I, Rebel Entry Devlog

I,Rebel Game Jam Devlog

Unfortunately, I hurt my back a week before the I, Rebel game jam started and as a result, I was delayed in getting started with it until the 14th of April. 

At the beginning of the game jam, we had been given the theme that must be included in the game. That theme was THE PERFECT BEAST, the theme could be interpreted any way you like. The words "The Six-Million Dollar Stag" popped into my head. I was envisioning a game in which you would first re-build a stag using cybernetic parts to make the ultimate killing machine.  I'm a fan of shmups in general and tend to write a lot off shooty games, and I knew I wanted my entry to be a shooter of some description. The vision of a stag with a gun turret mounted to it's back was in my mind.  Following on from this initial idea, I thought of the better name "Monarch Of The Galaxy", based upon the painting "Monarch of the glen" which I have seen in person in Edinburgh. 

Monarch of the Glen : https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/159116

I decided to ask ChatGPT to redraw The Monarch Of Glen, putting the stag on a purple planet surface with mountains and Saturn visible in the background, with a gun turret mounted to the stag's back and a bionic eye. The image you see below is exactly what it came back with :

As far as game engine to be used, I picked Pygame CE (https://pypi.org/project/pygame-ce/) 

The reason for picking PyGame was that I write a lot of homebrew for the Vectrex (home arcade system with built in CRT vector monitor) and have a few tools I have written to aid me in this. I recently rewrote my vector graphics app VecDraw using Python and Pygame. So I knew I would be able to take this and develop it into a vector game engine reasonably quickly.  And as I only had 4 days to write a game from scratch, I needed to use any existing  tools I had at my disposal.

I quickly took VecDraw and adapted to support coloured layers, this way I could easily take pre-existing graphics I have made for Vectrex and give them a little colour.  

Here is my version of the stag image ChatGPT created, rendered in colour vectors :

Once I had modified my vector drawing application, the next step was to write all the supporting classes (cVectorList, cVectorFrame, cVectorSprite) to allow drawing of these coloured vectorlists, allowing them to be treated as 'sprites', with scaling, rotation, a collision box etc.

Once these routines were ready, I quickly put a title screen in place. I also added an intro tribute to a friend who passed away from cancer last year. RIP John. This 'temporary' title screen wound up being the title screen in my submission (ran out of time to spruce it up).

Originally, I had planned to make this game a scrolling, multiple screen affair with a radar at the top of the screen showing enemy location, much like Defender, Dropzone and the like. My original idea was that our stag would be on foot, defending the planet Caledonia (I'm Scottish) from invading "Vectrexians" (enemies taken from my own Vectrex games). Sadly due to the time I had left, I decided that it'd have to be a single-screen affair as I was quickly running out of time to get everything done. 

So, the revised design would be that our stag must protect 4 statues from attacking aliens. If an alien touched the statue, it woudl ntake damage and eventually be destroyed. The game will end if all stags are lost or all statues are detroyed. Our stag must move left/right, avoiding enemies and projectiles and aim a rotating gun turret on it's back. Controls ought to be mouse + keys or twin stick joystick. I also wanted the gun turret to be dual function. A rapid fire laser shot and a missile that would explode and cause repeating damage while enemies were in it's blast zone. Some enemies should only be destroyed with the missle. I decided to call it the "Thistle Missile" and have it explode as a saltire flag, just to reinforce the Scottish-ness of this game and planet ;)

The statues I selected to defend all mean something to me personally :

Lemmings from my birthplace of Dundee.

Peter Pan from my childhood hometown of Kirriemuir.

The war memorial lion in Aberdeen, where I lived though my teens and early 20s.

And the Duke Of Wellington statue in Glasgow, my home since the early 2000s.

I made graphics for these statues, took a horse walk cycle and added some antlers and a rotating gun turret for our player sritea nd started to code the game. I collected some graphics from my Vectrex games and  I also reused some sound effects from them too, reloading them in the tracker application I use to make them and exporting them as WAV files for use in my game.

A simple "pew" sound effect in Arkos Tracker.

The same sound effect, exported as a WAV file.

With all of the sound and graphics resources compiled, next step was to quickly get the game done. I had decided I'd like 5 levels, based on my Vectrex games "Outta Space!", "Asteroid Assault", "Trick-Or-Treat-O-Tron" and "Love Connection". 

The Outta Space and Trick-Or-Treat-O-Tron levels would have a floating boss who would spawn enemies and be invulnerable at first, then at a later stage, the boss will drop down the screen a little and become vulnerable, These bosses should only be vulnerable to shots from the "thistle missile". Which I have limited to 3 shots at a time. The level will end when the boss is destroyed.

The other levels (Asteroid Assault and Love Connection) would play like Asteroid Assault, with asteroid dropping from the sky, damaging statues if hit. The level ends once all X number of  asteroids/faces/hearts have been spawned.

The final level would be  floating Vectrex machine, spawning all the enemies while asteroids drop from the sky. The game will end if this level is completed. 

And that's pretty much what got handed in. Yes, it's buggy and the boss script and difficulty need tweaking as well as a lot of playtesting and further development is needed but considering this was all done from scratch in 4 days, I think it turned out OK. 

And ultimately I have wound up with my own "Perfect Beast" - a colour vector game engine that should serve me well in the future, should I want to port any of my Vectrex games to PC. Something that has been on my todo list for quite some time <3