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The Journey of the Free Game

The Incredible Stick Warrior

Eight or so years ago I discovered that Stick Warrior had been redistributed on other webpages. More interestingly, people had taken the time to write little reviews with screenshots and ratings, indicating that they had actually played the thing. I recently found two more such redistributions. I have gathered them below with link and translation.

The first one, and the one from eight years ago, is written by Dominik Wetter on the Check site http://www.freegame.cz. For some reason there is also a Spanish version on juegosamigos.es. Kudos to Dominik for the dramatic take on the game’s story, glad you liked it.

How long will this evil embrace countless hectares that do not belong to him? How many innocent people fall into slavery, which is not just a retired way to retirement. Well, there will still be enough. That’s why you need to hurry up as a brave warrior to fight.
The punishment of various individuals who do not have good behavior and social feelings or hints is here some Friday. Therefore, the plot does not seem to reflect. Some of the game’s charm comes from non-standard graphics.

It looks like the environment has been painted with water colors (and it has not melted), which certainly does not see on every corner. After a certain calming of your passions, you set out to ride a couple of enemies from the realm of evil. As a warrior you will swiftly swing with your sword, jump over a number of chasms, and actively cope with a variety of game environments. If the weapon dampens the blood of your opponents, you are probably going merrily forward to one of the bosses. Between each level, you can return and collect coins that are not found. There are two ends of the game and something tells me that it is related to honest collection.

The game is especially interesting by the visual processing that I personally caught. Otherwise, you can enjoy the standard game that definitely does not hurt.


The second redistribution I found was by Rodrigo Prada on the Portuguese site baixaki.com during my recent search. Perhaps not as positive, and I disagree that an average kid could have made it (given my experience with game development and children). I get the point though. :)

Is it an ice cream stick? Is it a sketchy drawing of a 3 year old? No! He is the most ill-designed hero in the history of games. The Incredible Stick Warrior proves that it is not the graphics that measure the strength and courage of a ninja. Scribbles, martial arts and lots of violence in one more prank game.

A hero without character, without face, hands, feet …
Some games bet on rough graphics to differentiate themselves from other games on the platform. No wonder no stick figure has become quite famous for his various performances in games of several different genres. The Incredible Stick Warrior excelled in simplicity, here it does not seem that only the hero was designed by a child, but that the whole game was developed by preschoolers.

Graphics? What is it?
Defeat all enemies that come your way and take care not to be defeated. In addition to his incredible jump, his main weapon is his staff, with this artifact in hand any scrawl turns into a killing machine. Collect as many coins as you can and get to the flag that marks the end of each phase, somewhat uncreative, right?

…


Finally, Jhonny Costa wrote a short but sweet review on a second Portuguese site guiadowindows.net. Only thing I don’t get is why it’s version 1.0…

The Incredible Stick Warrior is a free game that in the same proportion as it is simple, is also fun. Control an incredibly rough stick figure and defeat your enemies!

The Incredible Stick Warrior
Your main weapons in the game are a bat and your super jump. The best platform style is to collect coins along the way and reach the flag that marks the end of the stage.

In a simple game like this, the commands could not be different: To control the violent toothpick use the spacebar, the directional keys, Control and Shift.

Explosion effects

Rutch Race

The game is fairly functional now, so I felt it was time to explore its look and feel a bit more. I started to play around a bit post processing effects. The results exceeded my expectations. While the ambient lighting is more vivid, the visual impression of the rocket power ups and their explosions were pretty cool. Very interesting to finally have the opportunity to explore these things properly. : )

User testing

Rutch Race

[Embedded video]

In an earlier project I worked with a group of talented, young individuals. It was an experimental continuation of our efforts to teach children to work with technologies once we felt that other actors had picked up the ball regarding young programming and such. They were selectively recruited and then invited to be trainees at our workshop, learning new skills and working on projects. Once the project was over we stayed in touch.

These persons just so happened to be perfect testers for our prototype, and today I was able to get two of them over for some proper testing. It went just well, we learned that the game is actually kind of fun. We also learned a bit about when it causes nausea and gave us some ideas of how to proceed. Good times!

Better with Bubbles

PickaBoog

Got word that these beauties were available at a local cheap brand store from a partner in crime of some of my projects. I instantly felt they would make for the perfect upgrade of the sneezing effect and bought one per nostril. :)

Photogenic generation

Rutch Race

Have spent some time working on the race track generation and I must say that I’m pretty happy with where it’s going. Given a seed, a track size and a list of list of instructions on what a piece of the track may look like, the generator can create a feasible race track. The track chunk instructions are in themselves fairly flexible and it’s easy to create new ones. This means that the game can now create a LOT of different track variations.

Phuck physics

Rutch Race

It’s a well known dilemma in game development that it’s tough to design movement for physics based bodies. While physics engines can be great for creating fluent, realistic animations in particular cases, it’s generally unpredictable and require a lot of knowledge and planning in order to create specific results.

In Rutch race, which is our working title this far, we wish to use physics to create realistic buoyancy and collision motions. However, because it’s a VR experience and is meant to be casual for short play sessions there are several things that may not happen that are part of real physics, like the boat flipping, not gaining speed in the right direction easily or falling off the track. Moreover, it’s crucial that steering feels really tight.

So I made a list of all the motions I wanted the boat to be able to do and thought of all the ways it should look in different scenarios and implemented a hard coded version from these requirements. I still use some physics for the buoyancy effect, but that is only applied to the visual representation of the player. This approach was an experiment, but I’m really happy with the result. Now it’s well defined how the player behaves given certain input and circumstances.

Agents and water

Rutch Race

Except for developing a somehow innovative amusement park game, I also lead a session with my colleagues on the park where they get to learn a little about Unity and game development. This time I showed them the built in agent and path finding solution of Unity, talking about and showing basic game AI uses.

Moreover, since we have decided that our game is going to be a race along a hovering, down stream river, water is an important feature of the game. Thus it seems fitting to explore visual effects that result in a delightful water. I’ve landed in a blend between realistic water reflections, highlighted vertex intersection and a animated caustics effect.

PickaBoog at RSM 2018!

PickaBoog

Wohoo! What a great event RSM 2018 was, although hot… I went to the venue early in the morning, bringing the last of the cabinets and other things with the help of my brother. The indie games, arcades and other interactive exhibitions had been moved to their own building, dedicating the main hall to just game and game merch plus concert hall. At some point I was afraid that people wouldn’t find their way over to out space, but my fears were soon gone. We had lots of visitors and while it was super hot I had brought a fan and we made sure to have beverages behind the stand to stay alive.
While PickaBoog may have proven to be a little hard to understand without a helping hand, I got a lot of positive energy from visitors and am more than happy to participate next year as well. The RAGE arcade gun stole the show a bit, but more on that in its own blog. : )

RAGE at RSM 2018

R.A.G.E.

Brought the RAGE gun to the local, annual retro game fair. Super fun! While the main fair (consisting of a retro game market) was in a huge hall, indie games, game events and exhibitions were held in a nearby event house. It was super hot, but lots of people attended and the gun almost stole the show at times (especially when we lost power for a while and RAGE was the only thing relying on battery, my laptop, for visuals). Lots of kids loved it, I guess violence and VR can be a recipe for success there, but I had all sorts of players. Really looking forward to improving on it further.

El Build Evening Final

PickaBoog

So it’s the day before the grand event, RSM the retro game fair. Finally, it’s time to put all that positive energy into celebrating games from all sorts of perspectives; as history, art form, technology, valuable items and other crazy words I can come up with. At any rate, I have used some of the feedback and testing from the GDL event earlier this week an have performed some upgrades to both hardware and software of PickaBoog. We have also helped each other out in the other creations that are going to the fair.

Sadly, we miscalculated the time a bit and were not able to bring all the things we wanted to the site this evening. Luckily, my brother is in town and will help me out in bringing the final pieces, early tomorrow. Everything is awesome, peace out. : )