About this project...

Our ultimate goal was to set ourselves up to create higher quality games for our clients. We determined that the best approach would be to create a game, the kind of game that we want to play, without any pressure over time or budget or requirements. We chose to make a character based, platformer game, because we believe it supports the widest range of game mechanics and scenarios, allowing us to tailor an original game to any property or concept.

To demonstrate the codebase that we have developed, we created a game called Puzzle Farter. In this game, the player controls a character who can fly around on his own farts. He must avoid enemies to reach the exit door on each level. But, this is just one possibility. Using our codebase, we could have created the following games:

• The hero is a young girl at the mall. She needs to avoid the cute boys and the mean kids by ducking for cover in clothes racks and changing into disguises.
• The hero is a ghost who can travel between the living world and the world of the dead. When the player hits the spacebar, the world changes and all living creatures become zombified versions of themselves.
• The hero can {jump with springy shoes, turn invisible, transform, stick to walls, throw water balloons, ride on the back of a kangaroo, etc.} while {escaping from the haunted house, collecting butterflies, catching ghosts, defeating all of the enemies, solving a puzzle, performing a task within a time limit, etc.}.

The codebase is modular, which allows us to vary the abilities of the hero, the type and behavior of the enemies, and the goal of the game (or the goal of each level). Not only does this permit us to design a large set of concepts, but it also gives us a great deal of flexibility to scale to any budget, as well as predictability with scheduling.

Perhaps most important, when we develop a game on this codebase, we can concentrate our full effort on the property and the quality of gameplay, rather than spending the majority of time on the low level details of the physics or collision detection, which is already done.