Just a little bit added this week

(Check out the new build here)

Not much to say this week other than two events came up this weekend that I didn't anticipate at all! Not bad things, good things, so I'm happy - unfortunately I didn't spend nearly as much on this prototype as I'd have liked. Anyway, I did add two levels which deal with bounce walls, and it's made me realize that I have a problem I need to solve: the imbalance between usefulness of warp walls vs bounce walls.

Warp walls send you places you might not otherwise have been able to go. Bounce walls simply allow you to change direction. This is useful only if you need to hit two goals at the same time, and only if those goals cannot be connected by a single, straight, contiguous line. But goals can be fulfilled piecemeal in this game, which means that in many situations you can forgo bounce walls entirely and just complete one goal and then the other.

What I need, I realize now, are a second type of goals which are linked to one another, which destroy themselves on contact with the player, and which resurrect themselves if their linked objects are not also destroyed within the stated time limit... I'll think about this for next week.

Also, I need to give bounce walls some audio and particle effect love, like I gave to warp walls. And I need to look into an issue where the player can become stuck within bounce walls before the wall appropriately repositions the player.

And again, the charge-up noise is by Javier Zumer, and is being used under this license.

Back to work!

(The new build is up here!)

Hello everyone. This week I return to regular work on this blog - hopefully for the forseeable future, I'll have several hours a week to devote to this blog. I took a week off last week because well... I was moving, and things were quite hectic. Things are still a hectic, but in a different way, and I'm now settling in to my new environs.

I'm still moving forward with the same game right now, so this week's offering is just the same thing with a bit more offered. I made some minor edits, but primarily I did a little bit of work and added two levels. I still need to add a tip or tutorial system, but I'm hoping these first three levels are really easy to understand (after reading the instructions). Next week should bring with it a better tutorial, and more levels.

As last time, the charging noise is courtesy of Javier Zumer under this license.

Delegates, Blue Walls, and Quick Blippy Particles

I'm going to run out of ways to vaguely say "Making slow progress" if I keep naming my posts as I have. To that end, I'm just going to put what's new right in the post title.

In addition to moving in about ten days, it's also my birthday this weekend! And my parents are visiting! And it's labor day, and tons of other things, and et cetera! I did the following in about fifteen to twenty minutes. Now the player script uses an event system so that I can have other things "know" when you're charging. Handy for making wrap and bounce walls change color to advertise interactivity. You also spawn a neat little particle when you enter a wrap-wall. Makes it feel more like you're "diving through" and less like you're just teleporting.

Like the last post, charge-up noise is courtesy of Javier Zumer under this license.

Progress by Degrees

This week I added a bit of polish (like... the kind you put on a linoleum floor or on a prized trophy... not the type of sausage) on what I submitted last week. Just a few hours working on audio and visual tweaks to get the goal-triggering and the charging to look a bit better and give a better feedback to the player. Check it out here!

Charge-up noise is courtesy of Javier Zumer under this license.

Just the tiniest bit of progress

My requirement right now is that I post something, anything, each week. This week I managed to get this going, in between moving shenanigans and spending a lot of time with some great people (at Bit Bash, no less!)

Reviving something old

Play the spare parts here!

I briefly considered entering a hiatus for this blog until I was situated in my new job, but I decided that, whatever small amount of work I get done each week, I want to publish it here.

What I did this week is really something that I did many, many months ago. I had a game I was working on that involved being able to charge into walls which wrapped you around the level and into walls which bounce you against them.

I could tell it was fun, but I couldn't tell what I wanted to do with the idea. Hopefully over the next few weeks I can figure that out.

A fully-assembled Revolver

(Play the game here)

Well, Revolver is done finally - it looks and plays like a one-week game, but it took three due again to how weird my free time is getting this month.

To be honest, I wish Revolver could have turned out better. I still feel like it's really lacking something, and I wasn't able to really find out what that was. For that reason, I wasn't really excited while working on it, and I think it shows. There are some surprising things you can do with the way the shooting is set up, enough to the point where I do think you could make a much larger game out of this.

I didn't try it here, but I wanted to know what it would feel like if you didn't charge your shots, but they naturally got larger and stronger the longer you kept them alive. The size-to-damage-and-speed relationship was also interesting. A game where bullets and enemies could survive contact with whatever they hit, but shrink and lose size/damage but gain speed might be something to look into.

This three-week development cycle is another thing to maybe look into. I did maybe 1-2 hrs of work a week on Revolver, if that... but if I had the normal 5-7 I could try tackling larger projects. Something to think about. I could also take the fourth week off and think of ideas for future games, while actually playing games myself (Outside of Destiny and Hearthstone, I've forgotten what that feels like!)

Anyway, yeah - play Revolver here! Despite my self-criticism, it's still worth the two minutes of play.

Laser charge sound is by Javier Zumer, and is being used under this license

In-game background music is "Buildy" by p0ss, and is being used under this license