30 Games in 30 Days: Grid

Fourth game is up! It's a puzzler, albeit a pretty simple one for now. Once again, over scoped and spent time on things that could have been left until later. I will learn this lesson at some point!

Arrows or WSAD to move. It's isometric, so the directions don't map to screen coordinates. But on the plus side, you have infinite lives! There are only 10 levels, and the game loops (so if you make it past 10 screens, well done!).

CLICK HERE TO PLAY

The Post-Mortem

I lost a lot of time on this one to polish: That is, those little bits and pieces that should wait until the game is done. For example, I added a blob shadow under the player, which resulted in a stream of problems to solve, like transparency sorting and other shader issues. That took quite a lot of time.

Then I added animation to the player. Even the simple jumping movement took quite a lot of time to get right. I suck at physics math, and spent too much time trying to solve that route rather than finding quick, cheap ways to just make the ball move in an arc. You'll notice the ball moves on a grid, too: The player provides input once, and the ball is moved before input is returned to the player. What is conceptually simple was actually a bit of a headache to get working.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes in this one. It's funny how simple little elements of a game can take quite a lot of engineering to get right.

On gameplay: I'm not too upset that this didn't turn out to be super fun to play. That might seem a weird response, given how much time I spent on this one, but I actually really dig this concept and I have a tonne of idea for turning it into a complete game: New tile types, new traps, even some enemies. I'm also super happy with what's going on under the hood, because a lot of it is reusable and will almost certainly make its way into future games (and save me a bit of time in the process).

I could spend more time on this and it would definitely be a better game, but I'm absolutely confident I'm coming back to this one, so it's going online as a proof of concept, and I'm going to have a go at catching up. I believe I'm two games behind now. Let's fix that

30 Games in 30 Days: Bounce

*Exhausted panting*. Third game down, but I've lost a day! Need to get two games out in a day to catch up!

Arrows move (up and down only). Warning: This one is a little unforgiving. You only get one life! No checkpoints!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY

The Post-Mortem

This is another game I think might have some potential to be turned into a neat puzzler. Once again, I over scoped. And suffered for it. It's been a mad dash for the last day and half to get this done. The main problem was that the game just didn't work using Unity's built-in physics: Controls felt 'loose', and the ball's movement was unreliable. I had to code my own simple physics solution which involved using a lot of stuff I'd never touched before. This slowed me down a lot.

I was aiming to have another 10 - 15 screens with some additional features, such as buttons which reconfigure the screen's layout, and destructable blocks, similar to Breakout. If I come back to this one, I'll definitely add those features.

There's a fair bit more I could say about the experience, but it's late and I'm tired and have to drive 8 hours in the morning, so off to bed I go! Suffice to say, this was a pretty painful exercise!

30 Games in 30 Days: Mini-Brutalabit

Well, another day down and another game 'done'. Check out Mini Brutalabit and let me know what you think!

Arrows move (or you can use WSAD instead). Avoid the lazers. Collect the yellow pellets and keys for points. Try to make it to the super secret end boss*!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY

The Post-Mortem

I actually really like this one. It reminds me of Castle Adventure, which I talked about previously on my blog here. What I've completed in a day is just the bare skeleton of the thing, but I really like it and think it has potential. I'll almost definitely return to this at some point (hence the "Mini" in the game's title).

It needs enemies. I even designed some puzzles around enemies, but had to replace them with boring corridors because I just didn't have time to get them done. More environmental traps and collectable items with corresponding puzzles would be nice, too. Add an earned ability to fight back, and a boss fight or two, and I'd totally play this game HA! The problem with enemies for this one was pathfinding - I had no easy way to give the enemies some awareness of the player's location. I think I'll create a simple game around an A* implementation so I have access to pathfinding for a future game.

Other than the lack of gameplay elements resulting in a bit of a boring game, my initial scope was a bit out there again. I find that scoping outside reasonable limits makes me work much harder to get it done, but it does mean I spend more time implementing stuff than testing and fine tuning it.

I got some simple sound effects in which is definitely a bonus, but still missing music.

Anyway, even without enemies the game is kind of hard and unforgiving of screw ups. But I like that, too! At any rate, I feel like game #2 is a definite improvement over game #1, but perhaps only because it appeals to me more, being all unashamedly old-school (albeit, only a fraction of what I'd like to do).

* Pro-tip: He's invisible!

30 Games in 30 Days: Pumpkin Panic

First game done! It has been a bit of an epic effort to get this out today, but here it is in all of its playable... er... glory?

Left and right arrows move (or you can use A and D instead). Avoid the pumpkins. Collect the crystals. One point for every pumpkin which splats, along with 10 x Level points per gem collected. Only 3 gems will be spawned at any one time.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY

The Post-Mortem

What went right? Everything and nothing! I made dumb choices, making this game take much longer than it should have. For starters, the art took up way too much time (probably about 8 or 9 hours on art and coded art effects). Occlusion baking really freaking sucks! This is all made worse by the fact that I had a cursory art pass done in less than an hour. It was functional, but it bothered me, so I ended up screwing around trying to get a baked-AO look to everything. Technical limitations and creative choices slowed me down a lot.

There's no sound. That's a shame. I would have liked to have figured out how to add sound (it's something I've yet to experiment with in Unity) but I just ran out of time.

The gameplay is boring. I expected that. Initially, it was just dodging pumpkins, but then I realised I needed to add something to give the player a desire to move around, particularly in the early levels, so I added the gems.

There's not enough complexity or depth here to really take much away from it other than: Too much art in these short-burst game making exercises is bad and doesn't leave much time for testing and tweaking gameplay. I think it could be more entertaining with just a little bit of tweaking difficulty.

My best score is 2445 btw!