Things are going great on the development front. I don’t think I’ve ever been as motivated as I am right now and I am getting a lot done. My target is a mid August release on PC/Mac/Linux, with mobile versions to follow shortly after. Here is everything that I have left:

• Need to make about 60 more levels, but I’ve been making about 2-3 a day , so I should be able to hit the date a little early.
• Server infrastructure for uploading and downloading user made levels. This is mostly complete, so shouldn’t take much more time.
• General polish to the user interface, especially the editor.
• A couple new mechanics that I plan on adding. These don’t really take more than a day or two to implement.
• User interface for uploading and downloading levels. A lot of work is going to go into this to make it as intuitive as possible, as it adds a ton of value to the game.
• Add some audio to the game. I need both background music and sound effects. I’m not sure how long it will take to do this.

One thing that I’ve tackled this week was slightly upgrading the visuals. Nothing drastic, but just a slight improvement that makes everything look a little less flat.

I’ve added several popup screens such as a pause screen, level complete screen, and several others. Here is the level complete screen.

Also have created a bunch of levels and added arrow blocks to the game. The arrows restrict movement to a particular direction.

Thanks for visiting and thanks for reading this post. Leave a comment if you have any questions or have a cool level idea. Also you can follow me on twitter if you are interested @Joseph_Michels.

I got quite a bit done on day 2.

• Finished implementing all of the remaining buffs
• Added around 10 additional enemies to the game

My goals for day 3 are to put it all together with some UI elements

• UI Screen for consuming buffs
• UI Screen for stats
• Overlay for hovering over buff icons?

Here is look at what the Scroll of Mapping looks like:

Another character has been added to the hub, the enchantress:

Also I have slightly tweaked the color scheme for the Ascii Mode:

Just an update to let you know that I am still working on Grab the Loot and Run. It’s hard right now because so many good games have recently come out and I haven’t had a whole lot of free time. All the free time I do manage to get should be spent on this project, but Borderlands 2 has been sucking a lot of it away.

On to things that I have actually done.

• Added several enemies
• Upon Level Up the player is presented with three options – Restore to Full Health, Enchant an Item, Increase Maximum Health by 3 – So far they seem ok and present the player with a pretty meaningful decision. It strikes a balance between immediate survivability and long term viability.
• Started working on enemy features and abilities – Enemies that poison, enemies that teleport, enemies that flee when injured, enemies that heal allies.
• Lightened up the color palette significantly – I have done almost all development on my laptop and I guess the color is very off on my screen (or maybe a look at it from a weird angle), but the game looks way too dark when I’ve seen it on other monitors and displays, so I went through and tweaked the colors and brightness so that it looks better. I’m not done with this yet, as it might need to be made even lighter.

I’ve gotten a lot done recently. Been working on the game a steady hour or two every day, so things are progressing nicely. Here are a couple screenshots showing off some of the things that I’ve done. I tweaked the FOV lighting to make it a little brighter because I realized it was a little too dark before. I also have added a ‘Discoveries’ or ‘Findings’ screen that shows all of the things that you have identified and what sprite represents them.

I now have added functioning armor to the game so I have been able to do significant prototyping of the combat system. There are still a lot of things that aren’t implemented that will make a difference, but I can still go ahead and state the basic design goals of the system I want.

The most critical goal of the combat system is that it is not random at all. This is something that I really liked from desktop dungeons and added a fun strategic element where you need to calculate several turns in advance. I’m hoping a little bit of that will rub off into GTLAR and allow for some strategic encounters. I achieve this by having all creature’s damage and armor values constant and visible on the interface. You can use this to calculate exact outcome of a turn. The formula is very simple:

Damage Inflicted = Maximum(Attack – Armor,1)

The maximum there just forces all attacks result in at least 1 HP damage be done, even if the armor would be sufficient to block it. This system is non random and is simple to understand… but it also is boring. It doesn’t really allow much creativity in weapons. For instance, in Brogue there are weapons that have a chance to inflict effects on monsters (Paralyze, Death, ect). This percent chance effect violates my non random rule, so it is not allowed. To combat this I have introduces a critical hit mechanic. It is currently a bar that is incremented when you are hit. Once the bar is full your next attack will be classified as a critical hit. The effect of a critical hit will be determined by the gear you are wearing (mostly weapon and rings) but will allow for interesting effects. I think this will add interesting dynamic of trying to build your critical hit up to use against certain enemies. The only downside is that its growth is triggered by getting hit, which almost encourages getting hit. I’m still brainstorming ideas to combat this.

The above screenshot shows the damage and armor indicator in the top left corner as well as the critical bar. It’s also possible that all of this could change as more of it gets implemented and it gets refined more. The end result is that I want combat to be fun and for the player to have to make meaningful decisions.

Changed up the walls to look more awesome. I’ll probably end up tweaking them a little bit to add a little bit more character (defects, cracks, discoloration, ect), but I like them more than the previous walls.

Bubble Time is finally finished, I hope you enjoy it.

Download

The title basically says it all. A much more complete version of Bubble Time will be released sometime this week, probably toward the end of the week. The code is complete and I am just doing some testing. I am also trying to make a short trailer demonstrating the gameplay. It feels good to finish the game and I really think that the high score mechanic is really fun. I realize that as the developer, I am probably very biased, but the game has a certain quality that pulls you in and  keeps you playing it. I’m hoping that other people experience that and with the online leaderboard there will be lots of competition. I’ll leave you with this, a short timelapse of the making of this game (the original version)