Developed in: 2007, 6th semester of Digital Games.

Platform: PC.

What I did: This game has 3 versions: The first one was made in Dark basic on the 2nd semester, the second one in XNA during the 4th semester (it was a multiplayer version that I also used as part of my final project: UA-Life of a Firefly: how to make an accessible game) and the last one in C++ Ogre, 6th semester. I did everything on the first two versions (including programming, design, art, and everything else). On the third one, I asked a friend of mine from the university, called Sandro, to be the programmer. He did a pretty good job and we submitted the game in the 2008 SBGames Game Festival (it's an annual big game symposium in Brazil).

Resume: A firefly is employed as a "lamp worker". Its job is to light the indicated lamp during the entire night and to do this it has to collect "eletros", eletricaly charged insects. The problem is that this job is considered the most dangerous between the fireflies, because some lamps are in distant places full of traps, firefly predators and humans.

Gameplay goals: Fun easy to learn adventure/racing game for young people. The game may have great visual effects and character animations.

Controls: The controls are very easy. Mouse movement moves the firefly, right click increases flight speed, left click decreases it. Esc for menu.

Description: The firefly has a constant speed (in the depth axis) that can be increased or decreased by a certain amount pressing the mouse buttons. It also has a constant speed to follow the mouse pointer (the firefly won't be where the pointer is, it will follow the pointer).
The eletros, obstacles and enemies are scattered through the stages, may have their own movement and are collected/collided with in contact.
The objectives are to reach the end of the stages before the time limit is over (before complete nightfall), collect at least a set number of eletros (so the lamp can be lighted during all the night long) and avoid traps and enemies (you have 3 lives to spend).

Needed: OpenAL (provided) + last version of DirectX.

Tecnologies/Tools: Ogre engine (using Caelum and Navi libraries), Maya 7.0, Photoshop to create the interface and textures and tons of MSN to discuss things (lol).

Notes: The graphics are pretty good. I really put an effort into making the 2D images fit the 3D world created by my programmer friend. Everyone that played the game was excited about the graphics. The sound was ok. I probably listened a hundred or more free songs trying to find one that would add more feeling to the game, but found none... In the end we used one that would work really good in a SimCity game =P The gameplay did not went as expected. We had some problems with the terrain mesh so the stage had to be small and that was quite bad since part of the fun is to fly at a high speed. Besides that, we did not had time to do the enemies so it became a solo racing game of collecting shiny things (racing alone... that sounds boring...). Maybe we can fix those things and create a second version sometime.

Other possibilities: I got some ideas about other scenarios and items. An interesting stage would be a desert/canyon with strong winds to blow the firefly (we would have to add some physics), a city where the firefly would have to enter inside buildings... lots of possibilities here. A factory of electronic devices or robots (since you're charging yourself catching eletros, you would be able to make machines work while flying near them... opening new ways, activating enemies and all that), a cemetery stage with ghost firefly annoying you and collecting the eletros you need... I even thought of an underwater stage, but that would be weird... I got to work my brain a little more on this. An interesting add to the game would be an online competition. Two fireflies electrically charged could push or pull one another... Adding other eletro types besides plus and minus like neutrons, for example, could do something odd too.

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