a videogame project

What is it?

Carapace will be a simple 2D platformer, developed in actionscript3 with the flixel framework, and will be distributed freely via web once completed.

The gameplay

Carapace will be a small but polished interactive experience to be played in one brief session (about 15-30 min. of gameplay). It will play like a little marathon: no savegame, big health bar and no health pickups.

Actually, no pickups at all; instead, the core mechanic of Carapace will be inverse character progression. Dropdowns. I have yet to nail all the details and the background story, but basically it will play something like this:

you start the game as a pretty big and clunky knight, in what appears to be a traditional fantasy setting (on a traditional fantasy quest). After a few easy fights (you’re almost invincible in your heavy armor), you encounter some little physical obstacles in your path; to go on, you must leave some pieces of your armor on the ground (small pieces at first, like the helm or the shoulder pads) to gain a little bit of agility. As you go on, you encounter stronger enemies and bigger obstacles, so you keep getting weaker, but also faster and more agile; you acquire a little different moveset every time you drop something (example: no jump –> little jump –> normal jump –> running/long jump –> ability to climb over ledges –> wall jump etc.). In the end, what remains is only a man and his suit.

The (only) level, will spawn vertically, with numerous floors, and slowly becomes a strange mix of classic fantasy and ’80s corporate office hell (it’s tied in some ways to the story, but more on that later)

Development

First of all, I’m doing this to learn; I would like to make games for a living, I already know the basics of programming, but I’m a total rookie regarding game mechanics and programming (on the other hand, I’m kinda experienced in doing graphics). For this reason I’m starting this devlog, which will be published here and in some other places; I will need help! :)

Of course I will be doing this on my spare time, so no daily updates, hopefully once a week, I already expect a long long development time.

First Milestone

Get the hang of flixel and platform physics/control and implement the first character, the guy in a suit with sword and shield.

Soon (hopefully)

First animations for the main character (which you can already see somewhere around here), and maybe some moveset scheme.