Aborakon & Richard Garriott

Richard Garriott, also known as Lord British, is most famous for his computer role playing series Ultima (besides travelling in space). Beginning with Akalabeth in 1980 and reaching its peak in 1997 with Ultima Online, the Ultima series influenced the RPG genre for decades.

When playing Aborakon: Fragment Green, it's obvious that the Ultima series was an example for parts of the gameplay, especially the controls and the interaction with items. In particular Ultima VII: The Black Gate was the biggest inspiration for Aborakon. By the way, this Ultima part was the first computer game I ever played (1992) and it had an enormous impact on me for sure.

Unsurprising it was a real pleasure for me to meet Richard Garriott in person the other day. I had the chance to talk with him more than an hour about his past, his current projects and about Aborakon. I showed him the game, he said that he likes the item interaction, so that you can move single wood logs below the oven ;-)

Spriting for Game Jam 2011

Some weeks ago I joined a 24h Game Jam in Munich. The subject was "MMO" (Massively Mulitplayer Online Game) and "Lemmings". So we had to combine these two topics into one game and finish it in 24 hours, including graphics and coding. It turned out to be a desaster, but a fun one.

So all in all we were 13 people (plus a girlfriend of someone watching us for 24 hours): 8 coders, 2 game designers, 2 graphic artists and 1 concept artist. The coders were split up in two groups. One group worked out the client code and the other one the server for the MMO.

Due to the complex backend architecture of a MMO we had to cut down the gameplay mechanics to the easiest level. We decided to make an action oriented MMO where dozens of players could enter a 2D map (see screenshots below) and held off Lemmings to reach their goal. With solid firepower of course. We called it "Muglings". For each frag you gain experience points which automatically upgrade your little space ship in 9 levels - from a small drone to a massive battleship. Ehm and the story was that the Lemmings world was invaded by an alien space force who sit in tiny little ships and ensure to make them a hard day.

My job was to make the sprites for the ships and some Lemmings. So I cranked out all the sprites for the 9 ships in some hours. Additionally with some animations for the weapons and engines. Moreover I made three visual damage levels to the ships' hull for easier identifying the healthpoints of an enemy.

That's a mockup screen after the ships' and the Lemmings' graphics were done.

These are my little ships I made in four or five hours. For viewing the animations, just click on the screenshot.

Here you can see the three damage levels.

And that's a title screen I made for the game.

One of our coders commenting his notebook's operating system failing. After 17 hours of work, 5am in the morning.

So we couldn't finish the game on a good playable level because there were some problems with the Unity3D engine we used. And problems like the crashing operating systems mentioned above didn't help either. Nevertheless it was a really fun event and despite of the technical problems we had a great time. Looking forward to upcoming Game Jams!

Last week some coders managed to re-implement the game in the Love2D engine. It actually works now, you can play simultaneously with other players now. For download link and more pictures check out the Facebook page: _CLICK_.
Furthermore here is the general website of the Munich Game Jam: _CLICK_