Greetings once again, time to talk about a game prototype!
I briefly worked at a small marketing agency where I produced this to pitch the owner of a number of Christmas tree farms. Work started May 2013 and concluded around July.
I wanted to try and make a runner-type game in the tree farm, and over a few iterations I think we came out with something kinda fun – although requiring a lot more work to get to release.
“Where’s Woodchuck?” has the player in pursuit of a baddie who steals Christmas trees and the owners dog!
Gameplay was divided in to levels each lasting a few minutes where the player would run through a location (only the tree farm ever got in to the prototype; more locations were planned) avoiding or destroying obstacles and collecting power ups.
Points were awarded based on in-game activity (items collected less number of collisions) and amount of time you beat the set level time by, and your score was beamed to an online leaderboard. We planned to award a prize for whoever was top of the leaderboards each week.
Power ups would give you a weapon, ammo and make you run faster, but collisions massively impact your score; There is no way to die as such, after three collisions you’re struck by lightning and your score is reset.
We also experimented with a customization feature as a last minute addition. A lot of the wearable elements are coloured dynamically via ColorTransforms in Haxe – everything old is new again!
Finally we have the minigames…
Only one exists, “Beaver Blast,” which freezes you in place and only allows you to move side to side while critters wander in and attack the Christmas trees. You can either shoot them for big points, or capture them in cages for a chance at invulnerability. I don’t manage to achieve this in the video below, but I confirmed it works in a subsequent play-through.
The game itself is presented in faux-3D, because NME had/has no support for 3D I ended up hacking about with a parallax effect until I was satisfied it looked “ok”. The whole setup was pretty difficult to manage internally with variable speed and projectiles coming from both ends of the screen that needed to be depth sorted beneath new objects being spawned. There are many depth sorting issues in the prototype.
You may also notice some graphical competency, which should immediately tell you I didn’t do the art. My coworker at the time – Lee O’Connor – drew a bunch of wonderful concept pieces and 99% of art in the game. You should definitely check him out (especially Highly Questionable Santa).
This was his first time trying to do anything for a game and I’m hardly an expert either, so this was a steep learning curve but I think the styling of the prototype was decent.
Here’s some of that concept art: Dream big or go home!
Another last minute addition was the animated intro for the first level, originally it simply flew over a comic page like the second level.
I’ll leave you with 10 minutes playing the two levels of the prototype and spending some quality time trying on hats. Thanks for reading.