#danmcgrathgames

You can download KLUB 99 here : https://toothandclaw.itch.io/klub-99

It’s been a while since I've updated the blog so I decided to do a little write upon a small project I did over the course of 5/6 days. I was recently playing one of my favorite Indie titles from the last few years called Papers Please. Created by Lucas Pope, Paper Please is a dystopian-esque passport/document checking game. Players are required to check documents of People trying to cross the border into the glorious Arstotska.  You have to check for various things like passport legitimacy, Visas and other documents. If you haven’t heard or seen this game I implore you to check it out. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds.

Link to Papers Please on Steam : http://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/

So as I was playing Papers Please I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to see if I could whittle down some of the gameplay features into a small mini game. After all, the best way I’ve found to learn how to design games is to cut down a game to its core features and focus on those. Instead of constantly adding features I focus down on chosen elements and work towards making them fun and user friendly. So, I decided on a theme that would best suit and simplified version of Papers Please. Instead of a Border crossing, I used a Club entrance. Then in place of a Passport officer, a bouncer/security guard who would be checking ID’s. The simple premise of KLUB 99 soon emerged into a shorter and more focused version of the Papers Please campaign. There’s five days until New Years Eve 1999, the Club owes debt collectors $10,000. You must earn this money over the course of these nights or else the Club will be shut down resulting in a terrible New Years Eve party. Winning (raising the $10,000 by the end of Night 5 or before) will result in a successful party and unlocking a High score mode where you must deal with as many People as you can in small time frame.

Identification cards are obviously a little more simplified than passports and contain less information. So the first thing I did was write Random name generator (for aesthetic purposes), a random date generator for the Date of Birth and Expiry date and finally an Occupation generator. I quickly started developing the logic for Score, gameplay, letting people in/Telling them to go away etc.

For the actual gameplay there are a couple things to take into consideration: The Person’s DOB, the expiry date on the card, the cards Logo and finally if the Person is drunk or not. Letting a person in while any of these things are not entirely in order can result in a pay(score) cut and an a strike. Three strikes result in you having to restart the night and a deduction of $2000. Letting people correctly will amount to more Money and better scores.

I didn’t focus too much on the aesthetics of the game as I wanted to keep it fairly “Old” looking or like something that would have been a cheap DOS game back in the day.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the result. The game was more of a “Could I actually do something like that?” kind of experiment more than anything.  I don’t really ever do logic heavy games, so this was my real first foray into something like that. Hopefully this is the first of a few “Post Mortem” type posts to come to this blog.

Till next time,

At the beginning of this year I intending to put out a ton of games. I was hoping to do at least 1 or 2 a month. Each with focused ideas and limited features. Quick,easy and fun. But instead I’ve spent the last 6 months experimenting and tampering with different ideas. As you may have seen throughout my blog/facebook or twitter I have been working on a couple of projects. Although I haven’t necessarily fulfilled my “grand scheme” of putting out a bunch of games, the amount I have learned in the past 6 months has put me at an advantage. I prototype and write code at least 10 times as fast as I used to. Testing ideas and creating systems has become much more natural to me. 

So, now I’m starting to hunker down. I’ve had a couple prototypes to go through and fiddle with to see if there was any potential there. Right now, I’m sitting on my little game Zealot which I made for the Seven day roguelike challenge. I’ve decided to expand it into a Doom/Quake-esque shooter. Cheesy, 90′s and fun. A small screenshot below shows just what I mean. Low res graphics, low polygon count models and weird textures and lighting. 

I’m aiming for something free and playable in July, somewhere in the realm of 7/8 levels. But I suppose we’ll see what happens.