Karma: The Game is a retro-styled platformer where moral choices guide your progression through six lifetimes. I am the sole director, desiginer and developer. Some graphics are currently placeholders, however in the final product all the graphics and art will be either original or used with permission. All sounds and music in the game so far have been purchased and are royalty free.
Planned features:
100% original and used-with-permission graphics.
6 lifetimes (levels) each with a unique character and mini-story.
Overarching themes and storyline encompass all 6 lifetimes.
Character can be customized with colors and accessories (HATS!)
Items can be picked up and used to solve puzzles. (1st level has 6 items)
Multiple solutions to many puzzles attached to a moral decision.
Gaining a lot of good or bad karma will alter your progress though the game
More to come...
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I've spent the last 3 or 4 days (they're all blending together at this point) animating, coding and tweaking the boss for the end of Chapter 1. It's easily the most complex thing I've coded and I'm really happy with the results.
This chapter is 90% complete and I'll soon be looking to get some feedback from beta testers. I'm looking for 2 or 3 people who would be willing to play through the game thoroughly and provide me with impressions, flaws, bugs, suggestions, etc.
Just wanted to let everyone know I've been working like crazy on Karma.
The prologue became far more involved than I originally envisioned, but I think it's easily the best part of the game so far. And the good news; It's basically done! Just some minor bugs.
Chapter 1 is about 80% done. All I have left is the boss and some tweaking.
If I haven't mentioned this already, I'm going to release the game in chapters. I'm expecting to have the Prologue and First Chapter released sometime in September. I'm not completely sure, but I'm estimating about 5 hours of gameplay for the first playthrough.
The game is officially going to be called just "Karma".
Also, I'm bumping the project progress (for the entire game) up to 30%.
I can't believe I haven't updated this in 3 months. Well, even though you wouldn't know it, progress on Karma is still coming along nicely and I wanted to share a few screen shots with you.
In my non-Karma life, since my last post I lost my job, fought with unemployment and lost, got a part time job, graduated (I now have an MBA degree ... too bad I don't know what to do with), quit my part time job and moved to a new apartment.
Being unemployed has many benefits for the development of Karma, but unfortunatley only negative consequences for the rest of my life. And with the economy, sales have been really slow at my online t-shirt store(robitstudios.com). Boo.
But enough about me... I decided Karma will definitely be released in chapters. The first release will include a prologue and the first level. I don't know if I'll release each chapter as a separate executable or build one complete file that contains each chapter as they are completed. Either way, the game will read your save file to ensure that you completed the previous chapter in order to move on.
Also, I don't think the game is going to have 100% original or used-with permission graphics. Graphics are a weak point for me and even though I have a few artists helping out with stuff I am going to rip some from commercial games. For example, a couple of the screen shots I posted on this update have graphics from some 16-bit Disney games. Do you think this is a bad idea or would it be acceptable?
I implemented a dialog system in the game which works well for my needs. However, I can't find the right sound effect to go with the scrolling text. I wan't something to the effect of Cave Story but I can't seem to find a sound that gives the right tone. Can anyone help out with that?
Motivated by all the positive feedback on the demo I got straight to work on the beginning part of the game.
I also received some good criticism that I'm going to attempt to work on as well. In fact, I'm going to list a couple of the common complaints and some solutions right here:
Too much is left to guess work
Since the demo is actually the second level of the game I've made sure that the first level will introduce the game play mechanics to the player. Also, I'm adding dialog to the game which will help solve this problem and others.
Needed more direction
Some things were not obvious enough (hidden passageways, the point of the karma system)
As I mentioned, I'm adding Dialog to the game which will help give the game more direction, explain game play mechanics and develop the plot. I wanted to avoid doing dialog originally because I though if it sounded cheesy or contrived it could ruin the experience. But I think it's the only way I can make the game work.
NPCs and enemies look too similar
This was partially a game design choice and partially because my graphics abilities are very limited. I chose to have enemies and NPCs look similar because, like in life, evil is not black and white. One's appearance can often be deceiving. There is a way to tell who will attack and hurt you and who won't and that will be explained in the game, via dialog .
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