The fourth round of RPP was different than the others. We had to focus on working with an IP (Intellectual Property) which is very common in the industry. Our team got Spaceballs as our IP. We thought to ourselves, “How can we make a game using Spaceballs that would be fun and in the spirit of the IP?” Our answer: think like Yogurt.
And so, Spaceballs: The Game was born.
Since Spaceballs was released in 1987, it would have been a ripe opportunity for Yogurt to hock Spaceballs: The Game for the NES. Our game tried to emulate the graphics and audio of an NES while keeping the humor of the movie. The programmers chose XNA as our platform since they found a 2D sidescrolling game engine already written that would suit our game perfectly.
When presenting the game to our fellow cohort members, Ron challenged us yet again: have other people play your game and only give the players one sentence of instructions. Our game did fairly well during that test. The player was able to distinguish what certain items did and who were friends and foes.
Ron also challenged us to use indirect control while designing our game, meaning guide the player in a way we wanted without forcing them into it. Think of it as gentle coaxing.
For this project, I was in charge of getting all of the sound effects and music for our game. I used a tool to convert MIDI files to make them sound 8-bit. You may recognize some of the tunes. All of the sound effects are from the game Super C (NES) for Wii’s Virtual Console. I recorded them directly off of my Wii. I helped the programmer’s by putting sounds in the game’s soundbank so they could focus on code.
I was also in charge of level design and I found our game’s font.
Lastly, I wrote some code using ImageMagick to flip some of our art assets around. Our artist was very busy, as he could only deliver assets that were facing right.
Before you play, you’ll need:
- Windows Installer v3.1 – Only needed if you’re on XP. You may have it already if your computer is up to date. Skip this if you’re on Windows Vista or 7. Download if the .NET Framework installation (below) fails.
- .NET Framework v3.5 SP1 – Only needed if you’re on XP or Vista. You may have it already if your computer is up to date. Skip this if you’re on Windows 7. Needed for the two XNA installers below.
- XNA 2.0 – Required
- XNA 3.0 – Required
To run the game after you’ve installed everything, simply unzip the zip file and double-click the “Run Spaceballs The Game” file within.
Team members: (Team 6) Me, Tucker George, Kenneth Greenblatt, Stephen Machalek, Dan Scholten