Devlog #3

Another Friday is here so its time to look back on the week. The iFest deadline is looming (next Saturday in fact) and so we hoping to give you all a great demo of the game. So lets talk about what we have been up to.

Yay play progression is finally in! This was a major feature of the entire game and one of the things I’ve been excited about. Basically this feature just carries over your progression through one play into each act in that play. Its a minor thing but I feel its something that you don’t see in a lot of puzzle games. To put things in perspective you are attacking monsters by breaking blocks, which gains you experience points so you can level up and do more damage and earn more points when breaking those same blocks. So the idea of the progression is that a good player can go for big block breaks and combos and level their puppet up faster then other people so that when he plays the 2nd act of the play he will start at level 4 instead of 3 and be attaining more points when fighting monsters.

Now its ok, this isnt going to ruin the game for people who want to play it casually because the monsters level up with the character, this is more for people who love going for highscores. The only thing left to do with this is show the player when they have improved their score in a certain act that all the acts after that could be improved because they managed to progress further.

I spent some time fixing the progression curves of the game. This includes how many points you get for breaking blocks, what the blocks give you at different levels, how much experience points you need for each level, the blocking times for each group of blocks, etc. Needless to say there seems to be a lot to make sure the progression and difficulty of the game feels nice. Hopefully the thought and effort I’ve put in to make it all work together pays off because I have a giant worksheet of graphs, numbers and comparisons that I think explains it all.

The Monster Counter from last weeks blog has been implemented, as well as the profile picture in the top left has been replaced with a level indicator so you can see which level you are when you start an act.

Also we had lost some of the RPGness of the game but we may have an elegant solution to that which will also relieve some of the balancing issues we will run into later on but it wont be implemented before ifest so we will save that until we have nutted out the full details of it.

I had designed our business cards and some t-shirts for Aaron and I to hand out at iFest and they arrived this week, they are a little dark but still look great.

One final thing is a mate of mine has been nice enough to compose some music for the game. In the very short time he has managed to produce some great tracks, we have added the main one to the game which will serve as the battle music. Of course for his generous work we are going to name a boss character after him. So far its looking like he is going to be the final boss of the Gladiator Play where he will have a giant beard and be called Kirky.

It is Friday, and I’ve given you a wall of text so here is a picture of a cave troll and what it seems is a guy from the future with funky glasses.