Now chances are, you're asking yourself, “Who the heck are the Adventure Apes?”
Quite simply, the Adventure Apes are two best friends (Mitch and Otis) who do their darndest to keep their arch enemy (Horatio Hawk) from reaching his goal of world domination.
The Adventure Apes began as a personal project of mine several years ago, intended to be an illustrated storybook. The idea struck me to make a video game that takes place in the same setting as the story, and shortly afterwards, I began working on what at the time was to be a small game project. As things progressed, the game started gaining a fair amount of attention, and my time became focused on its development for the PC. The game at the time was made up of two massive levels, and was something I still worked on when I received an email from the guys at PIE (Pacific Independent Entertainment) asking if I'd be interested in collaborating with them to develop the game for systems other than the PC. Offers like that don't happen every day, so I jumped at the opportunity and haven't looked back since!
The DSiWare game follows the same style as the PC version I was piecing together. It is an adventure-platformer with cartoony retro graphics. If you enjoyed the original NES version of Metroid, this game will bring a smile to your face! There are six levels to explore, ranging from tropical jungles, a dilapidated Mayan temple, even the firey interior of a volcano, each filled to the brim with enemies!
While the game is being developed, we will be keeping a blog updated with all the progress and interesting little tidbits about the game. There is a website as well that is in its infancy, and will likewise get additions made to it as things progress.
We would love to hear from the community about their impressions of the Adventure Apes and everything that revolves around them in their world, so please check us out!
jdarrell - While there are two characters, you are right that the majority of games focuses on just one, and the same goes for this game. The character who gets to run around in the game is Mitch, while Otis (his pointy-headed friend) is stuck back in the headquarters with their mentor/father figure, Dr. A. The plan is to have Otis and Dr. A communicate with Mitch at certain points in the game, so their role at this point is secondary... Epic boss battles? We shall see As far as speed runs go, the original version I was making for the PC did have a timer for just that purpose, and it is a fun way to challenge yourself or have bragging rights over your friends!
TokyoRed- While there are no plans to make this game multiplayer, part of the reasoning behind having two characters is to give ourselves more options for developing things further down the road. For now though, Otis is more of a teaser for what things could be. Yes, I'm being deliberately cryptic!
Sherlock- Thanks! It was our intention to make something that would (hopefully) stand out from other games. Fingers crossed we can pull it off!
Maybe you could give each character different abilities and let the player change characters at some points... Kind of like the babies in Yoshis island DS.
abgar, you're definitely thinking along the right lines with how to handle multiple characters in a game. A hero is only as good as his sidekick!
Okay, so we've made some nice progress lately putting things together, and I've got a couple images to share with you guys. They are screen captures of the development tools that were made by the Pacific Independent Entertainment (PIE) team. There are two programs that we're using; one for the animated elements (NPCs and characters), and one for level construction. They both really streamline the process, as you can see the amount of items in the directory tree of each one.
Figured I'd jump in and and introduce myself as well as field any technical questions that may crop up! Although I can't get into any Nintendo specific stuff, I CAN tell you a bit more about the tools and the game engine. To answer your question, the tools were written in C# with Visual Studio 2008. The game engine is a pretty straightforward 2D engine and is written in C++ with basic object-oriented building blocks such as objects, NPC's, FSM's etc.
The world-editor went through relatively few iterations with additional features bolted on on a case-by-case basis. Last feature was exporting levels as PNG's for instance. The animation editor is still pretty rough but does what it says on the tin: It takes animations and allows us to tag frames for events, such as trigger sounds or when to spawn a bullet or particle effect. Both export the data into a proprietary format that then gets read in on the engine side.
Been a while so I figured I'd give a bit of a status-update...
Mostly been working on the run-time with a couple of changes to the editor / animation tool here and there. On the run-time side, Mitch is currently up and running (pun wholeheartedly intended) in the first level! If anyone's interested I can upload some (very early!) screenshots or a 30 second clip. Problem is, I don't have a capture kit so it'd be relatively old-school using either a webcam or my iPhone.. Other than that, plugging along...
Wake me when it's finished and i've got the chance to up the sale numbers by one. No, honestly a 30 second clip sounds amazing to get a good impression of it. I don't really mind the video quality.
Here's Mitch running around in the first level. The first level is more like a tutorial and Mitch starts off with no skills and weapons other than the ability to pick up rocks. Still a lot left to be done but at least it'll give you a bit of an idea. The vignet doesn't show very well unfortunately..
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Topic: Introducing: The Adventure Apes!
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