Post by A numericalPrime A on Mar 2, 2012 22:33:17 GMT -6
DNews: Making Dot Wars [Part 1: Origins]
Hello! As you may know from past posts that I have done, my name is Daniel, your friendly yet incredibly hard to understand Dan with the plan… Stan… Ok, moving right along.
This is the first in a series of posts that are designed to tell the story of how we are making our latest game. We should be releasing one every week so keep your eyes… PEELED!
So you might have heard about the game before; it occasionally came up in conversation. Like this conversation…
Yes, the game is called Dot Wars. Hardcore friends will recognize it as a significant re-imagination of the original game that was called Dot Wars: Assassins, which was the first game Emberware ever made. More hardcore friends might even recognize the series’ true origins, which are rooted in the core idea of utter controlled chaos. It all started way back in eighth-grade PE…
We loved the idea of an RTS that was on the scale of games like Supreme Commander, where there were many different things happening at once. Due to inactive imaginations and/or hyperactive imaginations (no one is quite sure which), we decided that the coolest theme for the game was to simply use these organisms called Dots.
Here is a Dot. Its anatomy and overall meaning in life is not that hard to comprehend.
A Dot wants only to accomplish one thing: it wants to kill Dots that are not the same color as itself. That is really all there is to say on the matter…
In the end, we had nowhere near enough experience to make a game like that. So we moved on to less ambitious goals.
Thus, we started Dot Wars: Assassins! At first, things looked a whole lot more simple due to the fact that the game was made using a program called GameMaker. It was a powerful little program that allowed newbies like us to make simple games very quickly.
In true Emberware style, we decided that simple and easy were totally out of the question when we made DW:A, because it took us a couple of months to come up with the final version of the game released November of 2007. The game was a nod to old arcade games like Pac Man and Dig Dug with its use of north-south-west-east style movement. After that, we made everything else from scratch from our own ideas.
The idea of controlling the entire army was still fresh on our minds, so we built in this puzzle-type layer to the game. All Dots on your team moved at the same time, so the player had to use parts of the maps to arrange their army.
The game also had a couple of different types of units, all of which were predecessors to current units. These will be further discussed in later DNews updates.
Finally, the player would use these armies to compete against another player in a variety of primitive game-types, like Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, and Assassins. Again, all will be revealed in later posts.
After this tumultuous beginning, Emberware went dark for quite a while. It wasn’t until about two years ago that we started work on the final (yet totally different) version of Dot Wars. That’s up next week in another thrilling episode of:
DNews: Making Dot Wars
Hello! As you may know from past posts that I have done, my name is Daniel, your friendly yet incredibly hard to understand Dan with the plan… Stan… Ok, moving right along.
This is the first in a series of posts that are designed to tell the story of how we are making our latest game. We should be releasing one every week so keep your eyes… PEELED!
So you might have heard about the game before; it occasionally came up in conversation. Like this conversation…
Yes, the game is called Dot Wars. Hardcore friends will recognize it as a significant re-imagination of the original game that was called Dot Wars: Assassins, which was the first game Emberware ever made. More hardcore friends might even recognize the series’ true origins, which are rooted in the core idea of utter controlled chaos. It all started way back in eighth-grade PE…
We loved the idea of an RTS that was on the scale of games like Supreme Commander, where there were many different things happening at once. Due to inactive imaginations and/or hyperactive imaginations (no one is quite sure which), we decided that the coolest theme for the game was to simply use these organisms called Dots.
Here is a Dot. Its anatomy and overall meaning in life is not that hard to comprehend.
A Dot wants only to accomplish one thing: it wants to kill Dots that are not the same color as itself. That is really all there is to say on the matter…
In the end, we had nowhere near enough experience to make a game like that. So we moved on to less ambitious goals.
Thus, we started Dot Wars: Assassins! At first, things looked a whole lot more simple due to the fact that the game was made using a program called GameMaker. It was a powerful little program that allowed newbies like us to make simple games very quickly.
In true Emberware style, we decided that simple and easy were totally out of the question when we made DW:A, because it took us a couple of months to come up with the final version of the game released November of 2007. The game was a nod to old arcade games like Pac Man and Dig Dug with its use of north-south-west-east style movement. After that, we made everything else from scratch from our own ideas.
The idea of controlling the entire army was still fresh on our minds, so we built in this puzzle-type layer to the game. All Dots on your team moved at the same time, so the player had to use parts of the maps to arrange their army.
The game also had a couple of different types of units, all of which were predecessors to current units. These will be further discussed in later DNews updates.
Finally, the player would use these armies to compete against another player in a variety of primitive game-types, like Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, and Assassins. Again, all will be revealed in later posts.
After this tumultuous beginning, Emberware went dark for quite a while. It wasn’t until about two years ago that we started work on the final (yet totally different) version of Dot Wars. That’s up next week in another thrilling episode of:
DNews: Making Dot Wars