Don’t Look Back

Terry Mar 5, 2009 292 Comments

I’m proud to finally present Don’t Look Back, my very first game in flash! For the next week or so it’s available only on Kongregate, but after that I’ll provide a standalone version of the game here.

Being a flash game it doesn’t have a readme, so this seems like an appropriate place to say thanks to the people who helped me test it and gave me feedback during its development! I’d like to say a special thanks to Denis Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, Gregory Weir, Alex May, Josiah Tobin, disasterpiece, benzido, Tim W., zaphos, dock, Noyb, agj, Kian Bashiri, cactus, Annabelle Kennedy, Brandon McCartin, Ian Snyder, Porter, ozdy, lachhh, and finally, to Kongregate.

I hope you enjoy the game 🙂

[Edit 12th March] Don’t Look Back is now also available on this site!

[Edit 26th March] To those of you looking for the soundtrack; you can find it here.

Please don’t be away too long

Terry Feb 13, 2009 2 Comments

I’m itching to finally release Don’t Look Back after spending the last month working on it, but unfortunately I’m going to have to wait a while before I can – as an experiment, and since I’m, like, practically bankrupt, I’ve decided to try looking for a sponsorship. The game’s on Flash Game Licence, but it looks like the whole process is a lot slower than I thought it was. So I don’t quite know when I’ll be able to release it, unfortunately 🙁

In the meantime, I’ve decided to try and finish off one of the old projects I’ve got knocking around. I felt like working on Pathways, and something recently came up which gave me a good pretence to finally finish it off! I might have it out by the end of the week? Possibly? Who knows!

Currently, here’s where I am: the engine is finished, the dialogue is about 50% done, the music is finished, but I’m starting from scratch with the graphics to take a different approach with it, so all of that needs to be done. Here’s a preview of the new style I’m going for:

I’m still doing the mixed resolutions thing, but it’s a lot more subtle now, I think.

I should have a better idea by Saturday with regards to how long this one will take to finish… I’m thinking of making a short game tomorrow too though, if I do that’ll probably hold things up a bit.

Finally!

Terry Feb 8, 2009 1 Comments

Don’t look back is finished! I’m going to leave it in beta for a few days 🙂

If you’d like to help me test it before the final version, get in touch!

[edit] I think I’ve got enough testers for now. Thanks for the offers!

Shocking

Terry Feb 7, 2009 4 Comments

Literally the only thing left to do before Don’t Look Back is finished is to implement the music and sound effects into the game – I figured this wouldn’t be a big deal, but unfortunately I’ve run into problems 🙁

It turns out that because of the way MP3 files work, it’s almost impossible to make them loop cleanly – which destroys the ambient background effects… And Flash 9 supports only MP3s, so I can’t even use WAVs instead.

There are two things I’m going to try, probably: First I’m going to attempt to crossfade a repeating ambient background sound effect into itself as it finishes – I sorta have this working already, but it’s a bit messy and you can clearly hear the intersection at the end of the sample, so it’s not really much of an improvement… Maybe if I spend enough time tweaking it it’ll sound ok, though.

The other possibility is to take a different approach to the sound design – instead of a 10 second raining sample say, I could come up with a load of small rain samples that each play once randomly – this way I wouldn’t have the looping problem. But I’ve got no idea if that’ll actually work.

Even if this does fix the ambient sounds, a far more serious problem is that I can’t cleanly loop the music. I don’t really know how to fix this – I don’t know if I even can.

Nearly there

Terry Feb 5, 2009 13 Comments

I know I keep saying this, but Don’t look back should be out within a couple of days. Just for the sake of doing something different I put together a quick video of it (sorry about the messed up colours and low quality in general; video editing remains a mystery to me):

I’ll probably beta test it for a day or two before the actual release. Anyone interested in checking it out a little early? 🙂

I promise

Terry Jan 28, 2009 3 Comments

The other day I finally completed the last rooms for this little flash platformer! Although there are still little gameplay things to be done here and there, all the content is in place and you can now play it from start to finish. Still to do: the music and sound effects, some scripting, general polish and bug fixing. It is my sincere hope that it will be finished, as in done and dusted completely, before February…

(I’m toying around with calling it “Don’t Look Back”. What do you think?)

Seriously

Terry Jan 23, 2009 8 Comments

I think this is close to a record for me, in terms of projects that take longer than anticipated. It was supposed to be a half day thing…

I’ve been thinking that it just needs a big push to finish the content, so I’m going to “pretend” there’s a contest deadline tomorrow morning and work all night to finally get the content wrapped up. It worked for pretty much everything I released last year, after all 🙂 Though I expect it’ll still need a day or two to tweak and polish it before it’s done.

Here’s a few more screenshots of the more actiony parts of the game…

[edit] This isn’t working. Grr. I’m off to bed. 😥

Any day now

Terry Jan 21, 2009 4 Comments

I’ve been making some progress on this minimalist thing. I still have no idea what to call it.

It’s easy to get demotivated when things take much longer than you’d anticipated. It helps that it’s shaping up really well, though 🙂

Untitled Minimalist Game

Terry Jan 12, 2009 3 Comments

For the past two weeks or so I’ve been working intermidedly on Space/Void (we’ve decided to finish the Game Maker version), Detonate (It’s got AI and stuff now!) and Judith (Everytime we finish a day’s work on it it seems as though twice as many days work need to be done to finish it. It’s the strangest thing). For a bit of a change I decided to have a crack at entering this weekend’s Mini Ludum Dare. I didn’t really plan things out very well and the project is actually starting to look very promising and… well, let’s just say that one thing led to another and now I have another unfinished project. >_<

However! It’s very small, really, and I’ve resolved not to work on anything else until it’s finished. Which should be any day now, seriously. I promise.

(yeah I know I say that like it means something)

[Edit] Increpare also entered the contest with a game that fucks with your eyesight. Enjoy!