Obscure & Underrated #1: Trax (GB)

Nowadays, HAL Laboratory really only makes two kinds of games: Kirby games and Pokémon games.  So it may surprise you to learn that HAL was responsible for everything from Earthbound to Daydreamin' Davy to the excellent Adventures of Lolo/Eggerland series.

But today... today we are here to talk about Trax.

Trax released for the Game Boy in 1991, a year before the first Kirby game debuted, but right away the similarities are immediately obvious.  The spherical hero, the solid black projectiles, the four-pointed explosions - it's all classic HAL Laboratory.  But what sets this game apart from it's brethren is the gameplay.

In Trax, you play a tank that can fire in eight directions.  The A button rotates your turret and the B button fires.  It's nowhere near as convenient as the twin analog sticks of Robotron or Geometry Wars, but for the Game Boy it was pretty clever.  Various power-ups appear along your way, with a lot of them the shmup variety that toggle through different types before you pick it up.  There are four levels, each with mini-bosses and a gigantic boss at the end.

All that would still just be a pretty standard game though.  What really makes Trax worth your time is the sheer insanity of this game.  Bosses are huge.  Levels take place in Japanese villages and valleys, and nearly everything on the screen is destructible.  You fight tanks that look just like you.  You fight tanks that look just like you but are so big they can't even fit on the screen.  There's cut screens, showing beaten bosses chasing after you or blowing up.  My favorite is the first mini-boss - a helicopter with hands who throws his propeller at you like a boomerang.  It's the kind of creativity you'd expect in a game like Intrusion 2, except in pixelated black and white glory.

So there you have it.  It's a shame HAL has never returned to Trax... the tank's only other appearance was as a mini-boss in Kirby Super Star (tucked away in the Meta Knight level).  Too bad... the world could use more games like Trax.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

It's always a bummer when there's an idea you always wanted to do and somebody else makes it happen first.

Since I was a kid, I had the concept for a game in which the player would always be disoriented, but had I no clue of how it would actually work.  As a teenager, a name was put to the concept when, right after listening to Weird Al's Everything You Know Is Wrong, a friend suggested that I should make an Everything You Know is Wrong video game.

Over the years, I've collected ideas, drawing tons of inspiration from games like Wario Ware and Achievement Unlocked, games where figuring out the controls and objectives are the entire point.  After literally over two decades of mulling around this idea, it's only in the last couple of years that a firm concept has taken shape: the gameplay, the aesthetics, an actual title, etc.  I even fiddled with a prototype in GameMaker a couple times, and I've got a half-written script floating around on my hard drive.

So, imagine my disappointment yesterday when I discovered this:



I mean, it's cool, good for them.  They didn't steal from me or anything; they came up with it on their own, and I didn't even have any immediate plans to start earnestly developing the game.  An idea is only as  good as what you do with it, and the game looks pretty creative and fun.

Still, it's a little disheartening to see such specific thoughts of mine in someone else's game.  It's not exactly the game I would have made, of course; not by a long shot.  But the misleading and taunting of the player, the spikes that are actually trampolines... they even used my tagline!  How crazy is that?

In the end, though, it's cool to see so many of my ideas work.  And even though I clearly can't use the trampoline spikes now without looking like I copied them, there's still enough original things on my end - specifically on the presentation and atmosphere end, which are completely different in my concept, a little more Stanley Parable inspired - that it may be worth eventually doing after all.

But until I finally get off my lazy rear end, go play Default Dan! I know I will be.

Aw Snap!

Boy, didn't post much during July, did I? Almost like it's a month of American celebrations and holidays or something.

Anyways, I'm officially giving up on Snap.svg.  It's not that it isn't easy to use, or that it isn't pretty - it's that it's been a nightmare trying to get it to behave consistently across different browsers.  It should have been a red flag to me when the demonstrations on the official website don't display properly on Internet Explorer.  Yes, I am aware that Internet Explorer is not the best or most progressive browser choice, but that does not change the fact that a large percentage of your potential audience will be using it.

I have two projects that I've been using Snap with.  One, a potential Super Hexagon fan-project that I hinted at earlier, will probably end up coming to nothing anyway.  The other, a major visual overhaul for Clueball, is a bigger problem.  I love the graphical style; maybe instead of rendering it live, I'll just make picture files of it.

Monkeys Wave Goodbye (bye, bye!)

It's official: monkeysintheplayground.com is no more!  This was, of course, according to plan, but I overlooked one crucial detail: I no longer have a place to host Clueball.  I will be rectifying this problem as quickly as possible.

Quick Update

In my last post, I suggested that I was focusing on getting Wizard's Scroll to run in Java.  Still true!  Porting the Python code over to Java using Jython was easier then expected; getting it to run as an applet on JVM, however, is proving to be much more difficult.

Also, over the last couple of days I've been tinkering with an idea for a fan project.  Don't want to say much about it, if/when it inevitably falls thru, but it's already looking pretty interesting...

State of the Blog - June 2014

I'm back in class!  This, of course, is a double-edged sword, because while it's good news for my career, it's bad news for the projects at this site.  Mostly what it means is focusing on the projects that are most important to me and/or beneficial for my portfolio, and jettisoning the extraneous.

Untitled Gaming Library
This is the project I'm currently most excited about.  It started as the game engine for Mom I'm Home and then Wizard's Scroll, and then I starting rewriting the engine into small functions that could be used for any project, and what I'm ending up with is a pretty useful library of game-making tools.  This is a long-term project, but eventually I'd like to tweak it into something really classy I can release on GitHub.

Wizard's Scroll
My biggest short-term goal right now is Wizard's Scroll.  Although my eventual goal a 100-level game with fully functional level editor is still a ways off, the 50-level demo version is very close to finished.  I just need to tweak a little code and get it running on JVM.  Probably two weeks worth of work, if I had two consecutive weeks to work on any one thing right now.

Clueball
My second most immediate priority is Clueball.  The nice thing about this one is the game is already fully functional; I'm just adding a few coats of paint and some additional features.  My original goal with Clueball, back when I started it last year, was to implement full Facebook functionality; that's moved to the backburner for now.  I'd be more interested in seeing if I could PhoneGap it into running on Android...

Untitled Meditation App
I haven't mentioned it here, but I've been fiddling with an idea for a meditation app on the side.  This is another long-term project; the goal is to have something simple running by the time I move at the end of the year.  I know a few martial artists in the area that I'm moving to, and my hope is to get some "professional" feedback and suggestions, resulting in a nice little Android app.

Mom I'm Home
The concept of Mom I'm Home was to make a Legend of Zelda-style game with SNES-style graphics loosely based on my childhood neighborhood (a suburb with several nearby forested areas), with the urban parts serving as the overworld and the forest areas serving as the dungeons.  I still think this is an interesting idea, but the truth is, this is a project that would take a whole team of programmers to complete, not just one guy.  That's why this game (along with Lore and other projects I've mentioned here and there) are going on indefinite hiatus.  That's the downside of focusing on the important projects; it means some other, interesting stuff falling through the cracks. But fear not! Things will be resurrected as I find the time slash resources.

#screenshotsaturday

I've been saying for quite a while now that Clueball needs a little polish and TLC, and I'm happy to announce that I'm finally getting around to that! I've spent the last couple days playing around with Snap.svg to see if I couldn't make things look a little more professional, and although this is just an early version (no numbers on the balls yet), I'm still pretty happy with the results:

Old Clueball:

New Clueball:

 

Again, it's clearly not finished yet, but in the meantime, feel free to keep playing the original version and leave feedback!