

 

Then in-game I read all markers and use these to attach a spring between this point and the boss each frame. As a result the boss will follow the path and even when it gets slightly off-path because the player is in the way, the springs will automatically pull it back to the path.

-- Stijn

Developing our business

At this point in time there’s a lot that might happen for Xform in the coming year. Two new games are coming up that don’t fit in the traditional Xform line-up, because they’re not racing/shooting or even post-apocalyptic jetski games (this genre composed at least 10% of last year’s lineup :). As has been mentioned on this blog a lot by the developers already; we’re working on a time management game: “Panic at the Zoo” and a traditional platform game in the style of Super Mario Bros 3.

To get these out there in the world of gameportals and all those crazy flash game sites can be a real challenge. For a start, most sites only deal with Flash-based games and Xform games are made for the Shockwave plugin. The difference between these two is mainly that shockwave handles 3D games a lot better, whereas it’s a lot faster to develop in Flash, the 2D games that you see for this plugin can be as basic as they come. With gameplay consisting of banging the space bar repeatedly.

The market for high quality 3D browser based games is confusing to say the least, but the market is definitely there. Our upcoming games have been met with a mixed reception online, but there are people interested. We hope the gamers will enjoy these so much when they come out and appreciate the difference in quality with other, crappier games that they’ll become avid Xform fans. As for what might be in store for the company this year, there’ll be more high quality games in different, but also the tried and trusted Xform genres. Games for new platforms and new ways to play our games are also coming up! A good way to see our latest games, wherever they might appear online is through our website or on our facebook page!

 
 -- Erik

Alas, no moving platforms

Dear readers,

In about 6 weeks from now the platform game should be finished and there is still much to do. Yesterday our interns Ruben and Remco started working on levels for the platform game. They will have to make levels with the current available functionality. We noticed however that some more functionality would make the game more fun. After having a meeting about this, one of the desired functionalities was moving platforms. I have experimented with moving platforms before and written a blog about it before. Of course back then the program was much simpler. The moving platforms work, but there are little things like animations going wrong when on a moving platform or being pushed off the platform when it starts moving the other way. All these things are fixable with some amount of work, but with the risk of messing up other things which previously worked fine. For this reason and with our deadline in mind we decided it's better to leave moving platforms out. If there is time left then I'd like to look at again because moving platforms definitely make the game more fun. But it's better to have a game with few features that works decently than a game with many features that works crappy. So I'll be working on other features instead and of course more boss levels.

Here is one of the levels Remco is working on:

-- Stijn

Panic!

Today we can finally reveal you guys the official title for the "Time Management Game" we've been working on the past few months. It's called......Panic at the Zoo! Right now it's seems the game is just about done, but as you might know it only seems that way. There are always loads of small things to adjust, fix or add and all those things can keep you quite busy. While Joep is perfecting his code I'm finalizing the textures, cutscene images and doing some miscellaneous adjustments. I also need to create and compile some assets which will be used for marketing the game (banners, posters, thumbnail images etc.). Luckily I can use a lot of the game's original artwork which have been made as high resolution images and are scaled down for the game. Scaling down artwork for the final game also has another advantage, it will look much sharper then when it's created in the original size.

Finally I'll treat you with a screen of the Main Menu of Panic at the Zoo. Enjoy!

Matthew

Balancing the zoo

I made good progress with the so called 'Panic Mode' in the time management game. Currently it is fully playable from start to end. Also all of the trophy functionality in the panic mode is done.

From now on I'm going to work on the balance and tweaking of the panic mode. This is harder than it may look. There are a lot of variables to set to make everything work. Imagine all of the animal timelines and visitor timelines to be written down. We want full control of the game with a random feeling. Therefor we use pre defined 'demand' timelines for the animals. These timelines determine their demands during the game. For example; We want the monkey to ask for a banana after 10 seconds. The visitors are also semi random. The amount of visitors and visitor types are pre defined per game session. But the moment when the visitors need to be spawned, is influenced by the player's descisions and play style.

Working with partly fixed data gives me a lot of control over the different game situations while playing. It does make the game less random though.

-- Joep