Brock Crocodile - 16 bit inspired crocodile action!

Good Afternoon everyone!

I've been meaning to make a post about a project I've been working on these past few years, Brock Crocodile, finally I decided I had a good amount of work to show off the game so without further ado...

Project Overview: Introducing Brock Crocodile! A platform adventure starring a 30 year old red crocodile that draws heavy inspiration from 16 bit platfromers like Monster World, Sonic the Hedgehog and Quackshot. The game is a single player experience that aims to deliver a mix between fast paced platforming, exploration and simple run and gun/combat gameplay.

Gameplay:
The gameplay in Brock Crocodile is split between the two towns the player can visit to purchase powerups and the levels Brock must complete to progress the story. The game is designed in a linear fashion but the players can always revisit the stages to find whatever they overlooked. In the stages, Brock will be able to use his whip to take out baddies and use it to swing across pitfalls or interact with the background. If you prefer long distance combat, no problem! Brock comes packed with a fruitgun too, which can either dish out one of your five a day or take down some goons. Check out the video below to get an idea of the gameplay.

The Levels:
The game is set on the continent sized Crocodillian Island where Brock will venture from the local mountains to a bustling metropolis before venturing into the badlands in the east. The aesthetics for the stages take strong inspiration from classic SEGA platformers both in art direction (Blue skies!) and level design. Each stage will hold a new gimmick and baddie for Brock to tackle. Sometimes you'll find you might be able to blast through them whilst other levels will require more patience if you want to overcome the obstacles in your way. Above all else though, I want to make highly replayable levels filled with multiple routes and secrets for the player to discover.

Description: The adventure begins in the mountainous and forest region of the Gazadiaz Ruins. Known for it's world famous spinning bridges and lavish mushrooms, the player must navigate past the ancient ruins and face off against the leader of the Turtle Gang to find out what's going on. An easy task for Brock but he should be on the watch out, whilst the stage is straight forward he may find one or two surprises if he looks hard enough.

Description: The player must venture deep within the battleship and take on an army of bees. Full of flying hoops, transportation tubes and honeywalls Brock can walljump across, this stage is much more fast paced than the one prior and the player must be as quick as they are cautious if they want to get an audience with the leader of the beehive, Princess Cassandra.

Every good mascot game needs the baddies to back it up and I'm hoping I won't be an exception in this case! I'm designing each level to have it's own unique baddies, they'll be little reoccuring foot soldiers from stage to stage as the player will be taking on turtles, bees, tigers and all manner of fearsome individuals in boss battles of all shapes and sizes!

Inspiration:
If you looked at the screenshots and trailer and thought this looked like something you would find on the Mega Drive/Genesis, good! I'm a big fan of a lot of the oldschool platformers that appeared on the console ranging from Revenge of Shinobi to Ristar. But Brock Crocodile's biggest inspiration no doubt come from three particular games/series, Monster World, Sonic the Hedgehog and Quackshot. In both Monster World and Quackshot I loved the designs of the world and the gameplay whilst I appreciate the vast complexity of the level designs with the classic Sonic games and I draw a lot from those three titles in this game.

The Music:
The tunes in Brock Crocodile are going to be, at the very least, based off of the Mega Drive/Genesis soundchip and you go already listen to the first level's track in the trailer. We've got three talented musicians onboard;

Steve Lakawicz (Produced the trailer music) - Please login to see this link.
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Nishant Pawar - Please login to see this link.

Progress
- The base engine is 100%, just fine tuning it for optimal platforming speed and physics!
- Currently the first 5 stages have their layouts completed with a sixth being finalized of a possible 20/21 stages.
- The first 2 stages are being polished and a demo will be released soon, watch this space!
- The first town layout is complete and the shop system is finished, work needs to be done on the (basic) dialogue system and some NPC sprites.

Sorry if I rambled on, I'm just excited to finally announce the game, a pleasure to meet all of yours acquaintances!

Mini-update, I'm happy to say the official website is finally open! I'll be doing updates every Monday, from minor things such as character profiles to slightly more major news such as the stages, music etc, link below.

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Quote from droxon

Looks really cool, nice work!

looking forward to play the actual game

Quote from faber

Beautiful!

Thank you for the kind words! Hopefully should have a demo ready soon to show off

Been ages since I last replied to this topic, time to resurrect it!

So I've been working less on the levels and more on the hub section of the game. Looking at the dialogue box (Which was just a plain grey box.) I've changed it to be a black box with a white outline and it looks great.

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But I think the best change was adding a portrait to show off the NPCs, it forces me to do a bit more work but I think the pay off will be better characterisation as a whole for the project!

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Obviously they'll be loads more still to design, I think I'll have to make another 40 odd faceshots, taking a note from some oldschool 16 bit RPGs too, the mugshots will be blinking/talking when their speaking to Brock.

Thanks for the encouragement Danny!

Funny enough the demo is actually fully playable. I'm just holding it back because the game is missing some vital music and sound effects, I'm a bit of a perfectionist like that. Hopefully my musicians will have provided me the missing sounds soon so I can have the demo available publicly!

Thought it was best if I went a bit further in detail in the tools I used and a bit more on the history of the title. Consider this my first *proper* developer blog!

HISTORY
Brock Crocodile finds it’s early roots back in the early 1990s when as a young chap I decided that I wanted to be a game designer. From designing the characters in LEGO bricks to making faux magazines posting previews and reviews of the title. After a stint in various fangaming communities during the early 2000s I had come across Clickteam’s highly popular The Games Factory, a video game development program. The application used a range of GUI tools instead of scripting to help allow users an easier way at designing computer games. But it was not until 2009 that I actually began designing Brock Crocodile.

The First Pieces of Art
On a late Autumn day I finally decided that I should give my attention at actually designing the game I had planned to and so I set about creating the first Brock sprite. Opening up Microsoft Paint and using the basic palette as a guide to the colours I would use, I drew some nifty little circles and started attaching them together, before long I had the first official Brock Crocodile sprite! But I did not stop there and quickly after completing Brock I went straight for designing the first area the Gazadiaz Ruins. Looking back at it, whilst the same Brock sprite has remained through from 2009 the first stage has changed considerably. Now with more shading in both the foreground and background with much more detail, I opted to abandon the strict restriction on the palette limitation I set on myself.

Crafting the Level Design
When it came to designing the levels I originally opted to once again use Microsoft Paint but found it much more effective and efficient if I used the good old fashioned pen(cil) and paper. Another area that saw drastic changes as the project went into full production and saw me unfortunately scrap some good work but trying to implement my originally Microsoft Paint level designs lead me to the realisation they were just not as good as the new set I was making with my pencil and pad. I must have scrapped a good level of two worth of content but I’m not sadden by it, in fact I think what I have designed now is much more impressive! Compare the first half of stage 1 with that of the level design I created using Microsoft Paint to see what a massive difference it makes. Another major contribution to the project was digging through level designs of classic platformers from the 1990s and it proved to be incredibly help at analysing what they did right and how they implemented an effective design centred around the game’s core mechanics.

Working on the Engine
Now whilst the art may seem to some to have taken some time, nothing compares to the amount of time I spent programming the title. Thankfully the Clickteam community have a stockpile of tutorials on helping you learn how to use their programs and I finally dived in and discarded my old copy of The Games Factory I had from the early 2000s and decided to purchase Multimedia Fusion 2. Using various tutorials on Youtube and both the Clickteam official community sites as well as the many fan websites through out the internet, I eventually managed to get a hang of coding my first proper engine with Multimedia Fusion 2. From first giving Brock the ability to jump, then to walk, shoot, get hurt etc it all slowly added up. Ironically the core part of the gameplay, Brock’s whip, was the hardest and last core part to implement but finally after many stressful nights that too was accomplished!

Resolution Wars
Another massive change that happened during the early production of the title was the resolution change. The original levels were designed with a resolution of 240 x 180 to try and stick with the same sort of resolution a 8 bit title would usually be restricted too. However in 2013, after finally completing the base engine I decided that to not only to push for a much more varied and better art direction (By giving myself access to a wider range of colours.) I found a larger resolution would allow for a much less cluttered screen that was being suffocated with the HUD taking more then I would like of the vital space. More importantly though is that it helped the player avoid colliding with obstacles and enemies. Finally, the window size was upped to 320 x 200 (Closer to games found on the SEGA Mega Drive.) allowing me to space out the levels just a little bit more and allowed for a much better swing radius for a key component in Brock Crocodile, the use of his whip.

This wraps up the history lesson for the project, I hope you all enjoyed reading about the project a bit and please look forward to more developer blogs where I’ll be going more in depth from things such as level design to the coding of the game itself. Thanks again for reading and look forward to many more updates coming in the future, till then enjoy your Monday afternoon people!

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Thanks Paul and Craig, Sonic is definitely a feel I'm going for, or rather stuff from 90s era platformers on the Mega Drive/Genesis so I'm happy to hear that!

Been a while since I updated but the project is very much alive. Just completed the 8th stage out of 20, close to hitting the halfway mark of completion.

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An image from a month ago when I started work on the 4th Level, City Lockdown, and had only some basic placeholder graphics whilst my level artist for the stage, Please login to see this link., finished up bringing the concept art to life. On my end I've been busy animating the characters to get rid of the placeholder baddie art (Up top you'll notice Mikey is a stand in for a Gunther the Monkey and Russell the Ape is a solitary frame.) but here's the completed the idle animation for the barrel throwing enemy.

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I'll be saving showing off the completed City Lockdown until a little later, I've got a feeling it would make a good blog on how I plan out a level and bring it to life, but here's a teaser of the level design for the stage.

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[quote='DigiGuineaPig','Please login to see this link. can't tell you how much I would enjoy playing this! Great job! [/img]

Thanks! Don't worry about playing it, hopefully I'll have a demo out soon

Just finished this up for screenshot Saturday, Brock having a delightful conversation with the boss of Museum Mayhem, some strange Golem like creature, or is it?

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Got another developer's blog up on the site

Developer's Blog #2: Updates and Progress.

First before we start this developer blog, Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone had a warm and fuzzy festive period with friends and family. I thought I might try my hand at giving a bi-monthly report from now on. It lets you guys know the the project is alive and kicking whilst also letting everyone interested know how everything is coming along. So without further ado, let's get the second developer's blog running!

A quick recap on what occurred during December that ended up being far busier than I anticipated but I still had more than enough time to contribute to my project. Working with my level artist Matthew I quickly drew up the concepts for the fourth level and he helped produced the majority of the art. I also completed the set up for both stages for City Lockdown and now leaves me with working on the fourth boss, Lankeyarms (Name just a placeholder.)

So far this January I've started planning out the level design for Breakout Prison and working on the concept art. In order to keep things fresh I've decided to exclude any sort of baddies from the stage safe for a few secret ones used to help boost a player's score. In terms of the speed I'd describe each stage as the following; Gazadiaz Ruins (Fast) Beehive Battleship (Fast) Museum Mayhem (Slow) City Lockdwon (Moderate) Breakout Prison (Slow) I'm really hoping that this mixing up would help differentiate the levels apart from another, of course it's a dangerous method too, I don't want the gameplay to slow down excessively that it'd bore players.

Although it does share a gimmick from Museum Mayhem (Laser beams to turn on and off.) the stage is also equipped with flamethrowers that are activated when the player is spotted by a search light, retractable spikes, floors, doors and also a mini-puzzle where you'll have to insert coded boxes into the floor to open a door. It definitely is aiming to be a bit more time consuming than the prior two stages (That should be completed within 3 to 4 minutes in total.) since it's the only level in the game that has a single stage baring the final level. And again barring the final stage, this one has the lowest number of alternate routes. Coming off of City Lockdown that had upwards of 16 different paths, I'm gunning for a more linear straight forward level with maybe 2 or 3 different routes the player can take.

Now back to Lankeyarms, just like with the stages I'm hoping to keep the bosses fresh. An elderly primate dressed in a fashionable sharp white suit, he jumps around from the stage using his steam powered gauntlets that jettisons him into the air and tries to land a spinning roll on Brock. Failing that he always has a few handy banana grenade's to throw at our scaly protagonist. Lankeyarms leads a group of monkeys and apes to assault Serena City and capture it's mayor after botched attempts at stealing the artifact Brock recovers in the first stage. A thing to note about him is that he is so far, the shortest boss Brock encounters in the game and the second shortest overall (Brock's rival, Egaunodon, is the shortest being as tall as Brock) so trying to take him out with anything but your whip could be difficult.

That wraps up this developer blog, I hope you enjoyed reading it and one of my goals for this coming year is to start churning these out on a more regular basis. Until then folks!

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Just a little tease of the fourth level.

We've also got a Facebook page now, all shares and likes appreciated! Please login to see this link.

Developer's Blog #3: Designing a Boss

Welcome again for another insight into the development of Brock Crocodile. On this week blog I’m going to be talking about a central component in the game, the boss battles! Bosses are one of my favourite moments in video games, they can go from hectic shootouts to downright brink of sanity crazy. The first thing I do before starting any boss is designing the character themselves. Having the most awesome boss battle means very little if the character themselves aren’t memorable. I tend to look at titles from the Yakuza series as some of the best boss battles in gaming and how the games’ constantly take liberties in the fights to give the bosses some rather unrealistic special powers. I’m also trying to avoid repeating myself, the first four bosses range from a giant turtle with plasma cannons embedded in his shell to the current boss, a smartly dressed, elderly and slender ape with mechanical gauntlets.

The next bit would be getting a rough idea of the boss’ attack pattern and fighting style. This however depends greatly on the prior bosses as well as some future planning of later bosses. For example outside of his plasma cannon the first boss Pummell Gunzhell attacks by retreating into his shell and rolling towards the player. The following boss Princess Cassandra would hover around in her bee mech before trying to impale Brock with her stinger. The difference in both bosses are more than just aesthetics. Whilst Pummell’s attack’s can be dodged by jumping in one spot, Cassandra requires movement to get out of the way of her attack. The way to attack them is different too, you can get a few whip attacks on Pummell whilst footed on the ground but Cassandra requires Brock to jump to reach her hitspot area.

With that in mind and with the third boss following Pummell’s method of attack and opening, Lankeyarm is closer to Cassandra. Originally Lankeymonk was meant to be swinging back and fourth but I deemed that a bit too similar to Cassandra so soon and just a bit too difficult for the fourth boss too. He was always going to have specially designed gauntlets but they were to give him extendable limbs in a sort of Dhalism-like way but now instead uses them to jettison himself into the air. Once he reaches the end of the screen the game gives the boss a choice to either initiate his second attack or go back in the opposite direction. His second attack occurs when he hangs off the ceiling and pulls out three bombs after which he tosses them into the air. Once they’ve landed the players must judge depending on how fast the bombs are flashing to correct guess which bomb will go off first and position themselves next to the bomb that will go off last.

Another thing that was introduced with the previous boss, the Asguardian Golem, was the boss slightly changing their attack pattern based on their HP. This will not necessarily occur with all the bosses and some will even have totally different forms but it’s just one of the many ways to keep certain battles fresh from others. With Lankeyarm, this difference is less to do with more aggressive attacks like the third boss but more to do with giving the players less openings to attack the boss with.

Once a basic moveset was done it was finally time to let some people review the boss fight. A few friends (Shout out to Farzana and Bruno.) suggested the boss was a bit bland so in the name of variation, Lankeyarm changes the height of his jump and the speed (Moving as fast as Brock.) at set intervals. It certainly adds a lot more challenge to the battle and definitely means players should be cautious when attacking Lankeyarm at certain sections but not too hard that he would be out of place as the fourth boss. You can check a demonstration of the boss battle (Without the animation unfortunately!) above and one funny glitch I encountered.

That wraps up this developer’s blog, I hope you guys and gals enjoyed watching it and on a final note, we recently opened up a Facebook page, drop by and give us a like/share if you can! Till next time!

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Quote from happygreenfrog

First time I've posted on this thread. Looking forwards to the release of this game! It looks like the sort of game I'd like.

Thank you! Always encouraging to hear people like to try your game

Quote from Wolkam

So much work you did ! and it's cool that you explain how you did it I will wait to try it You plan to put it on some mobile platform or just PC ?

Hope I don't keep you waiting for too long, thanks for liking it!

It's coming just for PC now but I did want to try making a version. The twist would be that like this is based off of old 16 bit consoles I wanted to see if I could try a fun 8 bit like version for iOS/Android. Also thanks for the follow on Twitter!