Shadow Covenant

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)…

I’m 1h40 ahead of schedule, incredible!

Interaction between the particles and the level end block was easier than expected…

The game is also shaping up a bit, I’m starting to have a lot of ideas on extra elements for the game, although I’m still not sure on how to get them all together in a fun, level-based design.

Now, complete with moving blocks:

Next up, one of the new elements: colored walls that only let pass certain colors… of course, for that to make sense, I need to have control on the type of color I’m attracting with the mouse. I have two choices: I can base it on keypresses (which kind of defeat a bit my idea of minimalist gameplay, but might lead to a game that’s more fun), or there might be elements that either change the color of the cursor (changing what it attracts) or changes the color of the particles for a certain time (or forever, not sure).

These are the small decisions that I usually have a lot of fun with when I have more time, but when I have so little time to develop a game, I’d like to have a magic ball that gives me the answer right away!

Still don’t know if my idea with result in any fun whatsoever, but I have the level loader already working, from a text file:

This one is ugly even for my standards, but it’s also minimalistic, which was the goal… I’m really no good in building “small” stuff… My dreams are always so much larger than what I can build (either in compos because of time-constraints, or outside of them because of too big of a scope and an obsession with “perfect” code)…

Anyway, still on schedule (only by 10 mins, but it’s something!):

If I had a clear idea on what I’m aiming to build, I might have a more comprehensive schedule, which was my idea on the start, instead of just having the next few tasks defined…

Progress has been steady and on schedule so far:

Currently, there’s particles, and they follow the mouse cursor (or any attractors I define, the code is general)… It took me some measure of tweaking the parameters until I got something similar to the behavior I wanted… Ended up by defining the force applied to the particles as “force=delta_v/sqrt(dist)”, instead of the classical gravity-like “force=delta_v/sqr(dist)”… The particles are more reactive this way… Also added a “drag coeficient” to the particles, so they lose about 25% their energy each animation iteration… This will avoid them just shooting off screen in some fringe cases…

I can setup the attractors to affect only some colors (currently it’s just a RGB mask, but that might change).

Although it’s fun moving the particles around, I’m not sure if this will make an actually fun game… But to test that, I need to add the “level”, in a form of a maze of sorts… I expect I’ll have some other attractors and moving walls on that, but everything’s open at the moment…

I never thought how “minimal” is the complete opposite of what I usually think of in terms of game design (although I guess it’s a good way to design things: start with something big and subtract until you’re left with just some core mechanics, then you can add stuff back… I think it might avoid excessive padding in the game)…

I was thinking about an idea that I could implement with a terribly simple input mechanism… I’ve decided on only using the mouse position (can’t be much more simple than that, I guess)…

The idea is that the player attracts some particles (pixels, so keeping with the minimalist approach) with the mouse cursor… The behavior of the particles is physically correct, so if we don’t move the mouse cursor carefully, we will force the particles to overshoot and hit the walls of the level…

The level is comprised of a maze like structure (keeping it simple for now, but I might extend that with other attractors and moving walls). If a particle hits a wall, it’s lost…

The objective is for the player to reach the end of the level only losing a certain percentage of the particles… Seems simples, but with the addition of a time limit, it might be enough to make a simple fun game…

I don’t have a name for the game yet, but it will come to me…

Anyway, here’s the revised schedule: