It looks like the ship bastard child of “Frozen Synapse” and “Gratuitous Space Battles”…

It came out on the 30th April, so I’m getting this as soon as I can liberate some funds from my wallet…

What went right

• Again, my wife helped me with the brainstorming of a simple idea that was doable early on, which let me focus on developing soon, instead of just dicking around with some concepts
• Theme… Although I wasn’t a big fan of the theme this time, the fact remains that it restrained me a bit and I managed to pull a very complete game.
• Time for level design: this time, I budgeted and got to work about 3 hours or so in level design, which was great for the overall feel of the game, making for a more interesting and cohesive experience.
• Development plan: making a development plan early on really helped me keep the game on track… Although I could only “finalize” it later in the first day, it really gave me a good perspective on what I could achieve
• Focus on gameplay mechanics: I’m more of a story guy, but that usually lead to games that require a lot of content, which is kind of a no-no in 48-hour compos… This time, by focusing on the gameplay, I could fine tune the game and add the extras I wanted.
• Motivation: since I was seeing cool stuff happen on screen (and I did it fast), it started getting my creating juices going, which helped me keep me motivated for the 20+ hours it took me to actually develop this.

What went wrong

• Music: I usually use Wolfram Tones to build the music, but someone pointed out in a previous compo that their user agreement doesn’t allow to use it in this way, so I had to find another way to make music… But I don’t have any decent tools for it and I couldn’t find anything that really allowed me to create something fast that I could master easily… I tried out iNudge and some other stuff, but I ended up resorting to a friend of mine that’s a musician. He has all this gear so he was kind enough to teach me how to use it and leverage it to make at least one music for the game… although it took me 3 hours to get it right!
• Particle physics: It took me forever to fine-tune the particle behavior, since the standard “magnetic” equations weren’t making for a fun game, which is kind of more important than actual being physically correct… I ended up by having lots of small parameters to adjust and specialized code to handle some circumstances so that the game felt right without being right.

All in all, it was one of my best entries ever, and considering the feedback I’ve been having so far, it seems people are enjoying the game…

This is why I intend not only fixing some bugs reported, but also improve the graphics a bit (get rid of Comic Sans, for example!), besides adding levels and new mechanics to the game in the near future…

You can download the game here, and the source here. If you took part on the Ludum Dare 48-Hour competition, you can go here to vote for my entry.

If you’re too lazy to download and play stuff, you can always check the video below:

So, in light of that, here’s a totally awesome interview:

If features Jullian Gollop (the creator of the first XCom) and Jake Solomon (lead game designer of the newest installment)…

Very interesting stuff in it, specially the part where Jake Solomon looks like a teenage schoolgirl meeting his idol!

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!

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…

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:

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)…

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:

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!

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: