Shadow Covenant

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)…

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)…