Arc Brigade
Hey! It’s the weekend! Which means I get to sit back and not code anything at all (complete lies). Anyways, the point of this post is to tell you guys I’m working on a second game for an arcade box me and some friends of mine made.
Here’s some back story: Last year (well, really the year before that, but it didn’t catch) me and several other Andrews started a game development club at Carleton University. Over the year we did a bunch of cool things, like LAN parties and various competitions (writing AI for a top down shooter and “Scenes from a hat” style board game making) but I’d have to say the best thing we did was make an arcade box… well, we started making an arcade box.
Over reading week we were able to make the frame and paint it, and although I don’t have a picture of it painted (it has guys from sherman’s lagoon [because it looks like big kahuna] and space invaders, done by one of the Andrew’s awesome artist girlfriends) I do have a picture of us putting it together:
It’s made from 3/4 inch plywood, and may or may not be 30% iron. We could throw this thing off from the top of herzberg and it would probably bounce. It’s a beast, and weighs a ton.
Anyways, I finally got around to cutting the acrylic sheets for the screen and control panel, which should be finished by the time school rolls around. we already have a laptop and power supply figured out, so we just need to find a monitor that fits inside this beast. Well, that’s not all we need, we also need games, which is where I come in.
[A]rc [B]rigade ([A]rcade [B]ox, get it?? I am horrible with names) is going to be one of those oldschool airplane bullet-hell style of games. This game shouldn’t detract from my Red Metropolis project, as I’m limiting this to weekends and weekdays if I have already worked a full 8 hours on Red Metropolis. The development of this is going great now that I know what to watch out for. I’ve only spent a few hours on this and I’ve already have skeleton classes for just about everything I need. I’ll post some screenshots once my screen stops being the default cornflower blue, but here are some things I’m hoping to accomplish with this game:
- Parallax Backgrounds (those backgrounds that are made of 3-5 images scrolling at different speeds)
- Various weapons and power-ups
- Two player coop
- a non-arcade mode (like “rising mode” from Hard Corps) for people who download it online
- Metrics tracking system for the arcade version (not really game related but I think it would be cool to see a bunch of stats like: how many plays a day it gets, what do people prefer to play as, how long do they play for, etc)
For those of you who go to Carleton, the arcade box will hopefully be up and running around campus sometime in September/October, probably in Ollie’s or Res Commons. For everyone else it’ll probably be up after a Red Metropolis demo is released.
Oh, and one last thing, the Arcade Box will be free to play (with a coin slot if you want to donate to the club), mainly because Coin-Ops are really confusing and way too much work.
