This week I would like to talk about three different topics, the progress I’ve been making on the games I’m creating, the status of the Unity Level Editor and some thoughts on the past Ludum Dare 38 experience.
Progress
Fiery Squirrel is currently working on a couple of games. One of them is (tentatively) called Zin, which is the game that is benefiting from the new tile editor. There is also another game I mentioned in previous posts, Kuon’s Saga, developed in collaboration with Gabriel Uguet, illustrator and creator of Serpentarius, an online comic.
ZIN
Zin is a action-puzzle game that narrates the story of a little creature unable to move by itself due to a magic curse. The creature needs to recover its powers and escape from its captors. This is a very simple game for computer and consoles that involves mastering different kinds of abilities and gameplay mechanics.
The game is still in very early stage of development, I’m currently focused on designing and testing the first level, including concept art, sounds, etc. The game is divided in four different chapters, each one with four levels.
In case you are curious, you can play a very early prototype made for Ludum Dare some time ago in Newgrounds. The game now includes many more things and it’s bigger but the essence is still the same.
For this week, the focus was to create and test levels with the new editor, which is really helping a lot with the new tiles and perspective of the art. I hope next will show some new screenshots and progress.
Kuon’s Saga
This is a game that has been in development for some time, despite its simplicity and its casual nature, we created different versions of the game and tested too many things on a very slow development pace.
The game is planned to be released for free at some point next month and will include one level with 24 waves for players to enjoy. Progressively, depending on players’ feedback and reactions, we will keep adding new content with new levels and challeneges. This will be available for Android and iOS.
This week has been basically working on completing all the final elements for the gameplay, including graphical stuff and level design. By next week we will have a very solid demo to show.
Level Edition
I have good news about the Unity Tile Editor. All the basic functionality is already working properly and we submitted it for approval to the Unity Asset Store. The editor will be free and available for people to download.
This first version is a beta that will be expanded in the upcoming weeks, there are a lot of things to improve, from the functionality side of the editor to the usability, we plan to add new stuff to help automatize cumbersome tasks and create levels faster and easier.
For all of you that are interested in the details on how was the editor created, I’ll be posting details about the code in future articles. If you have specific questions, please let me know.
The video shows all the current features that will be available for people when the asset is approved on the Asset Store.
Game Jam’s Feedback
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was part of the Ludum Dare 38 three weeks ago. After playing a lot of different games and receiving feedback from people on the game I made, I have some thoughts that might be useful for people making games out there.
First of all I want to thank people for their observations, getting feedback is really nice and one of the reasons I like participating in this event. Comments from people really help improving our work, they show us a perspective that we probably do not have or just different ideas that enrich our way of thinking.
Feedback
When I talk about feedback, it’s not only players’ comments, ideas and bug reports. Feedback is also related to that concept of making your game react to the player’s input and be able to clearly show in the screen or through speakers what is going on in your game.
I decided to talk a little about this because my most recurrent comment on other people’s games was exactly that: “it would improve a lot if it had more feedback”.
And this is something that I really think developers can easiy do. Feedback does not really require super high art making skills or 3D modeling years of experience, this is all about the feeling of the game, this is related to showing the status of the game in a very clear way.
In SORLD for example, although I know there is a lot to improve and much more feedback to add, the basic actions have clear feedback and they were implemented in very few time. Shooting, being hit, recovering, dying and making progress are some of the basic actions that this game includes and they were represented with particles, screen shake, sprite rotation, sound effects, etc.
Seriously, with few changes on the feedback side, adding particles, sound effects, changing the rotation a little, zooming in and out, in most of the cases make the game feel much better and meaninful and it’s not really a difficult thing to do.
Jan Willem Nijman from Vlambeer has more experience than me on this topic and he gave a nice talk about “Game Feel” which is related to what I mentioned here. Enjoy the talk if you haven’t already and hope this helps you make better games!
This was basically it for this week. A lot of things going on, I’m trying to keep people up to date about what we are doing here and get some comments on what would be interesting to talk about for future post.
Have a great weekend!
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