Project MFOR

Posted by oddbob on June 13, 2007 · Lovingly Filed Under Development Log 
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MFOR

So, Project MFOR then - or Money For Old Rope as its lovingly known. What is it?

Well, rather obviously for me - its a shooter, its also going to be my first attempt (and probably last unless I miraculously survive the dev time and come out the other side) at a shareware game. Yes, I can see jaws hitting the floor already…

I’ve not shown a lot of it, essentially because there’s not really a lot to show right now. Just a lot of enemy patterns and behaviours all slung together, a few temporary graphics (more about that in a moment) and a rough plan of where its going to head.

At the moment its all slung together using cod-vector graphics - mainly because they’re quick and easy to knock out and it adds a little bit more enthusiasm for plugging away at the game knowing that you’re not just moving squares around whilst testing it. For the time being, the vectors are staying but I’m sincerely doubtful of wether they’ll still be there towards the end of the development time. Mainly because I don’t actually want to throw out another vector game. I’d like MFOR to be able to stand visually on its own two feet.

I’ve got a style I’d like to head towards in mind, but first up I want to make sure that everything works as a game before taking the plunge on doodles.

As usual, I’m learning a lot of lessons from what I’ve done before. Beast Invaders 3 taught me that I’m perfectly capable of writing a decent shooter but it also taught me that I really need to make sure I’ve got time and some semblance of organisation about myself if I’m going to make sure that whats in my head and on paper makes it into the final version. Thats probably going to be the most difficult part of putting MFOR together - things are a bit mental in Chez Bob at the moment and have been for quite a few months now. We’re in a sort of financial limbo which is doing my nut in waiting for it to lift, the house isn’t exactly conductive to a relaxing coding session with boxes of stuff everywhere ready for the place to be done up, and of course, I have my usual duties involving Mrs Bob and an excitable child to see to. And baby is at that age when he’s a bit on the willful side…

The main first task is to complete all the enemy types so I can just slide them all in to a level structure. At last count, I think I’ve got 7 or 8 new enemies done that I’m happy with, each with different methods of attack. Some multipart, some your bog standard drone ships. There’s also 2 or 3 recycled from Beast Invaders 3 but with a bit of refinement on how they behave as MFOR is an entirely different beast. No pun intended, honest.

All in all, I’m taking it pretty easy and slowly on getting things together.

Why Money For Old Rope? Well, its a piece of self depreciating humour. It is, of course, far from “old rope” putting this together. I’m sure there’s some folks who could live, breathe and shit code - but I’m not one of them. I’m not a natural coder by any means, and it probably takes me ten times more thought to do the things most of you reading this could do in the blink of an eye. Partly, I’m doing this to scratch an itch - to see if I can write something I’d be happy charging money for (as yet, I’ve done no such thing), partly to see if I can write something thats very much mine and partly to put my overly critical nature of my own work to good use.

Its not going to be the second coming of Indie gaming, its not going to be attracting the attention of major publishers I don’t think - I’m sitting here planning on charging at the very most £5 for it - and I know all the arguments for/against this, but crucially, I’ll charge what I think its worth. That may yet turn out to be fuck all. We’ll see, I guess.

More news, when I have some.

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4 Responses to “Project MFOR”

  1. Richard Phipps on June 13th, 2007 2:32 pm

    Interesting! I await more screenshots..

  2. Oddbob on June 14th, 2007 10:48 am

    As soon as I’ve got something more substantial to show, will do :-)

  3. Wiebo de Wit on June 14th, 2007 6:55 pm

    Looks interesting mate! What are the chances of your backdrop in the game looking like that in the final game? Cos my current game looks like that in the background atm :)

    oh well. looks interesting, send me a alpha/beta if you need input! (this favor will be returned of course :) )

  4. Oddbob on June 14th, 2007 11:10 pm

    Pretty slim :)

    I’ve got a comic book intro which is going to play out on the main menu as part of the attract mode (I can’t stand having to skip through them to get to the game) which is in a fairly different style and it kinda jars with the rest of the game being vector~ish.

    I’ll drop a URL over when there’s some game in there for you to look at, no worries. :-)

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