This is going to be quick, since I only have about three hours. But theres nothing on TV, and I have a bit of time. So I might as well try to create a game!
Probably not as good as last time, probably not as many updates, and its probably going to fail a lot quicker. We will see!
7 PM – Man, is this late already. And I haven’t even really started! So I just spent about half an hour or so and played around with several ideas I had. I thought, why not try to turn one of those into something playable? So I’m now trying to do this. So far, there is some kind of camera-movement which so far works really nice. And… thats it. Next up: Drag and Drop! Wish me luck.
7.50 PM – It took me this long to add Drag&Drop? Wow. This shows me how much I suck. Also: My computer freezed completely: once. Thats impressive and annoying! Also, kind of scary.
In other news, I’m getting hungry. I should eat something! If I don’t make it today – and I won’t – I might continue on this on wednesday or thursday or something. Far away.
8.40 PM – I ate something and thought about that one problem. Terribly interesting for you guys, I bet.
9 PM – Current bug: Somehow, the neighbours of the cubes aren’t correctly determined. This isn’t really telling you much since I didn’t say anything about this game so far, but you must admit “Neighbours of the cubes” would be a pretty neat name for a band!
9.20 PM – So now that works, but now the triggering of “please-search-for-your-neighbours” doesn’t work. Also, “Please search for your neighbours” is kind of a sucky name for a band.
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FAILURE – No more time today. Will probably continue on this later this week. Stay tuned!
CONTINUE?
3 PM – It’s late again. Well, let’s see how this goes. So heres a bit about the game:
The player gets a few cubes – its always cubes with me, huh? – arranged in a neat fashion. His (or her) job is to drag&drop the cubes in order to reconstruct the whole thing so that it fulfills certain conditions.
However, the connection needs to stay connected at all times. So you can’t just drag that one element out which would disconnect that whole thing. So I have to check if the cube the player desires to remove is actually one that might disconnect the whole thing. This is harder than I thought it would be. Huh. Well, I have a new approach to this on paper, and I’m now going to try to implement this. Since I love you, I’m going to tell you a secret: I’m kind of scared to implement this. 😦
3.30 PM – Case in point: I spent way too much time making that drag&drop-movement smooth, when I should have spent that time doing that stupid neighbour stuff. Okay, no more excuses! I’m gonna work on that now!
… Or maybe I should get myself something to drink first.
4.30 PM – Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Keeps crashing. Bugs. Crash. Bug. Error. Bug. Crash. Does this make you happy? This is my “hobby”. God. 😦
5 PM – I think it works!
Wait… is it pathetic that it took so long?
5.15 PM – I told the forum about this. I shouldN’t have done that. Where can I delete posts?
5.20 PM – So basically, I did that because it forces me to continue working on this. Man, clever, huh? But since people might be interested in the actual development, okay: I’m not having a design document – as per usual for these minigames – and the rough gameplaysketch is still permanently changing in my head. The basic gameplay is pretty much decided, but the style is changing rapidly, and there is also that voice in my head which puts the whole thing more into rhythm-game-territory. Which might be fun, but its a lot harder to prototype and do for me since I’m not able to do these things. Aww well!
5.30 PM – Urgh. I should be more careful naming my variables next time. So I can do “X”, when the variable named “fail” (a theme that describes this whole experiment) is “one”, which in my mind means “true”, so basically this reads as “if it failed, it worked”, which makes my head hurt 😦
I could have renamed that variable instead of whining about it here, but you know… this is more fun.
6.30 PM – After a not-very-constructive little “break”, which will now continue (it began already), there will/might/should/could be more! So far, I’ve only outlined a bit of the interface.
This time, I want to use no tutorials. Everything should be explained in the game: So expect bubbles to pop up (without interfering, obviously), these kind of things.
8 PM – Yeah, I took a break. Anyway, the “tutorial” is now a giant text floating around telling you how to do stuff. But its really just one sentence that reacts to your input, so its not like my usual long-winded tutorial texts. And its just the very basic controls, everything else should work without these long texts.
8.30 PM – Current interest in this is zero. I can basically write what I want!
9.30 PM – The best thing I ever programmed was a confetti-effect. I use it all the time. If you haven’t programmed your own yet, you should do so right now, since you can use it in any situation always and it will always be great.
9.45 PM – Will now add another gameplay element. After that: Creating a real endless mode, adding a score and then, there will be reviews. Previews. Playtests. And all that.
10 PM – I’ve used so much stuff from Cubic Colors, it’s not funny. And some of the material from Projection. And a few graphics from older prototypes not released, etc. etc. This is insane.
10.30 PM – Another bug. This time, a barrier doesn’t rotate correctly. Hmm..
11.20 PM – Enough for today. A somewhat playable version is done and will be sent to T for comments. I’m going to sleep.
Let’s start with a picture!
3.20 PM – So here is a shot of the current status. You can drag&drop the cubes and stack the cubes wherever you want in any direction. Your task is it to reach the goals, which are the colorful… shapes floating around. Since it can be difficult to judge the exact position of such an object, I’ve just added this handy line you see above. This makes building stuff a lot easier, and is an absolute must since there will be a timelimit.
5 PM – Whoops, forgot to update. So whats new? That line effect shown above has improved and can now be seen with mouse overs ALL THE TIME. This makes planning a little easier. I fixed a lot of bugs, all of them mainly involving more cubes than in the shot above. However, even larger structures with lots of cubes are now no problem anymore.
In order to be able to play with these, the camera needs to dynamically adjust – which it does now. It moves dynamically and automatically in such a way that you can always see everything. Neato!
5.45 PM – 45 Minutes mostly spent polishing and bugfixing. Among all this, I managed to make the game a lot harder – and fun – by … well, I guess by being an asshole. See, there are certain “lines” that forbid you to place cubes. These will now always be placed so that you have to reconsider. A lot. Mwahaha!
6 PM – And now its too hard Balancing is FUN

See the red lines? You have to remove all cubes along that line. Approximately one million billion in this picture.
6.50 PM – I’ll call it a day for now. Still not finished, so I removed that “Short Edition”-thing. Why is this taking so long? Mainly because I still do other stuff (no Gamedesign? Thats POSSIBLE!?) on the side, and also because this isn’t really prototyping – I’m doing way too much polishing for that. Will now end work on this for today. Thanks for reading, see ‘ya … tomorrow, I guess?
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4.20 PM – And here we go again! Bugfixing is the name of the game, and I already did that quite a lot! Also: The game is now fun enough that playtesting sessions take a lot longer than they should.
There is still that odd bug every now and then, but they are hard to reproduce. Hmm…
4.40 PM – Finally, I’m going to add the “Round”-structure that the whole game – basically – already supports. But we need to show that to the player, no?
5.30 PM – So now, for some reason, some objects aren’t checked correctly: Some of the lines above (the red things) don’t register if you put something in their way. I think I know what causes this, and the best thing: Said bug will be completely irrelevant, since I change how these lines work, anyway! Hahaha! BEST BUG FIX EVER
6.30 PM – It’s fun to have huge text on the screen, right? At least if it says things like “OH MY GOD ARE YOU AWESOME” and “OH MAN I WISH I WAS YOU”.
… Or, uh, “ROUND FAILED”?
Enough for today!
RANDOM NOTES
I doubt I’m going to use the timestamp anymore. So enjoy random notes and thoughts during the process of gamedevelopment!
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I’m wondering if “FAILURE” or “FAILED” sounds better, and I am also wondering if maybe thats too harsh? But then, in games you can really have the two extremes between amazing victories (“GREAT JOB!”, “FANTASTIC!”, “EXCELLENT!”) and horrific failures (“FAILED!”, “HORRIBLE”, etc) and it just works. So let’s see how this goes..
Tags: Experimental Experiment, live ticker, minigame, prototype

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