Agent Blue UI

Agent Blue has a variety of items, from weapons to ammo counts, that a player needs to keep track of. As we started to get non-engine elements into the game it has been a struggle to balance between the amount of information on the screen and screen clutter. Just for example it's important to know what the exact statistics of a weapon are when deciding if you should throw it away but it's not important to have those stats showing when hiding from an enemy who could sneak up in the screen space covered by the weapon information.

Current inventory screen (not final)

There are alternating phases in Agent Blue, first you get a relaxed mission planning stage and then you are transported to an actual level where you have an objective to complete while pressure mounts. We wanted to give players the ability to choose their items but we don't want them to slow down mid level to puzzle over exact stats, at the same time there are items a player can pick up mid level that they need to be aware of. To solve this issue we added a special function for sliding in specific UI elements.With this functionality we were able to implement both the ability to slide in changed UI elements such as when the player acquires a keycard and the ability to slide in all the nonessential UI if the user holds down a button while not taking over the screen like the inventory screen.

Nonessential UI onscreen (not final)

Nonessential UI offscreen (not final)

The new slide behavior has allowed us to better differentiate between the sections of our game and reinforces the underlying design. To recap we have a larger more detailed view of inventory between levels where a user can really build their character, UI that gets out of the users way and a way to unobtrusively signal that the user has acquired something new that the need to take notice of immediately.

Agent Blue

Agent Blue is Oakmound Studio’s current project, our first since shifting to program in Go. A 2d game in the style of Metal Gear, Agent Blue has the player navigate through levels populated with hostiles, sneaking around and dealing with them in any way possible.



Agent Blue’s levels are procedurally generated and death is permanent, making the game a stealth-based roguelike. It rewards careful resource management and being picky about what conflicts one engages in.



We’re also creating Agent Blue to see what problems come up as we develop Oak, a Go game engine which we hope to release as open source when we are happy with its API. We are updating Agent Blue and Oak every week and we are happy to receive and incorporate feedback as we go.

We will be writing posts about our development process and new features as they are added to the game. If you are interested in our game, how a group like us makes games, or even just how long we can keep writing then please write a comment!

Oakmound Studio

We are a group of three who love games and love making them in our free time. Over the last 1 and a half years we have worked on 3 major projects: Dyscrasia, Esque, and Agent Blue. Starting out we worked with Crafty.js to develop Dyscrasia and Esque at which point we decided to move past its restrictions. Looking for a better performance we moved over to program in Go and decided to make our own game engine, Oak and a single player game for our new engine, Agent Blue.

Dyscrasia

Oakmound's first project was called Dyscrasia. Dyscrasia was modeled after games like agar.io, intended to be an in-browser multiplayer sandbox. It was imagined to be a kind of online version of megaman battle network. It is currently abandoned due to performance limitations of the engine used to build it.

The final version of Dyscrasia, 0.0.3a, is available here. Combat is effectively broken, and it runs very slowly, but you can platform around and mess with settings, and if anyone else comes online at the same time, you can see one another.

Dyscrasia was worked on from June of 2015 to December of 2015.

Esque

From 1/1/2016 to 2/1/2016 Oakmoundstudio created the game Esque which you can find here: https://oakmound.itch.io/esque

We had recently encountered issues with the limits of Crafty.js when working on Dyscrasia and decided to make something smaller. Inspired by the "game in a month" series we decided to sit down and make our own.

Esque had three main goals:

1.  have a simple control schema that maps in a natural sense
2.  have a small time span that has events you can learn from but still be surprised by
3.  have a well constrained scope.

//More to be added later about how and why we chose and met these goals.

//More to add about the development cycle and how constraining our time forced us to cut but also produce what we did.