About Us

We are three Computer Science students at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam and decided to make Gobble Studios our side project to practice what have learned at the University. We are planning to develop applications and games. We will use this website to tell you about our work and the process of creating it. The following topics are some of the things we have learned thus far:

• Java (Object oriented programming techniques)
• Website building (HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP&MySQL, XQuery/XPath)
• UML modeling

We also have done some work with the XNA framework by Microsoft in combination with C#. This is what we plan to use in our software development. Using XNA and C# we can easily create applications for multiple platforms like PC, XBOX 360, Windows Phone 7 and Zune. But for the moment we are planning to focus on PC and XBOX 360 development.

First Project

We are pleased to announce that we will start our first Project soon. The idea is to make a 2D shooter. A good comparison in style might be the famous Geometry Wars franchise. Our intention is to make a game that is interesting and fun to play and has its own unique look and feel to it. We have a lot of ideas for the game at the moment and would like to explain a few of them to you:

Gravity

All objects will have their own gravity and every object will have effect on the other in some way. Here is an example:

You shoot a rocket towards your enemy. On its way it passes multiple objects in the game world (think asteroids and the like). If your rocket passes an object too close it might happen that its course changes in such a way that it will make a turn to the left and miss your enemy completely, it might even crash into the object it passes. In this situation the gravity can be a real nuisance. However if you were able to use the gravity in your favor you might even be able to hit an enemy that otherwise would be just out of reach because he was hiding behind one of the asteroids. The notion of gravity will force you to think about how you want to shoot at your enemy and will certainly make the game more interesting and fun to play.

Adding gravity to this game will give it a whole new dimension of gameplay and will make the game more dynamic and unpredictable. It also gives us the opportunity to add many more features later on (more on this at a later date) .

Health = Size

The second concept is a real game changer, the principle is simple: When you hit someone you will get the health he lost by that shot, if you’re high on health your ship will be big and if you’re almost dead your ship will be small. What is the idea behind this? Well we want to make the game easier for the players who are losing, they will be harder to hit because their ship is smaller, but also reward the players that are winning by increasing their health . The downside for the winning player is that they have bigger ships so they will be easier to hit. But not only will it become harder for you to evade the shots fired at you, your increased size means that your mass has also increased and this will cause objects to be attracted to you even more. This means that shots that would otherwise have missed, were you a smaller ship, will now be more likely to find their target.

There are some things that we will have to take in account though otherwise we will end up with a very unbalanced game. For example:

You shoot at your enemy and hit hem, he shrinks and you grow. After some time your enemy is really small and you can’t seem to hit him anymore. Now he has the advantage and lands many hits, resulting in you shrinking and him growing. Now the roles are reversed again. This cycle keeps happening and no one can ever seem to win.

This is of course not the way we want the game to play, it should be possible to win a game. Therefore we need to find a good balance between fairness and fun.

Well that’s it for now. We will keep you posted on further ideas and developments for this and other Projects.

See you soon,

The Gobble Team