The Magical Meaning of ‘M’
Apologies for the delays in posting. It’s been a crazy year so far.
MacGuffin
In the last 10 days of 2008, there was a HoV contest at verge-rpg.com. Some of the mightiest hearts and minds in all of vergedom conglomerated to form a game the likes of which have totally been seen before but that they wanted to make nonetheless.
We came up with: Dial ‘M’ for MacGuffin, a Zelda-style top-down action adventure game which pits the mettle of a Dashing Chap (you) against the evil Lord Malefact, who has locked the doors of the whole village just before teatime.
Some would blame a world not ready for such a bold new form of art. Some would blame the lack of even a single boss fight. Some would blame the shoddy hit model for attacking.
In the end, I blame the fact that CrazyAsianGamer made a helluva good game on his own.
Well, that, and the fact that my arch-nemesis Kildorf was the head Judge.
Masters
Hyptosis made a mighty amount of art, only a fraction of which we got to add gameplay to in the 10 days. He had 4 more gorgeous overworld areas laid out. If this was a 20 day compo, we could’ve filled it up as we were to the content-fleshing-out portion and each dungeon seemed to take about 2 days of implementation and testing. Alas.
Ustor helped in a pinch with the occasional observation and some last minute scripting. His assistance was appreciated.
Gayo came to bat designing puzzles and dungeon layouts, filling up our team’s google site with a lot of information. He’s also to blame for the warp tile puzzle in the dungeon, so you should send your hate mail to him.
most of my time was spent working on the systems coding: entity handling, collision detection, goodie pooping, tools, destructable terrain, etc. There’s still some work to do, I think. The l;ast two days were spent making the dungeon work nice. Sadly we didn’t have enough time to get multiple dungeons in, but this game was/is fun enough and far enough along to deserve some more attention.



