Thanks! I would like to improve my pixel gfx skills, so advices are very welcome.
They are zombies, or just people who have not got a coffee for a very, very long time…
About the back story:
The climate change has destroyed all the coffee plants from the planet. You are sitting on the last big coffee stock in the world. People are going crazy as they cannot keep awake without the daily coffee dose. They can smell your coffee tower miles away…
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@Vampirics suggested that zombies could be pushed to a hole etc., away from the field. I think that is a great idea. That way you could get rid of the zombies.
At the same time, you must protect the coffee supplies. I was planning, that if any of the zombies touches the tower, it will hop on the tower and drink a coffee. That has a consequence that the power bars will have holes (as they using coffee as a power source, of course ). The more zombies get through, the more holes the power bars get! So it is increasingly difficult to push zombies.
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Isn’t that the opposite of what you want? Games are supposed to get progressively harder as you play. If you find the game too easy in the beginning, you will never get to a point where it feels challenging.
But that gets more difficult as the bar has more and more holes. You cannot keep zombies away from the tower as easily as in the beginning.
Edit: So there are two separate things. A hole in the ground where you can drop zombies, and there are holes/gaps in the bar which makes pushing harder as zombies can go through gaps.
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The Zombies are easier to see, but I’m not a fan of the blue background.
I think the background should stay dark if possible.
The coffee cups being white makes more sense though.
I’d suggest giving CGA a go (as @jonne mentioned):
You’ve still got red, white, yellow and two greens, but you can also use black or grey for the background and put the grass back in.
Using brown might even give more of a ‘muddy trenches’ feel.
So the game is set in Finland, right? :P
The world’s 20 biggest coffee drinkers
- Finland - 12kg per capita per year
(From here.)
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Yes, we really like coffee here!
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To keep the non-violent theme, instead of hole in the ground, we could push zombies to the rehab center (which converts them to tee drinkers ).
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Bah not sure that pushing zombies in holes is that violent… Worst case just say the holes are warp holes that warp them in zombie paradise lol
Fine, could you draw a warp hole? 
Btw. I have now changed the gfx to your enhanced version.
You want the warp hole to be a fixed dimension? And I was mainly suggesting to just say that they fall into a hole that warps them somewhere else. I’d have to think how warp hole would look if you need to really have a warp… Just think Mario Brothers, pipes were used to warp too lol
A warp hole is fine with me.
Could you elaborate this?
I am currently implementing what happens when zombie touches the tower. I was thinking that it jumps on the tower and drinks the coffee (with a nice drinking sfx;-) ). But the “jumping” animation is really hard to do from this angle, isn’t it?
After that the zombie is drawn inside the tower instead of a coffee cup. Should the zombie look different after drinking coffee?
You could have them damage the walls instead.
Then when the walls break the zombies can get at the coffee.
And maybe if the player keeps the zombies away for long enough then the walls slowly get rebuilt.
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Only problem I see is that if the zombie remains in the tower, why did he stop drinking coffee? Would make more sense to at least just put a red X on the cup to show that this one is empty don’t you think?
About the holes, I was referring to it’s dimension. Don’t you want that warp hole to be variable? Like of many different sizes?
i like the idea, but I also like to make it so that when the zombie reached the tower, the vertical and horizontal bars got more gaps. Actually, it could be related to breaking the tower, which can cause damage to the “power bars” also.
you can only drink so much of coffee at once
The first public release, v0.1 :-). Just an early demo still but you can test the mechanics.
Please tell what do you think of it so far!
Some recent changes:
- Upgraded graphics (thanks @Vampirics ! )
- Added a sound effect
The bin file for Pokitto:ZombieFlock.bin (149.1 KB)
I decided to release sources also, as it might be of use for someone struggling with Java ( a disclaimer: Java is a new language to me also)
Sources: ZombieFlock.zip (1.1 MB)
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Note that there is a problem in Femto when using sound, which affects also to the Zombie Flock game. Normally, when a Femto based game wants to load another game, the user can press a reset button on the back to get a menu to do that. When audio is used, this results an invalid state, and you have to reflash Pokitto using the Usb cable.
This will be fixed in the future release.
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Rel v0.2
Changes:
- Removed the sound effects temporarily, because the loader do not currently work with them in Femto
- Fixed the coffee picture
ZombieFlock.bin (60.4 KB)
Note: if you want to start the loader to load another game from the SD card:
- Press the reset button on the back of the device any time to activate the menu
- Select “Change game”.
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“How am I supposed to keep them out with these broken bars?!”
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