[The Asking]

Ok so I totally came up with an idea. I have an RPG in mind for the final thing but I doubt I'll get that far. Initially at least it would fall more readily in a puzzle-platform mold.

So I have a super-hero character in mind, The Multi-dimentional Man. Taking the idea of alternate parrelle histories/realities/dimensions and running with it, the Multi-dimentional man can influnce more than one reality at a time. Him dieing in one reality simply moves him to another where he still lives.

Gamplay wise this adds up to something a bit like some parts of braid or prince of persia. Say you have 10 seconds to get out of a room before a bomb explodes and there is a switch to open the door. You go stand on the switch, door opens, step off it, door closes, boom - you die. Time rewinds 10 seconds and you are revived where you died. You can then start walking, whilest a recording of your previous life's action's walks to the switch hestitates and gets blown up allowing you exit through the door he opens.

I have a number of ideas for puzzels in mind where the player would have layer the effects of multiple lives, creating many alternate histories, in most of which they die, to create one where they survive.

[Verious]

Sounds like an interesting premise.

[The Asking]

There's still a big question mark over whether I am going to have time to do this properly but one big help is that Mathias has offered to do some of the art assets for the game, which I intend to make with his Pixie engine. Take a look at some of the examples he's put together for the protagonist.



http://www.colossusentertainment.com/forumref/mdm_run.avi

[Malignus]

Ha! I love that running animation.

[Mattias Gustavsson]

I quite like the concept, and it's going to be fun to make some art for this :D
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[SophieH]

WOW! I love the character!

as for his name, 'multi-dimentional man' is that some cross between 'dimension' and 'dementia' ?
if so is that hinting at the story? if so colour me interested :)

also your gameplay description sounds a lot like cursor*10, if you haven't played it you should check it out ^_^
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[Mattias Gustavsson]

I made some close-up shots of the character with different expressions:


But I have no idea what they are intended to be used for :P
_________________
www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[Hajo]

I can easily imagine most hilarious situations in a game that would fit some of those expressions :D

I hope the game will trigger some in the right moments!

[oenone]

the idea sounds very interesting!

[The Asking]

Well I was hoping to start posting about my progress today but that is unlikely to happen. Was just working on a little sandbox over the weekend, get things set up and, on saturday night, computer died.

Apparently Windows 7 is very touch about which fonts you uninstall, as stupid as that sounds. I had a couple of corrupt font files that I thought would be fine to remove as the were adobe fonts. I was wrong. Now all text input fields on my computer are broken and any program with a UI which resizes it's self to fit it's content text resizes it's self to nothing. I fixed it once by clearling out my font folder and installing just the windows default ones but since restarting the problem is back and the same trick won't work again.

Looks like tonight will be spent on a windows install...chalk up 1 day's progress...

[PsySal]

Sorry to hear about the woes with Windows! But, fonts or not fonts... you can do it!

Just wanted to post that I'm planning to totally lurk here and post on everybody's projects even though I'm not entering. I wanted to say that those facial animations are amazingly awesome.

[Codexus]

That's a weird problem. I hope you can fix it quickly.

[The Asking]

Is for me to develop this game in safe mode!

This truly sucks but reinstalling windows would take too long at the moment, and at least this works in some way. Hopefully I'll be able to post some images of how it's looking tomorrow!

[DeveloperX]

Solution: Disable all themes, run in classic windows mode (Ugly, but it works), and just reinstall the fonts you deleted if you can remember them.
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[The Asking]

Well that was a rocky development!

Didn't get half of what I wanted to do done, for various reasons, not least my fonts issue. I appreciate the advice, DeveloperX, but disabling the themes did not help. It seems that the Classic theme relied even more heavily on the missing fonts than anything else and left my computer unusable in anything other than safe mode. I have tried reinstalling fonts but they just won't stick.

Would like to work on the game more but need to get my computer back to working order, so am posting what I have got done so far.

You can get it here;

http://mattiasgustavsson.com/asking/MDM.zip

If I get my computer working before the end of tomorrow I may use the power of having fonts again to work on a better title screen and ending one, maybe even add a couple more puzzles (as it is you can breeze through it in about a min...)

Still I am quite happy with the way it has turned out apart from some shoddy collision detection on a floating platform and the main character's floating shadow. As a proof of concept I quite like it.

Let me know what you think of it!