Winnneeeeer! Space Ballz Proto 0.9

So I've been finding that if I get frustrated with what to do next for the game, I should work on effects to help polish whats there. So along with working on the levels, I decided upgrade the games win/lose screens. Take a peek! If you don't want to win or simply can't lose, use N (for win) and L (for lose) to see what happens.

I also removed levels 1 and 3 due to intense suckage. Coming next will be some better levels (hopefully) and a proper visual tutorial.

Enjoy and hit me with feedback!

In the mean time

I've musing over the levels I made. As my buddy (and major contributing artist to Space Ballz) Mike put it: I wanted to shoot myself while playing it. I'm spending free time here and there working on coming up with what makes a level 'fun' in Space Ballz. I think its about avoidance and choosing carefully how to spend your time. If a level has really no need for either of these, its pretty much sh**. I think I'll take this approach first when re-tuning and coming up with new ones.

So in the mean time I've been playing a ton of Dragon Age but tonight I decided to change it up and play some L4D2. Normally I enable a friends-only campaign but I decided to throw caution to wind and turn on public settings. Damn dude. I forgot how much fun this game is.

Space Ballz! Proto 0.8

So the new stuff here is "transitions" between screens in the game but also 5 new levels that are about easing players into the experience. I added some additional tuning options like limiting the types of balls that can be launched in a stage (so only green for example). The new levels are not particularly balanced. If you have some feedback for how they could be more exciting, etc please let me know!

Transitions

Using some of the renderable actions I added a new transition effect between "states" of the game. So now the game will fade to black between screens and hopefully not be as jaring.

More to come (this version is not available on the side)!

Space Ballz stuff coming soon!

So if I can peel myself away from Dragon Age - which the sheer addictiveness it brings kicks in my guilty "need to do hobby coding" device - I am planning on releasing some updates. The first release I hope will bring some greater clarity to how to play the game. To solve this, I've going to add a small slide show to the begging that will show you how the game is intended to be played. Second, I am going to try and create at least 3-4 levels that ramp up slowly and will go from "stay here and get all the balls" to "dive, duck, dip, dodge to get all the balls." I also want to add a strong level transition - probably fade to black then fade back in to help players get a stronger idea that they are switching levels.

With those features in, I will then move forward with possibly adding new gameplay elements.

Reflection!!!1!

I may despise myself sometimes. I may think I've hit rock bottom. I may think I've really wasted every chance everyone has given me.

Then I take a moment, step back, look at it all, and realize how f***ing lucky I really am.

A Clean Plate

I love the feeling of a freshly formatted computer

Updatez

While I don't have a ton of time to get into it right now, I was able to take advantage of the dreaded snow storm that massacred the east coast and get some work done on Space Ballz.

My TODO list has be re-arranged so that I stop adding features and instead fix what I already have. This comes into flavors: a proper tutorial or series of intro slides telling you how to play the game and also modifying the existing set of levels to ramp up and not just be a wide spread of what could possibly be. To help achieve the latter, I worked on some better editing features to the Tile Editor. I can now drag select whole areas and paint them and also move groups of tiles - this is particularly useful when adjusting 'tunnels'. My hope is to use the new feature to produce more levels to play with (since before it was just a massive chore to construct them).

So just that for now. The tool isn't really designed for you fine folks so this is nothing you will see but I wanted to let it be known that I haven't stopped production.