Added some nice special effects to the jammed tile mechanic. Strawberry icons orbit around jammed donuts, so at least the player has a chance to notice them. Plus it makes the tile board feel a lot less static once again. Things are progressing some what nicely 
Managed to get quite a bit done for this weekend’s beta.
During this period of inactivity on my blog, I have been working hard on Viva La Donuta. I’m now at the stage where I have some free time to talk about the development of the project. Development for this project is like any piece of software, and there are always boring, yet essential, bits to do. I have a rather small and closed beta team for now which provide me with some valuable feedback, and one of them mentioned that without prior knowledge what exactly you do in this game could perhaps be confusing. I am guilty of that, and I did some what assume that a lot of the audience that this game was designed for would have already played other match three variants such as Bejeweled and so forth. This was easily remedied by including small paragraphs which describe how to play and what to do.
These extra features, while necessary, cut into development time. Still, I hope these windows will help players in playing this game.
As a match three variant, I need to offer more game mechanics than just your standard match three. There have been many match variants before my own game and each have introduced their own game mechanics which attempt to separate them from the rest of the bunch. Thus, I also have to do that for mine as well. One of the aspects of being a game designer, is to control the flow of your game. Certainly a bad decision to make is to just use all of you game mechanics all at once and never introduce new ones later on. This can over whelm many players, and just because you and your beta team find it easy … just remember that they haven’t played your game as it was being developed. Thus what I decided to do, was to split up the game mechanics into small chapters. Each chapter introduces a new game mechanic, with five levels that progress in difficult. Difficulty judging is … well … difficult. I may finish the same level within a wide variety of times and order them based on that I suppose, but due to the random nature of the donuts and donuts with modifiers … it’s still hard.
In this screen shot I demonstrate the ‘jammed’ game mechanic. This game mechanic just stops tiles from flowing like they normally would, and to get rid of them you just do the same action of match three. While players are doing the same thing, I think the game mechanic works because it introduces something slightly different but not too strange, so it feels like a natural mechanic for this kind of game. Some games I’ve played in the past would try to mash it up with everything under the sun from having RPG, RTS, FPS and racing mechanics all in one game. It turns into a mess of all these things a player has to be able to do … and that’s not really fun at all.
There are another six more game mechanics like this, all having their own quirks. I’ll try not to talk about them so that people get a chance to see them in game first, rather than on here first.
More work to do, but it’s definitely starting to look and play like a finished product now.
Ok, so apparently I was meant to be finished which this game, but then again it isn’t done yet. There are still lots of things to get done, and while I’d like it to be finished so I can start a new project, I just don’t feel ready to release it yet. Lots of tweaks since the last time I posted here (almost a month ago!). I finally added some of the other key features I wanted to do such as nice flashier graphics and a hint function. … hopefully in another two weeks, it’ll be done.
MeHungy isn’t really a good name for a product at all. After a little bit of brain storming and rummaging around I eventually came up with “Viva La Donuta”. It’s sort of a nonsensical name, and it does some what roll of the tongue. You certainly can twist the wording around a little bit. I resisted the temptation to call it “Donut Mania” or “Donut Dash” since a lot of flash games exist with those sorts of names. Hopefully the name is unique (since I made up a word as well!) and some what interesting. Graphics wise everything seems to be rolling into place with some interest color schemes and art aspects that I never really anticipated doing at this stage. Still, it’s a lot of fun just being able to roll our some nice shiny graphics.
With only twelve days till launch, I’m working hard to get everything done. Hopefully I’ll make it, but I can spare another 2 weeks if need be. See how things go anyways, but certainly no time to talk right now!
During development of Contrast, I had made up my mind that I wanted to make a centralized tool that would handle all aspects of content development for it, aka ContrastEd. It was quite a cool editor actually in that it was really useful to have a central tool to do everything from importing textures, meshes, sounds and other content, to level designing. However, as the project grew large and larger, a lot of sub systems started to rot and started to fall behind in the updates. And this started to affect my morale a lot when programming ContrastEd.
Now that I am different state of mind in terms of what types and what scale of games I should be building, I decided to also reduce the scale of the tools. That is, instead of making one giant tool that attempts to do everything, just make small individual tools to cater for an exact requirement. In a lot of ways this makes sense, I can still share code since I can just link to the appropriate header files, management was easier, the IDE looked a lot less busy (not hundreds of files to think about) and making sure that decoupled code and elegant code was a lot easier since you also focused about a single task.
For my match three game I ended up developing two small independent tools for myself. One that lets me make up tile boards for the levels and the other to help me make the fonts or packed texture sheet definitions. Both a small, useful tools each taking about two days to develop. They’re certainly not as flashy as ContrastEd, but that’s ok, I just needed them quickly to do all the grunt work for me.
I think the idea of having small tools, but lots of them is some what growing on me.
Choosing an art style is always hard for any project, since there are simply many different art styles that a game can adopt to convey lots of different types of messages. Most of the AAA titles these days try to shoot for realistic graphics, or at least realistic as possible. This appeals to the majority of people as people can assume what things are and what things do. Also I suppose, people like to believe that better graphics simply mean more photo realistic. Art styles generally just need to fit the overall theme and mood of the game, and sometimes it’s difficult to do that with photo realism. I didn’t really want a photo realistic look for this game since most of the time you’re looking for specific things such as colors and shapes. In this case, I needed an art style that was vibrant and overly colorful rather than something that wasn’t. I have used many icon sets over the last few months of programming and Nuvola has always been one that I’ve liked. I decided to give it a try here and see how it goes, and so far things seem to be working out (plus it has an appropriate license). The donuts are still temporary themselves, and I think I will try to make some of my own later. With some new graphics, the game is already looking worlds better than the initial prototype!
Judging by the title you might assume that I lost all of my code in a hard drive incident involving hot coffee and pop corn (I like to use my CPU as a source of heat to pop popcorn). Cooked by explosion as one would say. But … no, here at Di.Co we have a nice file server which is Raid 0 with 500gbs of space, so we never lose code (unless all the hard drives were to some how explode at the same time). What I meant is that, some people feel the need to delete their old source code in an effort to force themselves to restart their projects or to begin from a clean slate again. But honestly, why would you want to do that? You have all this code that you worked hard on, to solve issues and it’s always better to refactor code than it is to just start from scratch. Sure, starting from scratch allows you to think outside the preconceived code design choices you started earlier, but heck, you’re on a time line and you’ve got to get things done two hours ago.
Sam and I decided that the match three game was probably the best prototype to continue development on, since it offered me a good chance to polish the product, as well as complete it within a three to four week schedule. Plugging away at the code last weekend, I managed to write a match three game within two days which is pretty good. The game design also allows maps to have void tiles and tiles that you had to perform match three overs in order to win the game. Instead of hand coding all of the levels, we might as make an editor to do that. A lot of the code from Contrast’s editor was resurrected to be used here. Along with wxWidgets, majority of the editor is ready to be used! Hopefully at the end of this week, I’ll have almost all of the code done for this project, which then means I can start making the game content.
This is a match three variant this time round. The basic concept of the game is still the same however as most other match three games out there, except with a few variations in game play.
The first one is that there is now a life time in which you must complete the board in. The way to complete the board is by performing a match of three or more on certain tiles of the board, these tiles are indicated by the dark blue outlines. When all the tiles of this color are matched upon, they go to a normal state which is indicated by gray outlines. If the player runs out of time then the board is reset and the player must try again. There is usually ample time however.
The other variant is that when a match of three or more is performed, tiles that are popped will also drop a goodie which the player can choose to click to pickup. Currently the pick ups do nothing, but if this game makes it past the prototype phase then it will of course do something.
There are some other variants as well, but I think that this prototype really shows the game play at heart right now. This prototype took me about two days to complete.
Tank City is really just a clone of an old Nintendo game that I used to play when I was very young. The concept of the game is pretty simple really. You have a tank, represented by the yellow circle, you drive around in horizontal or vertical directions and you shoot enemy tanks that are represented by the purple circles. There are also some terrain types that offer some interesting strategies to be made. You have brick (red blocks), forest (green blocks), water (blue blocks), ice (aqua blocks) and steel (gray blocks).
Bricks can be destroyed by shooting them, but you cannot move over them.
Forests can be destroyed by shooting them, but you can move over them (which allows you to hide within them).
Water don’t block projectiles, but you cannot move over them.
Ice don’t block projectiles, and you can also move over them but you lose some control of your tank.
Steel blocks projectiles and movement and can only be destroyed by heavy tanks.
So a simple mixture of terrain with different properties, enemy tanks, pick ups and simple goals seem to make this game a lot of fun. It is still a prototype however, and I’m unsure if I would develop it into a full game or not.
The concept for Audio Blast came about when I thought of a game where musical notes would spawn from the beat of the music. You then had to toss the notes into the right area.
The problems with this prototype was that the main focus on this game was to get the beat detection down pact. The problem is that beat detection is actually really hard to do properly. I performed a sampling using FFT and then checked the impulses of energy sent by the sample. This still doesn’t quite properly find the beat properly. Even splitting up the sample into sub bands didn’t really help much either. Another problem was that it was just too difficult to concentrate on the number of objects on the screen. Picking up one note, would also collide into other notes (intended effect) but with a hundred of these notes flying around it became very cluttered and you couldn’t really focus on tossing it into an area.
Oh well, it seemed kind of cool in my head, but the prototype shows otherwise.
