My Flash Game

As I mentioned in my last post I wanted my own game to be similar to the shooters of old. Whilst looking through 3 volumes of the “Guinness world records – Gamer’s edition”, I found myself kept getting drawn back to one of my favourite games “Duck Hunt” by Nintendo.

I have many fond memories of playing this game as a kid, and I am old enough to remember when that was considered cutting edge. I decided that I wanted to do a homage to “Duck Hunt”. This fits the genre I wanted to work within, could be easily achieved with my limited skill level, and most importantly, would hopefully be considered fun.

Obviously my game is not a straight port of the original, and in the first version I have completed, numerous artistic decisions have been dictated by my technical ability. The game is called “Duck Killer” and is supposed to be taken tongue in cheek, it consists of a title screen and a game screen, using nextframe and prevframe commands to switch between the two when certain conditions are met.

The title screen contains the name of the game and instructions, both written in the stencil font to replicate the macho font and styles, which dominated the 80’s film and computer game scene. It also contains a start button to get the player to the game screen. The background is the same for both the title and game. It is very bright colours and block images, i.e. Southpark, again this is due to my limited drawing ability, but also to give it the same crude, ironic, adult feel that Southpark has.

The game itself has 10 ducks which fly around the screen, you have 15 bullets with which to shoot them. Each shot causes the others to speed up fractionally, making them harder to hit. If you use all your bullets it’s game over, with your score in the top right corner, then you shoot again to restart, but if you hit all ten you win, and have to click a restart button to play again.

The ducks all move independently due to each having its own conditional statement and variables to control their movements. However they do follow their set paths each time, again due to my technical ability, which is a reason why they speed up by multiplying the x and y variables by the small amount of 1.1 of the previous value to change each users experience, but also because I remember old games used to do the same. Your score and bullets are counted in the top right corner, and are simply two variables, one counting up, one counting down. Each time a shot is fired the bullet counter drops by one, and if a duck is hit the score counter increases by one, the duck image is removed and replaced with a blood splat image on the same x and y coordinates, again to give it those ‘Southpark’ connotations, and it is all wrapped up with a gun shot sound clip being played.

If the bullet counter drops to 0 the game over message is pulled onto screen using new x and y coordinates, and if that counter drops again to -1 the game goes back to the title screen. However if the hit counter reaches 10, the bullet counter input text box is switched to a text string input, and pulls in a reset button and message of congratulations. On the odd chance that the player hits the last bird with the last bullet the congratulation message and reset button are pulled in instead of the game over by using if and else statements. Finally I drew a crosshair and by using the x and y coordinates of the mouse pointer, along with the hide command, the game uses my crosshair instead of the mouse pointer.

The game works in this version, but may not be the final version. It can be easy, but it is not and RPG epic like “Final Fantasy” or “Blue Dragon” which you pay £40 for, and intend on investing 100+ hours in, it is designed to be played in one 5 minute session, where your first couple of attempts you use to get your eye in, but then it is easily achievable and satisfying.