CodePink
patreon
Making the scan minigame
🕑 Added 2022-04-27 07:24:20 +0000 UTCHey everyone!
A few days ago, I added another minigame to the game. And this minigame will be part of the Doctors story.
The game itself can be found at Captains Room. Remember that green screen there? Well, now you can click on it and see what's it all about!
And this is what I made!
Now the green screen shows a 'scanner', which the Captain uses to scan the space-enviorments before starting a recue operation. And of course, at some point in the story Keen will have reasons to do the same.
Coding the gameplay
Now, in terms of gameplay I thought it would be fun to let you really scan the screen in order to find things (much like the classic 'Battleship'-boardgame). So that's what you will have to do.
Now it so happened that Rob (who coded the previous 2 minigames) wasn't available this time. So I took on the challenge to code this game myself :) Of course there is no way I can do any advanced coding yet. But The logic of this game is actually no different then that of any other game-screen in game. Because this minigame is really all about 'pointing & clicking'!
So here you see a bit of my creative coding for this minigame...
I'm not sure if it's readable for you like this, but what you might notice here is that I added a sound effect when you hover your mouse over a trigger area. I never did this before, but this will effectively help you to find things on the screen. Because the sound acts as a hint.
Now I'd love to show you more about the actual gameplay... but that will also show the solution to this 'scan-puzzle'. So I can't really do that :)
Making the art
But what I can do, is show you how I made the art for this minigame.
My starting point was of course, the green screen in the Captains Room. This was helpful to determine how the game should look, but at the same time the green screen also looked very flat and boring in close up.
So to make it all a bit more interesting, I added the joysticks at the bottom and I placed Keen in the screen as well. Later on I also decided to make a seperate, more detailed 'start screen', to avoid showing an 'empty grid' all the time (which is needed for the gameplay).
Next!
Well, I hope to release another game-update in the next few days; so then you can play the minigame yourself.
And of course, then I'd love to hear what you think of it! :)
All the best!
-Robin
Comments
Robin
Hey Dacer! I have no code-experience with anything except Ren'py, but it's indeed easy to use, and previously Rob (the programmer helping me) did make the step back to python to make the more advanced mini-games. It's a nice engine & I hope I can keep using it for many more years :)
Robin
Hey CyanCapsule! Thanks for the kind compliment, you saying that means a lot to me! For I totally love your artstyle :D
Dacer
I suspected you were using a modified version of the Ren'Py game engine for SpaceRescue, Robin, and that screenshot of your code appears to confirm this! :-D Ren'Py seems like it would be a good fit for what you're doing here. Less complex to use than its "father", the Python coding language, but it lets you use Python code when needed, if you want to do something complicated, or something Ren'Py cant do gracefully. Thanks again for another peek at your creative process. Looking forward to more fun! Be well!
CyanCapsule
Looking forward to it a ton! Character poses and background art is incredible and your minigames are some of the best I've seen in a Ren'Py project so far!
