Making a button more button-ish

11 April

Stars in Level Select

Added Stars. The save file now checks on what mode you completed the level on.
Grey star = Easy mode
Yellow star = Normal or higher.
It used to be a square, but now it's a star.
Subject to changes as the stars don't look like buttons. Added the mouse icon though...

Enemies can speak (soon)...

I also went to test the colours of the speech bubble. I think the orange one looks better, so I went with the orange one. I also had some issues with the speech bubble.

And here's a screenshot of where it went wrong. Haha. It's basically a camera issue.

UI improvements and design considerations

10 April

Today, Li Hao told me several issues with the game's UI and the way I try to tell players things. The UI isn't that fantastic. And the box which indicates which player is currently being controlled was at the upper right corner, and was never noticed. The restart button was also big and consumed space. The buttons were dull and it didn't really look good.

He also did not know that he could click on the portals in the Level Selection Menu to go there automatically. I tried to do button-like icons above the portals but it did not look clickable still. This problem plagued me.

How to make a button look like a button? And look good at the same time?
This doesn't look good enough by his standards and I think I have to try something else =(.

Checkpoint!

8 April

The following week will be an even busier week. Even though the story of the game is going to wrap up soon, revisiting previous levels, there are lots of improvements I could make to the game.

I sent my game to two of my close friends to play through the game, and it was a busy night taking note of their comments and experiences. My death statistics graph which I made a few days ago wasn't fully utilized, but it will be a vital part of the testing phase.

My friend died the most in levels 13 and 14. Following this is a design improvement, not to the levels, but as a  feature that will be added to the game.

To combat the "RAGE QUIT" scenario, 4 suggestions were made. The first two are from Li Hao.

1. Game Difficulty Change - Prompts the player if he or she wants to play on a very easy mode
2. Skip Tokens - Awards the player with the ability to skip a level every few levels played.
3. Walkthrough - Some players might look for walkthroughs
4. Checkpoints - Not having to restart if you almost reached the end

Checkpoint

represented by a flower that can blossom and glow

I drew a checkpoint. It's a flower that will open up on contact. I think the animation for that was pretty cool. The flower is dark because it's used for the forest levels.

Other improvements
Over the past days, I have added speech bubbles so that the turtle characters talk more. This makes the game much more lively. It was an unexpected addition, just like many other unexpected changes that serve to ultimately improve the game. With more speech bubbles in the game, I created 3 colour variations of the speech bubble that will be set depending on who spoke.

Level selection screen looks a bit better now.

Girl graphics enhanced (again)

Done on 7 April 2013

I've once again tried to better the graphics. It is really hard because a character size of 20 x 10 means I cannot add details that I want to add. It's a torture trying to make a bunch of pixels look like hair. It took me a few hours to finally get it right.

20 x 10 pixels
Very first version:

Second version, looking much better with hair and removal of eyelids and red lips

Third trial version with hair improved:

Final results at the end of today (addition of red topwear and skirt):

32 x 16 pixels
Very first version added hair, but a comment told me she looked very old:

Second version (final version so far?): Changed hair, and widened the skirt.

Hopefully this will be the final time. Afterall, it's hard to notice any changes made on 100% zoom.

Other graphic changes done in the past week (hopefully for the better):

 Trait icons (sort of like buffs):

Level 50!

6 April 2013

I worked on several new levels today. The playable levels now goes up to 49, and I am now working on level 50, which is one of the important core levels I had in my sketches. Due to time constraints, I might be cutting down the maximum number of levels in the game to 60 too, which is a good thing. The game has far more levels than I intended.

New feature: Spikes can be destroyed and plays the following animation:

I kind of love animating objects, so this was really fun to do. It plays at 12 frames per second.
There is only one level that implements this kind of dynamic spikes. It is possible to code it such that all levels use this new destroyable spike, but that will take some time to implement, so I will not be doing it yet. I am pretty excited to see what people think about it.

Another simple recolouration I did a few days back is this shimmering purple key. It's different from the other keys because it can only be collected by two players simultaneously. Rather than a change in colour, notice the key will turn darker and lighter as it rotates, which is another stark contrast to differentiate it from other keys. Moving on from MS Paint has allowed me to do cooler stuff like this.

A new level background which was resized from my original night city background drawing for a bonus level.

A draft of level 50...

A draft of a special lamp post level

This was the lighting when I was trying out. Li Hao helped me decide the final lighting, which looks much more realistic and natural than the above. The final lighting:

 20% lit

100% lit

TThis was possible due to Flixel's blend mode, which has overlay as one of the options. Though this wasn't part of the initial design. The initial design was just a dark maze, without any light source. But Li Hao said that fog of darkness isn't a good way of making a level difficult. And since I have already done fog of darkness in Level 20 before, I decided to do this lampost lighting effect, which makes the level more interesting (at the cost of some extra production time though. It took a whole night to implement this level, but the results were pretty good).

The colour and wrong direction of the spikes as seen in the screenshot was later adjusted, in case you were wondering about that. The last few levels took a much longer development time than early levels, especially the levels with "AI" and special effects and cutscenes. I'm very happy with the progress so far.

Cutscene within a level?

5 April 2013

Time runs short on my schedule. Although I have already more levels in the game than I initially planned, and more quality than I ever had, it also meant that I had also spent more time developing the game.

I am now focusing a lot more on the quality of the level, rather than the quantity. I've been doing a lot of fancy stuff with the game (and in the process, encountering the strangest bugs ever).

It isn't easy frankly. But well, I hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon. For the past few months, the game was stuck at under 40 levels, with missing levels in between.

It's now Friday and at the end of the past 7 days, I've created 9 new levels and 1 bonus level so far. The game now runs up till level 47. 3 of the levels are fully complete, aka fully decorated, with texts and free of glitches. The other levels still have to go through touch ups.

My aim is to complete all the levels by 20 May. I challenged myself to fully complete at least one level a day, and any extra time has to go into developing the next level.

Anyway, today I created this mini-conversation that occurs on one of the levels. I felt so excited when I got the speech bubbles to work with each other, so it looks like a conversation.

The above screenshot was intentionally captured to show them not facing each other

Notice in the screenshot that the two turtles are not facing each other, because players can freely move their characters while the conversation is going on. (Although it is easy to stop the player from moving them, so I can just arrange them for this conversation, I want to give the player freedom of movement even while a conversation is going on, as well as ability to skip it).

So one small detail I added, was to make them automatically face each other. I don't know how many people are paying attention to small details like this, but those who do make the tiny bit of extra work worth it!

AI Levels are fully working AI ! YES!
It took me up till the wee hours of the morning, but the levels with AI are fully working. So far, no glitches were found.

Introducing the Grim Reaper v0.10
(Hello and welcome to the Grim Reaper v0.10. He watches every death you make in the game.)
I was also trying to be (yet again, crazy), so I coded a sort of statistics table thing that shows how many times the player dies in each level.

This will be useful to generate precious data from any people who are free enough to test the game for me.

In the above screenshot, the red bars spike on levels which I died a lot on. Notably, level 16.

I think the "instructions" in the picture are pretty clear. I only played the game for a few seconds to test this statistic table. It's fully working across deaths on all levels. I can't wait to let someone try this. And I am most curious about which level is the hardest, and which levels they die a lot on! Nobody has seen this table yet (actually, nobody has seen much of this game).

If I have time, I will implement this. But seeing how I made this for testing purposes, it will probably not make it into the final game as a feature due to lack of time.

MiniGame + Simple AI

3 April 2013

AI
Today I added what seem to be the two most tedious levels to code. In Levels 41 and 42, the girl player is able to move by herself! The colourful picture below shows me mapping the zones through which the player will traverse through, and based on which zone the girl is in, direct the girl in a specific direction.

Here's a picture of my level design fail too:

Level Design fail. (Look at the Pink Door)

MiniGame