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Another day with a decent amount of tweaks and updates..

Extra Lives now display a little text when you pick them up, making it immediately known to you that you picked up an extra life.

Timer mode now resets to 300 seconds everytime you switch a level or you die (effectively giving you 300 seconds for every attempt you do at completing a level…)

Ended up spending most of the morning trying to figure out why the bloody Timer mode refused to reset on level 3 but worked fine on lvl 1 and 2… made absolutely no sense… and ultimately I didnt find out why.. But I did get it fixed… go figure 😉

Here is a video for the lazy folks 🙂

And once again, please dont hesitate to post a comment or let me know what you think of the game or the latest updates… It is really the only way for me to figure out whats good and whats not so good 🙂

Or what you would like to see changed or added to the game 🙂

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Hi All…

 

Just a quickie 🙂 Have been out all day, went on a train trip to visit my dad, and I brought my laptop and my usual drawing gear 🙂

Ended up with my laptop in my dad’s livingroom, working on the game, doing some programming and concept art on my own laptop, while Mette, my dad’s wife, sat next to me on her laptop playing the very game I was working on 😀

21-11-2009

 

Quite a different experience, but a very entertaining one, as my programming would occasionally be interrupted by outbursts from Mette, complaining about the little guy’s ability to follow her commands! or cursing at herself for running into firetraps ;D

 

Oh, and in the train I was fiddling with a different little idea for something I might make another day. no screenshots yet, but its basically a physics/gravity type game with a playfield, a ball, and you in control of the playfield, and your goal is to manipulate the playfield by tilting it horizontally and vertically to make the ball roll in a desired direction towards whatever the goal is for the map.

 

yes, its been seen tons and tons before… 🙂 But its a learning experience for me none the less 🙂

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I had the pleasure of getting to go home 2 hours earlier from work today… Which I of course immediately put to good use by rushing home and doing a bunch of coding… codey…stuff 😛

Added a Timer to the game, so now you will earn a score at the end of each level, based on how many seconds you have remaining of the 300 seconds that I’ve give the player to complete each level. (You wont die by running out of time yet… and yes, i am a CRAPPY tester… so I have no idea what will happen to your score if you let the timer run out and then finish the map at negative time… im guessing it wrecks you score 😛 Feel free to let me know 😉 )

Anyways, more to come… but for now, Enjoy the timed mode and keep the suggestions and encouragement coming.
Thanks all! 🙂

oooh, I almost forgot… Welcome to the Credits section! 😉 You know who you are, and Thank you for your help!

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I’ve recently come in contact with a 3d modeller who is willing to help out with some basic models for the game, thereby allowing me to focus more on the actual coding and designing 🙂

I’ll post a link for his portfolio/showcase later once I get it 😉

His first addition to the project is a little prism-like gem that will replace the yellow gem/coin thingy that we have in the game for bonus/pickups 🙂

I’ve added it to the game and tried out a Diamond-effect on it… didnt quite work as I had intended, but rest assured, it will be sorted once we figure out how to make a purdier looking one 🙂

Anyways, here’s a bit of camera-scanned concept art from TastyGraph’s sketchbook and flickr page 😉

Gemstone and 1up heart concepts
18-11-2009

End of Level Portal, locked and unlocked 🙂
18-11-2009

18-11-2009

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Actually… not really 🙂 I’ll do it in 1 post 🙂

I’ve added a Continue function when you run out of lives you will be able to continue from the map you reached, rather than having to restart (unless you chose to, since that is an option as well)

Not a whole lot of stuff got done today, other than… call me Mr.Slack…

Oh, except maybe for a little secret that I might be ready to reveal in the near future 🙂 (give me a few days 😉 )

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Hello All 😉

Its getting a bit late here, but there’s an update none the less.. based on a suggestion from Ravn, which I thought was quite a good idea, I have now added Ice Crates to the game… They are like the normal crates, except when they touch a firetrap, both ice-cube and firetrap disappears (yes, its very unpolished at the moment, but i will add fancy effects later 😛 )

This adds a whole new option for the player, as they can now search for ice-cubes and use these to clear out fire traps and gain access to bonuses… So I have of course added a bunch of bonuses near some of the fire-trap clusters 🙂 (on level 1 and 2)

Hope you enjoy! 🙂

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As you can probably guess from the post title… yep, this evenings update brings Unstable Platforms to the game…

You know, the kind of platforms that you stand on, and then they give you some kind of indication that standing on them is not a good idea, since they are about to fall… They’re not exactly a new invention, as you have undoubtedly seen them many times in the Super Mario games 🙂

You’ll see the first one on the 2nd level, have fun with it 🙂

I’ve also done a little bit of tweaking on the 2nd and 3rd map to make them a little bit more interesting and generally feel less empty.

And as you finish the game (wether its by death… or by entering the End of Level Portal on the 3rd level) you will undoubtedly notice that I have changed the way scoring works, and you will now receive a bonus of 500 points for every Life you have by the time you finish the game 🙂

Yeah, that means no bonus for those with 0 lives, due to dying… 😉

Let me know what you think of these changes, and feel free to post your highscores 🙂 (yes, I will eventually make it store the highscores and let the players compete against eachother… when I figure out how to do it 😛 )

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Yesterday brought many upgrades to the game… so today I decided to record a little runthrough of the 3 levels in the game (yes, I realise I am not picking up all the extra lives 😮 )

 

Hope you enjoy watching it, and dont hesitate to post a comment 🙂

 

Will be adding more stuff to the game throughout this Sunday 🙂 I’ve already created a volume-slider for the music voume, and it will of course be implemented in the next update of the game 🙂

 

Until next time! cheerios! :p

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Hello all…

 

Let me tell you about today! Today was a whole day of struggling with the code for the game, error upon error, and me being a total noob!! I had to throw down the towel and surrender at one point, went and did my groceries… On the way back I did some thinking… came back home and tested it…

BLAH! Didnt work 😉

I didnt give up though, so I kept working on it… for about 5 hours until I figured it out! 😀

 

hehe… 5 horrible hours! but hey, its done, I figured it out, and now my game has a persistant score and life counter across levels, but please let me know if you find any bugs in relation to this, as my system is probably not as cleverly designed as it coulda-shoulda been 🙂

 

I also watched a few tutorials that taught me how to work some more with the prefabs and instances/clones… which allowed me to get back to my game and add in a little visual feedback in the form of particle effects when you pick up a Bonus Item, or enter the end of level portal 🙂

 

So please, get right in, try it out, and post your score here for all to see! 🙂

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Hi all…

 

From figuring out how to do the extra life thingy, I managed to get my head around how to work with a score for the player, and gaining points from picking up the gems/coins… I also did a bit of an overhaul on the 3 levels, adding more fire thingies and more gems and tried to make the lifts a bit more interesting to use, by adding in the gems in rows while you’re travelling… giving you a POP POP PPPPPPOP!!! feel as you use the lifts… at least the first time 😉

 

Now I just need to figure out how to make it so that the scores and lives do not reset everytime a new level loads… by the end of tomorrow, I should have that nut cracked! ;D

 

Ooh, and before I forget… I changed it from being a streamed game (it would load as soon as the first map was finished, but sometimes this resulted in some problems for slow downloaders since some items would be missing from the next map… I’ll get it sorted, but for now I have changed it to a non-streaming format, so it will download all of the game before actually starting to play.)

On a more positive note though… Platform Textures are back! Yay! ;D The game looks semi-reasonable, once again 🙂 … but just semi 😉