February's Game: Water Calamity

This was a close one, but today I finished this month's game.

Several things contributed to my tardiness at getting the game done. My son was off school for a week (half term break), I had lots of various appointments, was ill for several days. Mostly though, I just lost the drive to work on the game and kept putting it off which caused me to have less motivation and so on through and endless loop. Today though, I said "Enough is enough!"

I pledged to do this to improve my skills in coding and to prove to myself that I could make 12 simple games. My ambition in doing the One Game A Month challenge and the reason I'm taking a course in game development is so that I might eventually be able to start a career from a hobby. I'm not going to get anywhere by just sitting around playing games all the time, no matter how much I'd like to do so!

"Water Calamity" was originally called "Water Catastrophe", but due to a brain blip on my part while I was making the splash screen/overview/instruction page, the name got slightly changed. The story behind the game is this:

The petting zoo has run out of water. You must drive the van to the nearest watering hole and fill up the water tank and bring it back to the zoo.

Seems pretty simple, right? Not really. The van uses up fuel quite quickly; so quickly, in fact, that you will run out of fuel long before you reach the watering hole. Don't worry though - the van can be refuelled simply by running over junk food that is conveniently strewn along the road. Also, once you get to the watering hole, you'll find that the local wildlife don't really like you taking all of their water! They quickly run after you, into the van and try to drink the water before you get back to the zoo. This time there are even more conveniently placed rocks in the road. Run over them and the local wildlife gets thrown out the back of the van, bouncing across the road like their rear ends are made of rubber. If you make it back to the petting zoo, the animals there greet you happily. The End.

Just like last month, you can play the game on Steam (you need to download GameMaker in order to play, but there is a free version)  or download the exe (the exe only works on Windows). Again, there isn't a web browser (HTML5) version because when I tested it, it was super buggy, doing all sorts of weird things that did not happen at all on either the Steam Workshop or downloadable exe versions.

Please play the game and let me know what you think!
 

Thinking About February

February's idea for the One Game A Month challenge is another simple game. This one differs from the last game in that it is completely my idea, based off of a dream I had awhile ago.

The game design is as follows:

You own a petting zoo full of cute creatures, but your zoo has run out of water. You must drive to a watering hole, fill up your van with water and drive back.

There are a few problems though. First, your van uses up fuel rather quickly. The other problem is made apparent when you drain the watering hole. It seems the local wildlife don't appreciate you taking their water, so they jump into your van and do their best to drink as much of the water as they can before you get back to your zoo!

As we know, problems always have solutions and these are no different. Lack of fuel is easily solved as the "fuel" your van runs on is junk food and there is quite a bit of it littering the road. Simply run over it and your van automatically converts it into fuel. As for the animals...well, there's only one thing you can do - throw them out! This is done by hitting potholes and rocks in the road. Hit enough of them and an animal will fall out of the back of the van. The less animals there are in the van, the less they can drink!

This game is going to be done in GameMaker again as I still don't know enough C++ or Python to do much in the way of programming (I'm still learning the basics). I'm also not certain how I can turn this idea into an actual game; that is, keeping count of the animals, determining how to get GameMaker to randomly choose an animal to bounce out of the van and so on, but I do have a few ideas. If anyone can give me a hint or two, I will definitely listen!