Launching Pad blog
Welcome to The Pretender!
Our current game is nearing completion! So in honour of that, we thought we should start blogging again. Well, we’ll see how Tim gets on – he’s saddled with most of the end-game work, unfortunately. Perhaps he can recover his sanity in time to write a true post-mortem.
The game
The Pretender is a puzzle-based platformer made in Flash. Set in the 19th century (because Victorians were such a wonderfully repressed bunch), the game places you in the shoes of Lorenzo, a young and arrogant magician. Performing in fringe towns and rural counties, he despairs of ever making it big in the city – until his assistant hands him a mysterious book.
Without going into too much detail, this book causes all sorts of trouble, culminating in the magician, his assistant, and an entire audience being swept into another world. The game begins with the magician wondering what on earth is going on.
The goal of The Pretender is to rescue all of the audience members in each level. This is easier said that done, of course – while the controls are simple, you’ll (hopefully) be scratching your head to come up with solutions to a variety of puzzles. You see, in this world there are elemental focus points that turn you into a being made of air or earth. When in these forms, you take on appropriate powers. As air, you’re extremely light, and can summon wind to make light objects move. As earth, you have the strength to break barriers or roll heavy boulders.
The levels are designed around these powers, which you must use intelligently to overcome a variety of obstacles. Rocks must be smashed, holes filled, and air currents ridden upon if you want to get all of the audience members to the exit. If we’ve done our job well, the game will be easy to learn, but hard to conquer.
The status
As of right now, we’re frantically trying to get The Pretender finished enough to enter it into a competition that closes at the end of the month. We certainly don’t think we’ll win anything, but it’s a nicely inflexible date that we can aim towards.
The game started life as a Multimedia Fusion project, before moving onto Flash. We wanted to tackle it in an episodic nature, which is why you only see two of the four elements in this version. In later episodes – assuming this one is popular enough to warrant future versions – we’ll be adding a ton of new features that revolve around earth, wind, water, and fire, along with all sorts of new ways to blend these together.
For now, we’ve developed 20 levels based around earth and wind. Even with these limitations, we think there’s enough variety in there to keep peoples’ interest.
In many ways, this has been a learning project, something to get our feet wet while we come to grips with various tools. We have very little idea how this game will be received. As a free Flash game, it’s hardly a good fit when you compare it to the large amount of small-scale games that can be picked up and played for a few minutes. The basic ideas behind The Pretender really fit better as a commercial product of some kind – but again, it’s hard to know where it might feel at home. As it currently stands, we’d need to do a complete rethink for something like Live Arcade or the PlayStation Store.
For a Flash game, it’s certainly taking a very long time to make, due entirely to the not-particularly-small ideas behind it. Tim’s said to me before that I’m completely incapable of coming up with tiny ideas, and I think he may be right! At least now the end is in sight, and things are coming together nicely.
I’d also like to do a big shout out to Vin Rowe, our awesome contract artist on the project. All the pretty graphics you see are because of him. :)
In the meantime, check out the screenshots here, enjoy the new preview page, and stay tuned for further thoughts on The Pretender! And the game itself, of course…
