The introduction
I am working on an NES-inspired platformer in Java 1.7. Currently developed in OSX and testing in Windows as well, but plan on porting to android after initial release. I have two artists I'm currently evaluating to purchase art from, so hopefully I'll get better tiles and art panels soon.
The Story
The game is very sarcastic and humorous. It starts out with the main character pouring batter into bowl in kitchen (there will be art-boards in the intro scenes). In the next screen he exclaims "Shiat, out of milk!" while rushing out of door -- fridge open in background. Then it shows the character running towards town in the distance. This is the entire premise of the game. When the player arrives in town, he'll learn that although most of the town is accessible, the grocery is not accessible due to a bridge being out. The game will consist of the player obtaining parts to fix the bridge so that he can get his milk and finally make his waffles!
The Gameplay
The town will consist of buildings (much like the towns you are familiar with). Each building is actually a "world" and will be quite large and have many inside, underground, and outside areas. Each "world" will have a list of "tasks" to complete -- which you will see when standing near the house's door. Completing all tasks will unlock the final task for that world, which will net you the piece of bridge you are looking for. Initially one house is accessible, but the next house becomes accessible as soon as the first task of the previous house is completed. The player will not be able to linearly complete all tasks at each world due to need of items or skills found in other worlds; so the player has to experiment and think about what paths his newly obtained loot will open up. Gameplay style is of course platformed style, with a bit of RPG mixed in (no leveling or EXP, but there will be projectile and melee fighting). There is also physics (Box2D), but the physics is downplayed and no puzzles will explicitly rely on physics (as I personally hate those types of games). I'm hoping to have at least 15 hours of gameplay (meaning 15 hours to complete if you know what you are doing) so this isn't something that I'll have finished next month of course.
The Screens
You can see some older screenshots of the game before I contracted an artist here:
The Goods
For now I'm not building new releases as I'm to the point where I am too busy doing actual game content to do any meaningful general builds.
The Rest
I use OSX, so if there is a linux or windows guy out there who's a night owl and wants to help test and provide feedback that'd be great. You can contact me here, or via the googles (tim.sarbin@gmail.com). Bonus points if you have issues running the current release as I have tested it on several platforms and with several people and only 1 person has had issues so far.
That is all. Kthx.
