Freedom Tales: The Communist Robots! is the second rapid prototype I developed at FIEA. My team for this prototype consisted of Steve Durst (producer), Tucker George (producer), Lauren Schenzel (artist), Chris Spence (artist) and myself. Freedom Tales was created in Panda and was developed in two weeks.
Concept
The focus of Freedom Tales is storytelling. We use a comic book style to tell the story of Bobby, his sister and the invasion of Communist robots. We use humor allow the user to “turn pages” of the comic at their own pace and kept text to a minimum to keep the player interested in the story.
Gameplay
The player controls Bobby and must destroy the Communist robots. The player can use a melee attack with Bobby’s baseball bat, or a range attack by hitting a baseball with the baseball bat. The “Crusher” bots can only be destroyed by hitting the exposed batteries on their backs. The boss “Commie Bot” can be hit anywhere, but is much faster and stronger than the Crushers.
Graphics
The comic book pages for Freedom Tales were created in Photoshop. The models for Bobby, the robots and the environment were created in Maya.
Artificial Intelligence
The Crusher bots are always in an attack state. This causes the Crushers to seek towards the player. The Crushers can only turn in one direction, which is a mathematical error at first, but the team agreed that this behavior added some humor and a little strategy to fighting the Crushers, so we kept this behavior in the game.
The Commie Bot AI is slightly different. The Commie Bot is not activated until all of the Crushers have been destroyed. Once this occurs, the Commie Bot starts to seek towards the player. Once the Commie Bot gets within a specific range of the player, the Commie Bot speeds up and starts attacking.
