Farm Nightmare - A pixel rpg horror

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

First just some quick info.

What’s this?
A pixel rpg horror game centered around a young boy with abandonment issues. He’s been left on a farm and will need to find a way to escape

What game engine is it made with?
I’m just using Java API’s including Java 2D

Who is making this?
Only me

RELEASE
Okay guys here is the first release though there isn’t a whole lot going on. Mainly running around grabbing keys to unlock doors and a few things to click on.

THE DOWNLOAD
Farm Nightmare 1_001

Controls:
arrow keys to move
shift: run
z : button 1
x: button 2

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Thanks for checking it out!

#2

It’s certainly not awful, but I think you could polish it up a bit.

One thing that I personally think can make a 2D horror game work is the sound design. You should find a sound-bro to maybe get some good ambience and creepy sound cues going on.

For example, this game essentially immediately turns off your fear reflexes because of the simple graphics. That’s the perfect opportunity to make weird stuff happen with the sound design and maybe even the computer itself (of course, don’t make it virus-tier though).

Just food for thought. It looks very nice so far!

#3

Looks good!
When can I play a demo?
A agree with the music suggestion

#4

@SkyAphid

I most certainly concur about polish and sound. I’ve messed around with a free sound generator called Psycle but am convinced it won’t do. Thinking I’ll need to team up with someone too since looking for the sounds i want as royalty free is rather difficult.

^ I’m working on a different scene (prison) gimme about a week and I should have something with sound

#5

So I know this seems a bit out of place due to the environment being a farm but the kid suffers from nightmares, okay?

This is a snapshot of testing out one idea for moving between rooms. Also got a sound loop going!

Now just need a nice creaky door sound or something to throw in there.

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#6

That looks really good. I like the sounds.

#7

Thanks, seeing you’re about the only one interested in a demo I’ll keep trying to aspire to your liking. :-X

#8

What’s the target platform? Like, will it be a game available on Steam?
Or will you port it to Android/IOS?

I like the art : )
I’m waiting to see what the monsters are going to look like.

#9

sounds are really creepy… :o

#10

@TheMeatMan

I’m not sure about releasing it via a publisher and think I might just host it on my website and sell it via paypal or something. This could of course change but as of now I’m thinking I’ll keep the game independent. I do want to port it to Android though am not sure about hosting it on the play store. Again, thinking independent here.

Thanks! I spent a good month drawing something new everyday pixel style and am glad it’s paying off. That was a lot of time spent away from programming.

This is actually a bit of a dilemma I’m currently facing. Kind of want to keep it psychological as opposed to lots of monsters though I do have a few “Boss monsters” in mind.

^ haha yeah, have to resort to creep sounds since the graphics won’t be able to pull it off quite as well.

#11

What do you mean by independent? Don’t you think you’d make more money on steam or google play?

#12

Coded a method today to load up different rooms in the game world. Attached is a video showing the player walking about the prison scene.

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#13

That looks dope.
Will there be a demo before the game comes out? I want to try it

#14

Yeah there’ll be one for sure. Just don’t have anything to really play yet.

#15

It looks OK at the moment. The only problem with this is that honestly, using Java2D, making interesting lighting or complex particle effects are going to be very hard. Also simple stuff such as rotation, tinting and raycasting become complex in Java2D. I’m only trying to help, and I think that this game has potential and I love horror RPGs, but I seriously suggest moving this game to a different framework. I highly recomend LibGDX which you have probably heard of. It allows for physics, camera rotation (That means that you can rotate the whole scene), camera zoom, dynamic lighting (Thats the main advantage for a game like this), very fast rendering and much more. Hope that this helped!

#16

I see your point but I haven’t witnessed anything overly complex in terms of the features you bring up in other horror rpgs. Ib for example is very basic and has none of these features you mention and it’s regarded as one of the best free rpg horror games, possibly any rpg horror for that matter. Furthermore, there’s a game (Wait) on steam that I’m sure implements the advanced lighting you’re talking about but I honestly thought that game didn’t even come close to other free games made with RPG maker which didn’t have advanced effects.

I do appreciate your comment but as of now I’m not thoroughly convinced that I need the advanced stuff. Though I won’t completely write it off, it’s just that I only started learning how to program and how to make a game this past February and I’m at the point where I want to make something with what I know. The next game I make I’m definitely going to dive further into OpenGL.

#17

– Added a way to move the player’s facing direction when he is up against a wall and can’t walk in that direction

– Added some more sound effects

– Added a few more art tiles depicting keys of various colors, a mannequin chained to the wall, and a dirty toilet.
The mannequin and the dirty toilet will be in different cells in the prison hall (though these aren’t shown in the video)

– Coded a method to show full screen sized images of items. There’s a pamphlet inside the starting cell that the player can pickup and read.

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#18

Sloppy, but it gets the point across
Don’t judge my dev skillz

http://flashpawstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/farmscrn.png

Working on having these here cell doors come flying at the player to do some damn game dodge effect or something :expressionless:

#19

I ran my .jar on a different machine with:

Win 7 Pro 64-bit
core i7-3770 @ 3.40GHz
8GB RAM
jre 1.8.0_101

and the game runs slow unless I change the affinity in Windows Task Manager to run on two cores. If I switch it back to run on all cores, it’s fine. The memory allocation on this machine is well over 200MB but on my development laptop its < 70MB.

dev laptop is old
win 7 32-bit
Intel core 2 duo @ 2.66GHz
4GM RAM
jre 1.8.0_65

Also tested on the same machine (i7) but with linux mint and it ran the game fine without tweaking any settings though I did not check memory/cpu usage.

Anyone know what gives? ???

#20

Time to profile what’s going on.