Solomon's Divorce Court (Previously for the Justice Pageant)

[Noyb]

Divorce proceedings can be very messy indeed. Luckily, Judge Solomon is here with his trusty sword to fairly settle property and custody disputes among the divorcees.

The gameplay will basically be Fruit Ninja, except you'll get more points the closer you get to cutting the objects in half.

I finished a prototype of the gameplay over the past few days. Click and drag the mouse to swipe. No scoring yet.

Prototype: http://noyb.retroremakes.com/Games/Solomon.html

[Noyb]

I updated the above prototype with a basic scoring mechanism. When you cut an item into two pieces, the game calculates what percentage of the item's pixels are in the smallest piece. You get one point per percentage point, plus a tiered multiplier the closer you are to a perfectly even cut.

I'm not entirely sure where I want to take this aesthetically. With the deadline looming, I'm half tempted to keep using KNP clip art to add new household items, children, and pets.

As for the gameplay, I still need to tweak item spawning/movement constants, and see how adding in multiple types of items affects everything. Adding in asymmetrically shaped items might add some interesting twists on the gameplay, although they might need to be at relatively even numbers per game in the interest of fairness.

And if I have time, I'd want to add an explicit narrative frame, perhaps two individuals approaching a judge, themed waves of items in the game proper announced by one of the divorcees ("What will happen to our children?!"), and a short ending screen where all of the pieces you cut in the game are split up and dropped into two separate bags.

[elegwa]

10550 score :/ I like it, pretty good! I played like eight games then I was like OH RIGHT, WORK! :P.

[Jasper]

Wait are you using Flixel now Noyb? (Or Stencyl?) Nice!

[Noyb]

So, yeah. Work on this has been spotty due to a brief addiction to Deadly Premonition. Missed the deadline, but still planning on developing this further. Below is approximately the post I made last week that was eaten by the database.

The version linked to in the first post now picks objects from a random pool of house-themed Klik & Play clip art sprites. Mix of even sprites and some longer in one direction. Still need to play around with excessively asymmetric sprites (like top-heavy lamps or diagonally oriented ones).

I'm also noticing that a lot of scores lie in a relatively small range. I'm thinking of adding a DDR-style combo system (continue to build combo by getting 40-60 splits or better) to stretch that range out a bit.

Still to come are elements secondary to the gameplay, like integration with high score APIs (Mochi? Kong? others?), storing a local high score, adding a title screen, and minor story elements. I'm thinking of bookending each playthrough with a short skippable line or two of dialogue from Judge Solomon if that doesn't interfere too much with the easy restart nature of the game. I was also considering a level progression game flow (earn new levels by sustaining a target average cut percentage?), but I'm thinking the game might be best served by the short session flow already in place. Sound design might also be tricky, especially to put in some sword-shwooshing that doesn't irritate with its frequency.

Since this is more arcade-styled than my usual games, I'm toying with the idea of polishing it up for sponsorship. It'd require me to seek out an artist to collaborate with (or find a decent source of free clip art), since I don't think the KNP library is public domain. I'm also a tad worried that sponsors might give pause at the whole baby-slicing mechanic and (intended, not-yet-implemented) divorce theme.

10550 score :/ I like it, pretty good! I played like eight games then I was like OH RIGHT, WORK! :P.

Thank you! Glad to see that there are some elements of addiction in here.

Wait are you using Flixel now Noyb? (Or Stencyl?) Nice!

Yeah, straight Flixel. Made a few projects in it (including that replay-based action platformer you played), but I've never really developed anything past the prototype stage.

[Stephen L (inactive)]

I found this quite endearing already.

[Noyb]

So I obviously failed the Justice Pageant, but am still developing this game off and on.

I updated the build with a few new features. As before, the link is in the first post.

Added in the beginnings of a combo system. Every slice better than a 40-60 split adds 0.1 to the multiplier. Making a worse cut, or letting an item fall off the screen resets it. Still getting very low variance on my scores, so I think I'll tweak this to be more forgiving and/or more lucrative in terms of how it effects the multiplier.

I also coded in the ability to slice rotating objects. Took a bit of debugging and diving into Flixel code to realize that this now limits me to sprites with dimensions less than 97x97 if I want to have 360 prebaked sprites for each rotation degree, since Flixel stores these sprites in a single BitmapData object, and BitmapData objects have inherent size limits.