Deal Or No Deal Game Info

[Guyfawkes]

Heres a quick roundup of what I posted on my blog before I had to take it offline temporarily. This was originally written on Monday.

Today I listed all the things that needed to be finished in the actual game, surprisingly there wasnt much left, so an hour or two later the list was empty and the game as it stands is pretty much complete! This doesnt mean the actual game is finished, as the game has not been given to beta testers (apart from one) so there is still some things that I have probably left out. I dont think there is alot to do though so any new suggestions will be relatively minor changes (I hope) to the actual game.

One area of the game that hasnt really been worked on is the menu system so I will probably start work on this in the next day or two. I have no idea how I am going to design this, currently its just a basic looking menu screen (see screenshot below) so I am opening this idea to the public to see if anyone has any ideas on how this can be presented. If you have any ideas please let me know and post any images etc.

Current crappy menu design, ideas for new one wanted!

Sonistar - if you are still interested in helping with the graphics I need a hand cursor for the game. It should be 13x17 pixels in size, and a light colour so its easily viewable in the game. The transparency value should be RGB 255,0,255 and preferably in BMP format. Check the screengrabs on the first post for roughly how it should look. Thanks!

Also I updated the first post on this topic with two screenshots from the latest build of the game so people can see the progress.

 

[dgrams2000]

Guyfawkes,
I just sent you an email with a couple things that you may want to look at be4 releasing a beta.
Some are just suggestions as before, but there are a few things that are kind of important.
The biggest is a crashing bug during gameplay in the UK version.

...for future betas/updates.....
By the way... do you want a 'Help' file typed up on how to play the game?
I'd be willing to throw something together some kind of text/readme file that can
be displayed from the game's menu....

...or if there is anything else you want to throw my way... I'm willing. (within reason)

 

[dgrams2000]

(Incase you want to entertain the thought of using screen grabs for menus...?)

Or maybe you could have different (random) menus with a screengrab
from both a US and a UK versions?

 

[deadlychicken22]

Why don't you have unlockable content? Different menus would be good as unlockables, but I think it would be great if there were other things you could unlock as well . . .

 

[dgrams2000]

Why don't you have unlockable content? Different menus would be good as unlockables, but I think it would be great if there were other things you could unlock as well . . .

According to prior posts, he is planning to have unlockable content in the game and is looking for
ideas (like what you mentioned about the menus)
I think on his first beta release, it will be more or less the game portion, and he will be adding on
to it in the future. We will have to come up with some other cool ideas for Guyfawkes as well!

Guyfawkes, did you get a chance to mess around with the code today?

 

[Guyfawkes]

ideas for the menu design are especially needed and I need them quite soon. the above one isnt a bad idea but it is possible in the future that other countries will be added (we have UK and US currently) so I want to make it fairly neutral.

ideas for unlockables would be cool, so let me know if you have any.

dgrams2000 - i fixed the crashing bug, turned out to be outdated code on my input routine for gp2x, worked fine on the pc version.

 

[dgrams2000]

Guyfawkes,
Yes, I agree it would be best to have menus for the UK version as well, but I dont have any copies of the show that I can get any good screen grabs from.
I will try to think of some more 'generic' menu options.

As far as unlockables,
first you need ideas on 'How' to unlock things before you can think of the rewards.
That can be tricky in a game like this, as you don't have to play seriously to win high amounts.
Here are some ideas that can trigger the unlockables:
- You pick the $1,000,000/L250,000 suitcase (and win it)
- You pick the $1,000,000/L250,000 (and settle for a deal)
- Various 'Deal' Achievements (for taking a deal over 200,000 or 300,000 etc)
- Winning the lowest amount
- Having a perfect 1st round (If you can pick the first 6 cases and have them all
be amounts on the left hand column, either all under (Under 1,000 amounts)
- ????
- Achieving the high score on either a 'Deal' High Score table, or a 'No Deal' High Score table.

Prizes to win:
- On the US show, for one week, they doubled and tripled the prize amounts.
(.02 up to 2,000,000 and also .03 up to 3,000,000)
- The ability to be offered 'gifts' along with deals. For example, on the US show a few times,
the contestants came with something that they specifically wanted to buy with the money.
Like a PONY for example. Throughout the offers, the guy was offered 35,000 and a PONY instead
of a 49,000 offer - for example. Another guy wanted a HUMMER automobile, so he was offered
30,000 and a HUMMER instead of 90,000
- Custom menu screens
- Custom 'Congratulations' screens
- (maybe have these options available to be toggled 'on' or 'off' in the OPTIONS so that
you are not forced to play with these options if you don't want - after unlocking them.



(oh... and by the way, pushing the 'A' Button on the GP2X during gameplay
removes all the graphics and shows you the Dollar Amounts for each case. You may
want to disable that testing feature.)

 

[dgrams2000]

Here is a more generic menu...

 

[Guyfawkes]

Any other design ideas for the menus? I will be deciding what to do in a day or two.

 

[Guyfawkes]

regarding the ideas for unlockables in the game. i had an idea there could be a number of awards in the players profile which you can unlock. There could be awards for winning each of the boxes, dealing over certain amounts, loosing certain amounts, picking all left side/right side values in first round, winning the million and so on.

the awards can be represented by medal type thingies in say a display case. doing a quick count there would be well over 30 awards (double that if you add US and UK versions) so it would take quite a while to get them all so it adds a bit of a challenge and more playability to the game.

For the second part which is the prizes in the game such as the hummer. I like this idea but I will only consider adding it to the US version as I know its not in the UK one. Again, this could be used similar to above in a display case style so the player as something to aim for to collect everything.

Things like new screens etc could be unlocked when you have a certain number of awards won. One idea I had was being able to display a custom image in the games background instead of the dotted one which shimmers. another possibility is to replace the models with custom images.

im open to ideas so let me know if you have any

 

[dgrams2000]

Any other design ideas for the menus? I will be deciding what to do in a day or two.

As far as the menus, do you have a 'vision' or samples of your own that you've thrown together?

Your ideas for the unlockable 'medals' is a good idea. Just like 'achievements' on the XBox 360.

I guess at this point, I"m looking forward to seeing a very polished up version of a demo release before throwing all these extra
ideas around.

There are probably more gameplay features to get thrown in before the unlockables come in to play.
You mentioned you wanted to have 'random' quotes that the models blurt out... I can try and email you some ideas later today,
and I also was thinking about the speech that is used when the banker's 'offer' window comes up.
Right now, you speech says "For $xx,xxx.... Deal or No Deal" Instead of it saying "For $xx,xxx" how would it sound to have
the announcer say exactly what is printed on the screen?
Let me know if you have any new versions to try out while I'm watchin DOND tonght.

 

[FluffyPanda]

im open to ideas so let me know if you have any

I think you should build in a minigame, using the doom engine, where you can chase noel edmonds round the studio with a chainsaw and make it unlockable when you have every other objective complete. Then I might actually play it

Errrrr... actually you should probably ignore me completely in this thread. There's something about DoND that brings out my sadistic side (and I haven't even seen the uk version yet).

 

[Guyfawkes]

DOND was supposed to be a short break from another project I am working but its turned into a fairly large project now. i want as much as possible done in the first public release so that any bugs reported will be fixed in the second update. it probably means that the public release wont happen for a while longer but if it means the game is better then i think its best this way.

i need to do some more work on the speech as theres parts where stuff is repeated such as the models speech. some short sentances would be useful so let me know, things like good luck, i hope its a low box etc. i have to keep an eye on the filesizes, in total the game is around 7MB, 5MB of it is audio so i think another 3MB maximum would be ok.

 

[dgrams2000]

Model Quotes:
Good Luck.
I hope its low.
Please be low.
Here we go. Good Luck.
I'm crossing my fingers.
Silence (I would reccomend this for about 50% of the time or more.
since the models dont normally say too much until
things really get interesting.)
...Or if you have a way to track whether or not the player is doing 'good',
they could say... "I hope your luck changes here." or "It's got to get better"

Guyfawkes, there is always going to be more that you want to put into the game,
maybe just make a small list of a few more things and then say "thats it" and release
something to the public. The game is very bug free already, except for the few speech
things you want to fix up. Plus if more pepole are able to see what state it is in now,
they will have more reccommendations on what changes they would like to see.
..just a reccomondation from the peanut gallery.

Have a good evening.

 

[sam fisher]

DOND was supposed to be a short break from another project I am working but its turned into a fairly large project now. i want as much as possible done in the first public release so that any bugs reported will be fixed in the second update. it probably means that the public release wont happen for a while longer but if it means the game is better then i think its best this way.

i need to do some more work on the speech as theres parts where stuff is repeated such as the models speech. some short sentances would be useful so let me know, things like good luck, i hope its a low box etc. i have to keep an eye on the filesizes, in total the game is around 7MB, 5MB of it is audio so i think another 3MB maximum would be ok.

I could do some voices lol.

 

[dgrams2000]

I could do some voices lol.

..Alright Sam.. lets hear a .wav of you... "Deal Or No Deal" haha!!

 

[FluffyPanda]

You really should call noel edmond's agent and ask if you can have an interview. You might be able to get him to read a few lines

"Deal or no Deal? £29,860 and a GP2X is the final offer."

If there turns out to be a copyright problem and the agent sues you then you can always re-brand it as "Veal or no Veal" where you win cuts of meat...

I'm going to take my pills now.

 

[Guyfawkes]

voices are already taken care of so no need to involve mr edmonds, he will just rant on for 30 minutes anyway

 

[dgrams2000]

You really should call noel edmond's agent and ask if you can have an interview. You might be able to get him to read a few lines

"Deal or no Deal? £29,860 and a GP2X is the final offer."

If there turns out to be a copyright problem and the agent sues you then you can always re-brand it as "Veal or no Veal" where you win cuts of meat...

I'm going to take my pills now.

FluffyPanda, you are getting into this aren't you.

 

[FluffyPanda]

FluffyPanda, you are getting into this aren't you.

Yeah. I'm gonna be an adict, I can just tell.

And I bloody hate DoND.

Thanks a lot GuyFawkes

p.s. You should change your avatar to this: