An engine has been found! Programmers need not apply any more!

So after working on the music for the past few weeks I've been playing a lot of other games for references. A few of them, namely TMNT arcade and Final Fight, inspired me greatly, but not for the music.

Falling Down is now going to be a side-scrolling beat 'em up.

You heard right, Falling Down is now an arcade beat 'em up in the style of TMNT, Final Fight, X-Men arcade, Streets of Rage, and countless others. I have the engine already, it's just a matter of getting the artwork and music done now.

Also, the storyline is going to change drastically as well to fit the new style.

Peace,
-Kail

Multiplayer Madness

Any game worth playing is worth playing with your buddies, am I right? Who plays games alone these days? Well, a lot of people, but the thing I hate most about life is not being able to beat the crap out of my friends, so I turn to video games. Out of my group of friends, here so referred to as The C Warriors, I kick the most ass in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (I have the high score at Burger King) and the Dragon Ball Z Budokai series (thanks to my brother). I'm also skilled in Bomberman and Smash Bros, which are some of my favorites because they're challenging when I'm playing with my bros.

What does this have to do with a mostly single player platformer such as Falling Down? Well name one great platformer that had an ALMOST FUN multiplayer mode! That's right, you can't, cause they all sucked. Sonic 3 and Knuckles and Super Mario World, the two greatest platformers of all time, had terrible multiplayer modes. Honestly, they weren't fun at all. So wouldn't it be great if my game had an AMAZING multiplayer mode?! Yes, yes it would. So I hereby declare my idea to put an awesome multiplayer mode in this game. Num num num.

Right now I don't know how the multiplayer will play out. Think a playing field like Bomberman, four players, and every secondary good guy in the game is playable beyond the three main characters. This would be a great added bonus if we can get it into the game, who's with me?!

Peace,
-Kail

Level Ideas

I'm sorry for always using Sonic 3 and Knuckles as an example, but c'mon, it's the greatest platformer of all time, who can forget chasing the giant Robotnik robot through space as Super Sonic? This level is what inspired me to talk about some of the levels in the game.

Anyways, I'm gonna lay down some level ideas for y'all. The game is mostly going to take place in two cities: Rutherford, NJ and New York City. The Rutherford levels comprise the first half of the game, and they're gonna be based on streets and parks in Rutherford. Now if you've ever been there, which the majority of you reading this probably haven't, you'd know it's a pretty plain town, but that's what's gonna make this interesting. Name one platformer you've played that takes place in like... a normal looking environment. That's right, you can't. Here's a couple of ideas for levels that I was thinking up:

Rutherford Levels:

Carmita Ave - first level, a long straight through street, similar to the one pictured in the concept art, there's gonna be cracks in the side walk you can break through to go down into the sewer and there will be trees you can climb into, because Rutherford is known as the Borough of Trees.

West Passaic - An up-hill level, haven't really thought of anything cool for this level.

Memorial Field - A big field level, gonna kinda look like a grassy level from any generic platformer.

Park Ave - The main street in Rutherford, it's a down-hill slope that leads to the first huge boss battle.

And then the New York City levels:

St. Marks - Same as it is in real life, the grimey, but awesome street with $1 Pizza, you can climb up to the rooftop of one of the buildings for a Roof Top level

Union Square - Fight through monsters at Union Square! Idk I don't got any real ideas for this level yet

Uptown R Train - Take the subway uptown, what's gonna be cool about this level is it moves around you, so it feels like you're actually on the subway. Go through the cars to get to the normal end of the level or climb up on top of the cars to get to another level, or get off at one of the early stops for another level.

Times Square - This is where another huge boss battle will be (obviously, I mean c'mon)

Those were just some basic ideas I had for levels, nothing's set in stone yet, but you can see from the list of levels that you start off in Rutherford and move on to eventually getting to New York. Eight levels isn't bad for a platformer, considering Sonic 3 only had 6 levels. If these were the final levels, these would be the straight through levels, none of the alternate path levels were really touched upon (some were mentioned though).

Gameplay Concept Artwork

Oh hey wow is this an actually relevant post?! I felt kinda bad for making every image I post either Sonic related or Package Deal related, so I went and made some concept art of how the game SHOULD look!

NOTE: I AM NOT THE BACKGROUND ARTIST FOR THE GAME!! THIS IS SOMETHING I WHIPPED UP IN AN HOUR FROM SCRATCH IN MS PAINT! THE FINAL GAME WILL BE MUCH MORE DETAILED AND BETTER LOOKING!

This took me a while to make, I used a lot of Spade's Package Deal comics as the inspiration for this, to the point where I actually stole the grass because the grass I made was dull and lifeless. At first the buildings were all red, like red brick buildings, but that proved to be too... unattractive, as it clashed with Kail's red hair and the Health Bar.

OH WAIT! IS THAT THE HEALTH BAR?!

Ok since I showed you the health bar, here's how the health system works in the game. Each character has a set number of bars, Kail has four, someone else might have five, the other guy might have three, but for now since I barely begun to work on the other characters, I'll just talk about Kail. When you get hit by an enemy you lose one bar, once you lose all four you die. To gain your health back, you need to find energy drinks! The in-game energy drink is called "Getting Up" which, if you hadn't noticed, is a funny little in-joke poking fun at the game's title. One energy drink will give you one bar, one turbo-fueled energy drink will fill you up completely.

Next post I'll talk about the battle system... maybe, idk lol.

Peace,
-Kail

Different Paths to Different Levels

Super Mario World and Sonic 3 and Knuckles are the two examples I use for this game the most often because they're probably the two greatest classic platformers of all time. This game will not be a rip off of those, quite the opposite, this game is going to be able to stand on it's own two feet without having to be compared to anything else.

The idea to the game is that you don't have to just go right and make it to the end of the level. I liked the Warp Zone pipes in the second level of Super Mario Bros. on the NES, that was a cool idea. My idea for the game is that like in real life, you don't have to go in one direction, you can explore the area and end up going to different areas, and still end up at the same place. In New York City to get to Port Authority you don't have to walk down 42nd Street until you get to 8th ave, you can take a number of paths, like the subway or the bus, and that's the idea with this game.

Think Star Fox 64, there were like 3 paths I think in that game, depending on what you did and where you went in a level you would be sent to another level, and it didn't matter which way you went. That's the same idea with Falling Down, you go in one direction, you wind up at this level, you go in the other direction, you wind up at that level.

Maybe later I'll post some of the move sets I have for the characters and I'll get into detail on the battle system, which there really isn't much of because this game is about exploration and platforming and figuring out how to get past obstacles more than fighting.

Peace,
-Kail