Mafioso Football Manager released in May!

Mafioso Football Manager will be released in May by UmmaGumma Games!

– coach your way from the Third Division into the Premiership
– develop youth players, make transfers, watch your veteran players retire
– manage your team’s budget while taking care of your reputation
– buy services from your sponsor, coaching center or the mafia
– follow a detailed live coverage of all your matches
– unlock special teams by earning achievements

– each playthrough is unique!
– a random team name generator with almost 700,000 unique team names in the style of English football clubs
– a random player name generator with over 32,000 unique player names and dozens of nationalities
– a random scenario in the beginning of every week

– the game is 99% finished!
– …and it will be 100% freeware!
– release date: May 2012
– the release will be followed by a Finnish localization of the game

More screens behind the cut!

Back from the dead

After a small creative break I’m back! Here’s just a brief update of what’s going on.

– I have continued my work with project “Tuonela RPG” (the game will have another name though) and it is my main project right now. I decided to obliterate the old code and start coding a completely new game engine from scratch about a month ago. I can say that it’s slowly turning out much cooler and complex than the one I did last autumn. I also completely redid my old ASCII map editor and have added several neat functions to it, including simple mouse support and the copy/paste functions. Making detailed maps is now much easier and faster than before. The maps I’ve done so far have a nice Earthbound-vibe to it and occasionally I almost forget that I’m living in the ASCII world. All maps will be dynamic with NPCs and monsters moving around, smoke rising from the chimneys of houses and windmills turning.

– Codename Desperado will be released at some point. At December I ran into the usual problem: the game was already practically finished when I decided to start adding more and more (completely useless) features to it instead of just releasing it. Some of the features turned out rather hard to code, so right now the code is in a state of mess. I will try to take some time and finish it as soon as possible. Don’t hold your breath though, the game was intended as a sort of “practice project” anyway, so I’m not giving it a very high priority. However, it is worth noting that one of the things I was practicing was how to successfully finish a project. In this sense I seem to have learned little…

– My long-term plans include an ASCII zombie survival game set in a huge post-apocalyptic city and something completely different, an ASCII football game.

In the next few updates I will be showing some sneak peeks of the RPG project. I’ll also be making some kind of a “dead project update” showcasing some of my abandoned projects as well as some smaller practice demos that I’ve done. Stay tuned!

Codename Desperado

Project “Tuonela” has, unfortunately, been placed on hold. I have been making such great progress in programming this autumn, learning new stuff every day, that I am having major problems staying focused on any given project. Thus I have spent the last weeks making small mini games to test my new skills. About a week ago I however decided to start a modestly bigger project and create a side-scrolling shooter. Now I am proud to announce that Codename Desperado is very close to being finished.

As usual, the game features ASCII graphics which I have tried to design as rich as possible. I have accepted some limitations to my engine just to keep the game simple and the project size manageable (considering my impulses!), but still the engine turned out pretty neat. The goal of the game is to single-handedly overthrow a military junta in a fictional Latin American country. The player has to kill enemies, destroy tanks and avoid stepping on mines. The levels are very short as the supported map size is only 320*12 symbols. There are four weapons (9mm, AK-47, grenades and C-4) and basically three different enemy soldier types.

The game engine is about 99% done and now I am working on new maps. Currently I have seven maps done and I will keep doing more as long as it’s fun and they don’t feel too repetitive. I reckon the actual game will have about 15 maps. After that all I need to do is to add the storyline and test the game to get the difficulty levels right. I plan to include three difficulty modes to choose from. By completing the game the player is granted hidden extra weapons and perhaps even a jetpack! 😉

Here’s an early vid I posted on YouTube a few days ago. Many things have since been improved, but it gives you the general idea of what the game will look like. As you can see, I sadly suck even in my own games: I am actually killed by the first enemy soldier. 😀

Another gameplay video!

Here’s another vid that I posted on YouTube yesterday, now showing some actual gameplay. As of now I’m creating some more maps and finishing the first areas of the game, then I’ll move on to program stuff like items, equipment, magic, shops, menu systems and ultimately the battle engine. Hopefully by next weekend I will have the first areas of the game fully playable, although upcoming school work and thesis writing will naturally slow things down a notch. This will probably be the last video demo for a while but in a few weeks you can start expecting an official trailer for the game!

Slow progress with “Tuonela”

After a Sunday programming spree of epic proportions the scrolling engine is just about finished. Before finishing it I will have to start working on maps and finish the story. Work on the maps will easily be the most time-consuming part of the project as the game world will be rather vast.  The title of the game will be Tuonela (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuonela) and it will be packed with Finno-Ugric mythology. For example interaction with old Finnish pagan gods will be a vital part of the game.

I also recorded a small video showcasing  the scrolling engine. The maps are semi-randomly generated forest maps with just a few NPCs and monsters lurking around. While monsters are visible on-screen, they start following the player, so battles will be difficult to avoid. Meanwhile the NPCs just stand still or stroll about minding their own business until the player talks to them. Each NPC and monster also has a unique moving speed: naturally later in the game monsters will be faster and battles even harder to avoid.

Tomorrow: maps, maps and maps!

ASCII RPG project

First post! I am a mysterious being that recently got back into programming games. Modern games turn me off and as I have not updated my programming skills since the First World War, I create most of my games in QB64. While BASIC became a horribly limited and disfigured programming language already decades ago, it is perfectly suitable for creating games that could or could not have been cool 40, 30 or in the best-case scenario as recently as 20 years ago.

No point in wasting time so I’ll just get on it and introduce my current project: The Great And Legendary As-of-Yet-Untitled ASCII RPG Project! Now I am a big fan of ascii but one thing has bugged me for a long time: practically all ascii-based games that I am aware of are ugly as hell. Dwarf Fortress is probably the first game that even tried to come up with fun-to-look ascii graphics but the result is still pretty incomprehensible to me. Ascii has it’s limits, that’s for sure, but seems like the whole concept of ascii games with ambitious graphics hasn’t even crossed the mind of the programmers. This is something I’m trying to change, while creating a classic fun-to-play rpg in the process.

As usual, I have began my work by creating a map editor. The editor is now pretty much complete, excluding npc’s, monsters and events that will not be hardcoded but actually included in the map files to keep the actual game code more compact. QB64 luckily fixes most of the memory limitations of QB 4.5, but in my opinion it’s always good to minimize hardcoding. Next week I will start working on a tile-scrolling engine, although I think “a symbol-scrolling engine” would be more accurate. The actual game will most likely resemble the early Final Fantasy games. One difference is that battles are not random, but enemies will appear on-screen. However, when caught in contact with an enemy, the game will switch into a battle screen similar to Final Fantasy.

One concept that I will be working on is the player’s ability to alter the world. Some early ideas that I’ve been playing with include the player’s ability to plant and fell trees, build small bridges over rivers, dig holes (and find precious metals in the process), use magic to freeze objects or set them on fire and perhaps even build a house and a small farm. Let’s see…

I’ll close down with a few screenshots from the map editor. The third image shows what an example map of a small port town might look like. The size of the maps is currently 144*44 symbols and I will most likely keep it that way. Click on the images to see bigger versions and let me know what you think!