GENERAL INFO

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

Platform: PC.

My job: Everything on the first two versions (DarkBasic and XNA - this last one became my course final project: Universally Accessible Life of a Firefly: how to create an accessible game). On the third one, I asked a friend from the university, Sandro Ferreira, to be the programmer. We submitted the game in the 2008 SBGames Game Festival (it's an annual game symposium in Brazil).

Resume: A firefly is employed as a "lamp worker". His job is to light the indicated lamp during the night and to do this he has to collect "eletros", electricaly charged insects. 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.

GAMEPLAY

Controls: The controls are very easy. Mouse movement moves the firefly, right click increases flight speed, left click decreases it. Esc for menu. It's all about timing and perception.

Description: The firefly has a constant speed (in the depth axis) that can be increased or decreased by pressing the mouse buttons. It also has a constant speed to follow the mouse pointer.
The eletros and enemies have a movement pattern and are scattered through the stages. There are stationary obstacles too. They can all be collected/colided with by contact with the firefly.
The objectives include reaching the end of the stages before the time limit is over (before complete nightfall), collecting at least a set number of eletros (so the lamp can be lighted during all the night long) and avoiding traps and enemies (you have 3 lives to spend).

THE DEMO

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. We probably listened to a hundred or more free songs trying to find one that would add more feeling to the game, but found none... And the gameplay had a few issues. We had some problems with the terrain image, so we were forced to use a small stage which was quite bad since part of the fun is to fly at a high speed (speed + tiny stage = you out of it in a few secs). Besides that, we did not had time to implement the enemies so it became a racing game instead of an adventure. Maybe we'll be able to fix those things and create a second version sometime. It is quite good though, considering we took about 3 weeks to do it.