Graduate Games Blog

I played some Halo Zero yesterday for some inspiration. First off, I can’t believe how hard the game was to find. The original author’s website is shutdown or gone and there was a ton of junk websites and forums that I had to wade through to even find a legit free download. I had played this free fan game 2-3 years ago and wanted to revisit it and take a look at the level design and enemy AI specifically.

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I had forgotten how action packed this game is. It’s pretty much constant shooting with some slight platforming. I realized that the level design is pretty flat – you basically run right and occasionally have to jump over obstacles. Enemies come at you in a pretty linear fashion as well. I do not think there will be quite as much shooting action in our scifi game (perhaps a few levels and sequences here and there). We will definitely be more like Metroid where platforming and exploration is key. One of the disadvantages that Halo Zero had was that it stuck to enemies solely from Halo 1 – meaning they’re pretty much all bipeds that walk towards you and shoot at you. Our game will have biped enemies, but will also have hopping creatures, crawlers, and flyers. This should give the shooting a little more depth than Halo Zero since enemies will be on varying levels of the y-axis.

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Another thing our game will have going for it is Eric Catto’s Box2D engine running in the background. Your character will still control straight-up old-school style- but other objects in the world (crates, grenades, etc.) will be subject to physics. This should make for some great scenarios: you could shoot rocks in mid-air that an enemy has hurled at you back at him, or blow a bunch of crates over to create a method of reaching a higher locale.

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One thing Halo: Zero will certainly have over our game is in-game/animated cutscenes.  It is our plan to use more of a comic-book style approach with static cutscenes.  This will allow for users to create their own cutscenes for user-created levels by just drawing their own images and packaging them with their level.