Guli-Guli @ MSC-APICTA 2008

Yesterday was the final judging of the shortlisted nominees for the MSC Malaysia APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Awards) 2008. Yep, you guessed it. I was one of the shortlisted nominees. It was a project I've been working with a friend for months now: A flash game for the PSP.

It started like more than 5 months ago when I needed to come up with a flash game for my final project. The concept was supposed to be experimental gameplay. So I thought like why not let's have some fun while we watch how some people fuck up in doing some tactile coordination. The game was originally designed to be played on the PC. So the controls involved using the WASD keys and the arrow keys. Below is the alpha prototype that I submitted for my final project. The graphics is less than eye pleasing, mind you. It WAS a prototype.

After like two weeks into my semester holidays (which was like mid-June), I received a call from my Flash lecturer saying that he liked my game concept and wants to enter it into for the MSC Malaysia APICTA. The only problem is, it has to be redesigned. Only the gameplay concept was to be retained. He said that I'll need to form a group to get the project started. So I was, "Why not?" since it'll be great to finally have a chance to work with a programmer from the IT school.

Porting the whole thing to the PSP was seriously not a walk in the park. Hardware limitations. Period. Utilizing only a 2MB cache of processing memory, the original game that was meant to be played on the PSP had to be tuned down and optimized fully. And for some fucked up reason, the PSP is only using Flash Player 6 as opposed to the PC which was using the latest Flash Player 9. Now just what the fuck is Sony thinking?

Anyway, fixing the problem took like a month. Truth be told I didn't expect it to take so damn long. Well, that's for not having the SDK for it. So anyway, the whole scripting process had to be redone and also precalculated for the PSP since real-time calculation is seriously gonna kill because of the lack of processing power in the PSP. Graphics-wise, it was inspired by a 1980's comic strip that was done by Tan Sri Dato' Lim Kok Wing called Guli Guli. Being an LUCT (Limkokwing University of Creative Technology) student, what better way a tribute to a work done by the Tan Sri years ago?

After months of ups and downs and a whole lot of stress, we managed to finish it thanks to a whole lot of support from friends and lecturers. The judges were pretty impressed as well. So I hope we make it as the winners!

The final work is as seen below. It may be slow and stuff but heck, it was designed to be played on the PSP. This was just the PC port. Anyway, enjoy!