Shadow Covenant

Game done, and I have 3 hours to spare! I think it’s the first time I finish with time to spare and that I actually had time to create levels with some care (instead of just throwing things at the last minute). The game is a bit hard at the end, but keep at it and finish all levels with 100% completion and you’ll get a bonus level as well!

Fully tested, played through it one last time (so I don’t repeat the issues of last time)…

This game was really fun to develop, I got more out of the gameplay than I expected, although some elements kind of got lost in middle…

I’ll write a postmortem eventually, but not today.

Anyway, you can check my entry here. If you participated, vote for it, please!

Looking forward to doing some voting, there was really interesting stuff going pass on the blog!

You can download the game from here, and the source from here.

This reminds me that I should add a section on this blog for all the games I’ve done in 48 hours compos… And maybe add “Shadow Stars” there as well, it’s not like I’m selling it anymore!

Not been blogging because I’m getting late on my schedule…

Just came back from a friend’s house… he’s a musician, so he has keyboards and cool programs to play around and he taught me how I could make a song for the game…

Unfortunately, it took me so much time to make one song that I couldn’t do a victory one as well…

Anyway, got all levels up and running, including the secret bonus level, just missing tutorial system (I hate writing these), and some polish (save game state, highscores, etc), besides the final testing of the game in “Release” mode…

Options are also working, including the colorblind mode (hope this works fine, let me know if you test this game and you’re colorblind, I’m interested in your insight!)

Anyway, I’m pretty happy on how this is turning out… I gave up the previous 2 times I took part in the compo, so I was in dire need of actually finishing something, and this one ended up being quite fun to program and playtest!

A couple more hours and I’m done…

For the first time since I started this compo, I’m behind my schedule! Gasp!

Anyway, not very serious, since I did a lot of code for other tasks further ahead, specially in the polishing department…

Anyway, finished the scoring, high-score, end game conditions (including space for the bonus level!) and flow between all of these…

Next step is doing some more levels… Still thinking if I should put a time-limit of sorts in the game, but I don’t really think it will improve the game that much… At least, not for the type of levels I’m thinking…

Current schedule:

Finally, my game has a name… “Particles”… Yep, even the title is minimalist…

Anyway, here’s the title screen:

Impressive, I know…

Anyway, the options currently don’t have anything, but I want to add there the option to turn on the tutorial on/off, sounds and music on/off, and a colorblind mode…

The game relies a bit on the three primary colors (red, green, blue), and as far as I know, some colorblind people can’t see the difference clearly between them, so I was wondering if anybody that’s colorblind could give me a hand in adding this to the game…

The 3 primary colors in the game are:

So, basically what should I replace these with?

These colors are 0xFF0000, 0x00CC00, 0x00CCFF respectively…

Anybody?

Anyway, I’ll add this if I have the time… had to change the schedule a bit, I’m going to take longer making the music, since a friend of mine has a lot of gear and I’m going to his place to use it to make the music with his help (guiding me in the tools, etc, since I’ve never worked with professional stuff)…

I really love particle systems… so little work, so much bang!

When a particle hits a wall, now we have a nice feedback… The way I’m building this is a bit inefficient, but this is not exactly a GPU intensive game…

Anyway, I’m running some minutes behind schedule, but everything’s under control (I think)… now the though part: making the main menu and finding a name for the game… Since I don’t have a story (the game is abstract), it’s harder to figure out a name… Candidates are “BoomParticle!”, “Quarkxplosion!”, “TakeTheParticlesToTheExit!”.

Schedule:

Been working on level design this morning, I have the 6 first levels (the tutorial levels) done…

I’m still getting the grips with the game mechanics, trying to figure out what’s hard and what’s easy to do, what kind of difficulties I expect players to have, etc…

My wife’s been beta-testing the levels for me, and so far the game looks fun (I lack objectivity on it, since I’ve played too much already)…

Going to add a mini-explosion to when we lose a particle… there’s little feedback at the moment on it…

I’ve also been thinking about level-done conditions (more than 50% particles saved? More than 75%?), when to trigger it (if I trigger as soon as the condition is reached, there’s no space for “bonus points”, but if not I might risk being stuck if there’s a forgotten particle somewhere), and the retry system (infinite retries? Limited? If infinite, scoring makes little sense, unless I reduce the score based on the amount of retries on a specific level)…

And there’s also the business with the name of the game… no idea on what to call it!

As I mentioned previously, I was wondering if the type of attractor on the mouse should be done through keypresses or some kind of environment element…

Well, I’ve tried it with the environment element:

When the player passes through any of those panels in the floor, the cursor will start attracting only the color on it for a certain duration (adjusted per pile)… This seems to work better in terms of gameplay, so I’m probably keeping it for the future.

The element for the floor tile needs some graphical work, since it can be confused with a door/wall…

Anyways, going to work on some level design before moving on to the polish phase… think the main game elements are done at the moment…

Current schedule:

…but I can’t seem to find the right way to do it…

To unwind, I went and searched for a way to get music for my game (although it’s only scheduled for tomorrow)…

I’ve played around with iNudge, and although I managed to get a decent enough song for my game, I can’t seem to find a way to save it… besides, I don’t know the license on it as well, although I guess it’s ok to use it (since it’s on the tools page of the compo)…

Also tried the trance generator on www.anticulture.net, and some of the songs generated are quite good (with some tweaking, but since it exports MIDI, shouldn’t be too hard to achieve)… but again, can’t find if we’re allowed to use the music generated in a game…

In previous compos, I’ve used Wolfram Tones, but someone pointed out to me that their license doesn’t allow for use in a game and such…

I could grab my electrical guitar, but I doubt I’m skilled enough to build a song for this sort of game with it…

Hopefully, I’ll find something that I can actually use or I’ll have to remove the cobwebs of my old Impulse Tracker and find me some sample banks!

It’s funny that some things that look well on paper turn out to be terrible when implemented… Case in point: the attractors…

Just added attractors to the game, which behave as the mouse and can attract and repulse elements:

The result is terrible, from a gameplay perspective… Either they’re too strong (and they bypass our own attraction on the mouse cursor), or they’re too weak (and do nothing to help or hinder the player)… The behavior was different from what I was expecting (I was expecting a kind of “negation zone”), but it is actually correct, although not fun at all…

I might use them anyway to impede some paths (although I can use just walls for that, to be honest, no difference).

I have also implemented moving attractors, to see if they could be salvaged… although they’re a bit better, adding a measure of challenge in some sections, they’re still very weak as a gameplay mechanism:

Problem is that I don’t know if I can make a compelling game with just walls and blocks… My wife seemed to have fun with just those elements, but I don’t know how fun that actually can be in the long run… Maybe I’ll have some new idea in the meantime, since I’m still on schedule… I still have to consider the attraction change issue (keypress vs environment control) anyway, and if I decide to go for the environment control, the attractors might be a good element again (although I doubt it)…

Current schedule:

Colored walls now!

Colored walls don’t affect particles of the same color… Same applies to blocks!

Still not sure what’s the best option for changing the attraction type… Currently, it’s keypress driven (as you can see in the lower right corner), but I still think that having areas on the screen that change the color of the particles or the cursor (really the same, it’s just a matter of duration of the effect) might open new options for the gameplay… Probably will have to code it to try it out, which will mean less one hour or so of polish-time (especially because I’ll have to be social tonight, so no late night coding for me!)

Anyway, this is going fine… If I’m lucky, I can finish all the gameplay elements today, which means I have all the day tomorrow for the polish (levels, menus, sound, music, etc)…