ICBM (with free and open AGS Project Files & Art Assets)

Started by Michael Davis, Wed 01/04/2015 23:45:13

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Michael Davis



********************** EDIT ***********************
Hey everyone! I just uploaded my ICBM Adventure Game Studio
project directory and all the Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files here:
www.gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/icbm/57197
**************************************************

Hey, AGSers!

Holy cow, it feels so weird posting on here again. I haven't posted anything to this forum in over a decade! := The last time I posted here was back when I was in college and we were still hoping for another Larry Vales game. A time travel one, if I remember correctly (I made a Reality-on-the-Norm game hundreds of years ago, back in 2001: www.realityonthenorm.info/game.php?id=98).

Well, I grew up and moved on and left AGS behind, but I recently had a gap in my employment (the games company I worked for in California lost funding and went out of business, wuamp wuammp :~() so I decided to use the free time to make a short retro pixel-art game! I was going to use Unity but a conversation made me remember AGS and then I also remembered that AGS already had, like, every feature I needed. So I looked it up and I was stoked to see it's still being maintained! And it's even more awesome now than it was fifteen years ago!

So anyway: I made a short, free game with AGS called ICBM and I'd love to know what y'all think.









The game, its AGS project folder, and all the art files
are available for free under an open Creative Commons license!




The official site is here:
www.icbm-game.com

The press kit is here:
www.icbm-game.com/press

And it's being hosted on GameJolt here:
www.gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/icbm/57197



I would love any feedback, and I would really appreciate any comments or ratings on the GameJolt page!

Thanks so much! Can't wait to hear what y'all think!


:cheesy: :cheesy: :cheesy:

Mandle

WELCOME BACK!!!

Oh, and while I'm checking this game out go and play Heroine's Quest, Donald Dowell, Adventure Island, and ummm...basically everything else awesome made in AGS which has come out over the last decade or so!!!

StillInThe90s

Very impressive trailers & screenshots!
Good use of unexpected free time, I would say. :-D

Monsieur OUXX

I read the title as this: "Windows 1.2 for IBM PC". I'm getting too old.
 

Michael Davis

Mandle: Thanks! I'm realizing that I have quite a backlog of great games to play haha

StillInThe90s: Thanks so much!

Monsieur OUXX: lol :grin:

Michael Davis

Man, it feels so awesome to log into these forums and see my completed game listed in the Announcements section!!! It only took me 15 years hahaha

ThreeOhFour

This looks excellent! I'm excited to try this out, sorry to hear about your employment situation, but good on you for using the opportunity to make something like this! :cheesy:


Mandle

#8
I have played a lot of war simulation games and I must just say that this is the most accurate simulation of a cold-war-era missile-silo control-room that I have ever seen. Both in mood and technological detail it represents perfectly what the brave staff of these facilities had to go through every day. I even have to wonder if you are perhaps crossing the line of giving away national secrets at some points in the game, but I guess the technology displayed in the simulation is so outdated by now that this is not a factor? I hope....*gulp*

The level of suspense grew and grew with every mission, especially when:

Spoiler
One of the key pieces of equipment needed for your daily functioning disappears around mission 2 or 3...I almost crapped my pants when I saw it was missing...I was at a loss for a while but managed to continue on without it...But only just...
[close]

And the suspense cannot be topped by playing the game at the highest difficulty level: I was literally on the edge of my chair throughout missions at this level! Literally like: "Oh God, when is this ever going to end?! Holy SHIT!!! There's more?!".

I did eventually manage to complete all the missions and took away an important message as well from this game:

Thank GOD we had such dedicated staff manning these facilities during the cold war. This simulation really shows the stress they were under and how, by following the lead of their superiors, including...

Spoiler
The President Of The United States, who can contact you at any time via a hotline telephone link whenever you must spring into action.
[close]

...the world as we know it still exists today!!!

I would highly recommend this game to any hardcore nuclear-war-simulation-game fans out there who just love that feeling of ultimate power that comes from having your finger on the big red launch button:

You will have never played one quite like this before!

selmiak

simpsons did it before... no, wait, actually it was selmiak... but not that elaborate and with these cool gfx and vfx! Really cool!

AprilSkies

Impressive work iamMichaelDavis!

www.apemarina.altervista.org

Monsieur OUXX

Every aspect of this game (game + trailer + visual material ) is so cool. How is it possible to reach this level of coolness while looking totally casual and relaxed? Teach me, master.
 

Michael Davis

Mandle: Thank you so, so much for your kind words! It's crazy, because of the nature of the, err.. gameplay, I suppose we can call it, I couldn't really share it with a lot of people to get feedback until it was almost done, because I didn't want testers to get fatigued with the whole idea of it too early and then not be able to really nitpick for errors, so I was kind of working on it in a vacuum, much more than I would normally be comfortable (I normally prefer to share stuff early to let it get beat up on as soon as possible). It was always going to be short and free and it was always going to be a weird, niche product, so obviously I was never expecting an avalanche of praise, but I wasn't sure if, like, ANYONE was going to like it (outside of saying "Well, the art sure is nice"), and had sort of adjusted my expectations accordingly. All I could do was try to make it amusing to myself and then cross my fingers.

I say all that to say, basically, I had no idea if it would have an audience, much less be able to find it if it existed. So your post, and a few other responses like it that I have received in various places online, are such a welcome relief to read! :-D Thank you so much for your time spent playing it as well as your awesome, awesome comments. I was absolutely floored reading your post, and I re-read it probably a dozen times haha

Selmiak: I really, really really love Don't Push The Button. Like, a whole lot
Spoiler
Just to be sure: the button IS unpushable, correct? That is, just, bravo/a, sir or ma'am. Bravo/a. Delightful. Inspired.

Also, there was a sound effects and music slider, but none of either, as well, right? Originally, ICBM was going to be strictly just the art of the background, sound fx, and the hand drumming its fingers with ZERO player interactivity, and I had a gag in the options menu to Enable or Disable Mouse Support (for a game that was keyboard-only, and even then only in the menus, there was to be literally no interactivity during "play"). When I had the idea to add the mouse to the gameplay, I lost that gag, which, just, broke my heart (though I gained the option to add the customizable mouse cursors, which I'm not sure if anyone has even noticed yet! haha).

Anyway, seeing how masterfully you have already executed the same joke, makes me feel like I can let that go. :P
[close]

AprilSkies: thank you!

Monsieur OUXX: Thank you so much for saying that! Especially coming from a French person, whose opinion on coolness is therefor automatically 1.6x more legitimate than mine! :P

The short answer is just "lots of practice" haha. I'm almost 33, and I've been making weird stuff and putting it on the Internet since I was in high school in the late '90s. And looking at the background you submitted to the Lost Cities Background Blitz, I don't think you need any pointers from me, pal. If anything it's the other way around

Mandle

Quote from: iamMichaelDavis on Mon 06/04/2015 02:51:36
and I re-read it probably a dozen times haha

SPOILERS:
Spoiler
I re-read/re-wrote the post about that many times as well in preview mode just to be sure I was:

(A) Not giving away too much...
(B) Not saying anything about the game that couldn't be taken in two different ways so that not-yet-players and already-played-players could both take seperate meanings from the same post...If you want to use my post as a "quote from a player" to promote the project then I would be honoured!
(C) Not concentrating too much on the hidden jokes (see point A)...By which I mean: I actually wrote a paragraph about how awesome the cursor select mode was but then realised that by doing so I was hinting too much towards the final payload the game delivers by concentrating on such a seemingly trivial point, and deleted it...
[close]

Michael Davis

#14
haha I am so, so stoked that you liked it. I also forgot to say, in response to your comments about state secrets: the United States were and are actually pretty open and transparent (I mean, relatively, of course) about our nuclear program, because there's no good in having these things if you're not going to show them off so everyone knows you have them. The missile launch procedure has been documented and shown to reporters, and the extreme safety precautions the program employs are bragged about openly.

Also, while everything in the instructions and "story" is based on reality (that is a real missile squadron actually stationed at that real Air Force Base, etc.) the workstation and its contents are a complete fabrication. I just made it all up :P Graphically I tried to base it on the real thing, especially the communications panel (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Minuteman_III_Launch_Control.JPG) but as for the names of all the components and the descriptions, it's all fictional.
Spoiler
It is meant to seem as if there was a real game to play, were you to ever receive orders. You would receive codes on the phone that you would then verify on the verification panel, then give the orders to your superior who would decide on the next course of action, you'd plot values on the targeting computer to use on the BIOS writer, then hand that disk over to your superior and then finally turn the key. So I didn't worry to much about what the real panel looked like or behaved like because I wanted to "gamify" the whole thing.
[close]

Also also, (I hope this isn't getting too pedantic but feel free to TL;DR right over this post whenever I start getting too boring) there is a rough plot, though I didn't want to spell it out too much, with, like, a screen of text at the end outlining it all or anything.
Spoiler
The opening movie is meant to be a war propaganda film that the main character, Derek Evans, saw as a little boy in school (in Eugene, Oregon), which made him want to grow up and join the Air Force to enroll in its nuclear program. And the ending video is, his mom makes him VHS tapes where she records a couple hours of live TV for him, like, the local news and stuff, the latest episode of Alf or whatever, for him to watch down in the bunker. And he sends them back when he's bored of rewatching them over and over and she reuses them, and that's why the tape is so worn out. What you're seeing on the tape at the end of the game is just a random slice of one of those videos she has sent him. And, also, it's meant to be a window into the contemporary world of 1983, of course, and be subversive and "deep" and "about things", etc. etc. :P
[close]

Mandle

Yeah, I kinda guessed most of that about the control panel:

Spoiler
I really just added that comment as an extra hook to up the interest level a tad ;)
[close]

The bit you wrote about the school propaganda film reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAiYwADzr2Q

(Much better than the Bert the Turtle film (laugh) )

KodiakBehr

This game brought me so much delight -- you have no idea.  This is so jaw-droppingly stylish, I have so many questions about how it was made.

You are an inspiration.  I highly recommend a side-serving of The Atomic Cafe with this game.

Michael Davis

KodiakBehr: Thanks so much! I'd be happy to try to answer any questions you have, and I have made all of my Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files, as well as the Adventure Game Studio project directory, available open and free at the GameJolt page:

http://gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/icbm/57197/

KodiakBehr

I am already tearing through them, learning as much as I can from your example as to how to improve upon my interface weaknesses.  This is simply brilliant -- welcome back to AGS and never leave again.

Michael Davis

Thank you so much! :=

So far ICBM has been written about on:

Vice MOTHERBOARD (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-most-realistic-cold-war-game-is-a-boredom-simulator),
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04/13/icbm-simulator-free-game/),
IndieGames.com (http://indiegames.com/2015/04/icbm_lets_you_blow_up_the_worl.html),
and was recommended by Rami Ismail, one of the founders of Vlambeer (http://ramiismail.com/2015/04/icbm/).

This has just been the best month ever :D :D :D

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