@HanSolo, post #4
@BULI, post #3
@] SKOLMAN_MWS ˇ agrEssOr [, post #13
@groovebox, post #15
I WILL get around to answering your questions
The game took a year longer than originally scheduled because it took me forever to get into the workflow needed for the environments. This time had a good effect on the basic gameplay as a lot of raw ideas were discussed, rejected or refined as well as giving Jason apple time to tweak the raw controls and create the editors that I would later use to design the levels and battles.
It's a shame we had to rush it out the door towards the end but the market was winding down and we just ran out of cash.
To quote Jason Perkins when we wrapped up; "it was the best of times and the worst of times"; Early performance anxiety and having to sleeping on friend’s couches/moving back to your parents is never great but spending the summer of '94 in Renegades offices, tweaking and playtesting the levels is some of the best fun I've had working in games.
Ruff was a real labour of love which made it's original reception all the sweeter as well as it still getting fondly talked about.
Some "Fun" Facts:
Jason came to me and asked if I wanted to do a game with him and Renegade using Castle of Illusion staring Mickey Mouse as the main point of reference. The name "Ruff and Tumble in the Fantasy Forest" is his as is "Doctor Destiny".
We played a HELL of a lot of Sonic, Marioworld and Fire and Ice in the early stages of development.
I really wasn't down with doing a cutesey themed game so the big gun and the "Tin-Head" robots are down to me.
The bees spawn from hives in the trees- these can be blown up.
The game DOES have "leaps of faith" but these are only used for bonus areas.
Harsh but fair was the main level design philosophy.
A lot of what is laughably refered to as a story came about from shoe-horning a plot around the art that I'd done; Mario and Sonic had coins and rings so I did marbles because they looked nice. The Alice in Wonderland "story" was literally the first thing I thought of when someone asked me about story- we just stuck with it as it kinda worked and was suitably rubbish and unobtrusive. We cared more about how the game played than any kind of deep and meningfull storyline that no-one else seemed to be interested in at the time. As with a lot of other aspects of the game, we thought "if we can't do it well, we just won't do it", this is why a lot of stuff got cut.
The last two bosses we based on what can be done quickly. Personally I really like the gameplay of the Saucer enemy but the last boss was based on something I did right at the start of the game.
Sorry about the lack of an end game- one was story boarded as well as an intro, but these movies would have taken a lot of time to make and most certainly required another disk. Besides we would have rather made more levels.
There are two core mechanics that no one seems to "get" but make it a lot easier:
1. You can pull down when airborne to drop a lot quicker, this make s landing on moving platforms and avoiding enemy's attacks a lot easier (I ripped this off from Fire and Ice)
2. Enemies don't drop power ups randomly; if you kill enemies fast enough they start to drop power ups in an accending order, a little like the increasing score you get for eating ghosts in PacMan. there are a lot of areas in the game where the player can save up groups of enemies and go there with a powered up weapon and mow them down to earn lots of extra health and lives as well as boost the time you have each weapon for. In these areas you can just jam your finger on the fire button and crank the stick from left to right and literally play with your eyes closed.
Unlike games nowadays where a designer can build the game and playtest a level very quickly, most of the level design in RnT was dependant on the ROYAL MAIL British postal service. I'd make a level and post the disks to Jason. He would then take my data, build the game and mail it back to me. I would test this and make the tweaks/changes and post it back, etc. Sometimes it would take 4 days to see how a level design played and thinking back to all this I am amazed the game turned out as well as it did (or even get finished).
There were a LOT of unused enemies designed. The final boss was drawn early all mong with Tin-Heads on ROTJ style speederbikes before we really knew what shape the basic gameplay was. Other unused enemies are T1000 style morphing badguys that try and stab you as well as a few nods to some characters from the british comic 2000AD.- some of these can be seen in magazine previews.
I designed a special level to be given away free on the cover of a magazine (I think it was "the One") It was a huge Forest map. unfortunately we couldnt include it in the final game due to a lack of disk space, which is a shame as it was a lot of fun and a lot of work was spent making it.
(would very much like a disk image of this to run on an emulator)
There were also a lot of enemies that we done and finished and in the game that we junked because they didn't work particularly well or used up far too much memory.
A lot of ideas that would have deeply affected the core game were discussed and rejected either because of time, technical limitations or just an inability to sell them to all concerned, these included: "Tumble" who was a spherical tame robot dude who would follow you around, distract the enemies and deploy real heavy fire power in tight spots. A Yoshi style walker that Ruff would ride like a motorbike was designed and drawn that looked awesome but was far to expensive to use. And one early mad idea was to make the game a platform based Defender where the enemies appear from secret doors in the levels and abduct cute characters you're supposed to be protecting.
A few other general tweaks were unfortunately not implemented: Splash damage for exploding robots was never done, so an exploding robot would knock over other nearby enemies. Body part shrapnel (like NARC) for exploding robots were drawn but were unfortunately unfeasible on the Amiga. Automatically choosing the correct diagonal shot direction when on slopes was another idea we sadly didn't have time or space for.
The second to last level- the one with all the coins, was intended to give a player who had been fighting for weeks to get to this point, some kind of reward as well as a load of extra lives for what was originally going to be a huge boss battle. I didn't consider it in any way a rip-off as the previous levels were absolutely massive and thought the player would appreciate the R and R. THis is kinda wasted if you're just watching a playthorugh or cheat to get there.
The basic design for Ruff Rogers was drawn by a friend of Jasons who was a fan of the Simpsons- the original was very Bart Simpson-like.
Wunderkind could have continued and done more games but I was utterly burnt out after RnT and felt rather bitter about the whole thing for a year or so afterwards.
Ruff 'n' Tumble took around 2 years. The original contract used the following phrase when describing the time to completion: "How long is a piece of string?"
@Gżegżółka, post #16
@Gżegżółka, post #17
@Gżegżółka, post #18
@Gżegżółka, post #14
@teh_KaiN, post #21
@Gżegżółka, post #22
@Gżegżółka, post #22
@Gżegżółka, post #16
@BULI, post #24
@skipp, post #26