I am pleased to present the culmination of my efforts at making a game for the ds106 final project: Beneath. Go ahead and try it out.

I hope that you enjoyed playing it as much as I did making it! It definitely ended up being much more work than I had anticipated, but it was worth it. I feel like I benefited a lot from the experience – learning how to program in Flash/ActionScript, learning to to make a game, learning how to finish a game… and smaller things, too, like figuring out how to record a screencast for the walkthrough below.

Behind the Scenes

The most obvious changes since the last update are the completion of the second room and the addition of the third. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, both in terms of creating an atmosphere and providing some sort of gameplay. Here is what the second level looks like in Ogmo, the map editor I discussed in an earlier post (click images to enlarge):

It’s a nice tool, as you can visually “paint” what a level is supposed to look like. Also, notice all of the “AI” tiles on the screen. Those aren’t ever shown when playing the game, but are instead used to trigger events when the player walks over one. You’ll see in the Selection window on the left that one of them is configured to use ScriptAi with monster_growl. ScriptAi is just responsible for starting up AI scripts; monster_growl is the actual script which is run. It plays the growling sound you hear in the background. Thus, the way I made all of the different monster sounds play as you walked around in the level was through these AI events. Other examples of scripts are lady_house, which controls the taunting lady at the beginning of the game, and drop_boulder, which controls everything happening in the beginning of the third level.

So what does a script actually look like? Here is the code for drop_boulder:

Finally, here is a sampling of all of the code I had to write to make Beneath… There is a lot going on behind the scenes, the Ogmo map editor is just a small part of what makes the game happen:

Help for the Lost

Here is a walkthrough for the game that I recorded with Jing. I would prefer that you not watch it, but rather play the game instead. But if you’re having trouble figuring out what to do, or if the game didn’t come to a clear and obvious conclusion, this will make all clear.

Credits

The lo-fi graphics were by oryx of TIGSource
The incredible music is courtesy of Kevin Macleod. The tracks I used were Darkest Child, Steel and Seething, and Private Reflection. Frost Waltz appeared on an earlier demo of the game (the forest scene).
A variety of sounds came from Freesound.org.
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