pixelpaton

Not a great deal to write about today as I mostly focused on design, which I don’t have too much to comment about.

I Started out sketching layout ideas for the ‘Main Menu’, “Game Over” etc screens, not sure on what I will go towards yet …

Altered the bitmap that darkens the edge of the screens, adding a bit of noise to the mask and tweaking the levels, this is how it looks now …

Spent quite lot of time editing the bitmap tiles after buying the textures I needed from iStockPhoto. This took up several hours of todays time to get the textures colour balanced and to tile nicely, and there’s still more work to be done on them. Unfortunately the intensity of the colours on the phone isn’t as vibrant on my desktop. When I played the game on my phone I found it lost some of what I had been aiming for.

Here’s what most of the tiles look like as files …

And here’s the result in game. Still needs a bit of work but looking much better already. I’ve changed how the ball looks again too, this time to something like a glass ball which you can see slightly through …

And another in game shot showing a magnet in the top right that has a particle emitter pushing out small symbols …

Here’s a short demo showing the latest updates in the game running with Adobe AIR on my Nexus one …

MazeBall beta 7 from Terry Paton on Vimeo.

I need to tweak the controls soon as the games feeling a little ‘lazy’ and a little frustrating to control. A friend I’ve had test it for me has complained that it needsbe more responsive. I don’t think this will take too much so I’m not worrying about it just yet.

I started today implementing a particle engine into the game, which mean simply adding in the code I use for pretty much all my other games. This is quick and easy to do and runs nice and fast. At the moment I’m just generating test particles, nothing specific. I also wanted to see how this affected performance while working with the scrolling engine so I quickly put it on the phone. The good news was, the performance was excellent.

Screen shot showing a bunch of particles being emitted from the balls location …

Next up I needed to start setting up special floor tiles that have varying effects. I need to allow a whole bunch of different types, so this meant marking the level bitmap with additional colours and scanning for/generating those when building the levels. So first up I had to establish a large-ish set of distinct colours so that level editing won’t be a nightmare.

Here’s the set of colours I’ve chosen, red text indicates tiles I still need to add into the game, black text are the tiles I currently have working …

My test map now looks like the below, and this is the one I’m using in the video at the bottom of this post …

The first tiles I got working were ‘force’ tiles, if you roll over them your ball is pushed in the direction they are facing, I do this with a simple proximity test – the same test I use for toggling tiles on and off. I simply added a few more conditionals – if your above a left facing force tile, push the player left … easy! Here’s how they look in game …

I then went on to make a rotating force tile, slippery tiles and magnets! I’ve also dropped back the intensity of the images of the tile toggling as they were really standing out too strongly.

Here’s the video showing the progress, this is running Flash with AIR for Android on my Nexus One …

MazeBall beta 6 from Terry Paton on Vimeo.

As a last task today I’ve settled on some images to buy from iStockPhoto which I then use to create the textures in the game. Hopefully I should be able to apply the textures tomorrow and get things looking a little more refined.

I wasn’t able to get a great deal done over the past day, but I was able to begin playing with the look and feel for how MazeBall might look. To start with I had sourced a few images from iStockPhoto and ban dropping a couple of textures into the tiles that I had made.

Here you can see that I’ve dropped in a repeating pattern for the floor and one of the wall tiles (just above to the right of the ball) has a texture applied to it. This confirmed that I might be able to get something looking good out of this …

So after having a quick play with Photoshop I decided to change the whole set of tiles, but this time I made the floor a light texture. This REALLY didn’t work as the lighter texture for the floor made it look like you were up on top of walls and could fall off. This needed to change …

Here I made the floor darker, and changed the metal ball into a wooden one. It’s starting to look better now, but it’s a little too dark. Not sure if I will stay with the ball being wooden either as the metal makes a nicer contrast in these textures, but for the moment it can stay like this. I began playing with the floor tiles a little more, experimenting with how they might change as you rolled over them ‘toggling’ their state …

Here I had started making the floor tiles into actual bricks which feel like it makes more sense and I’m starting to get the coloring right. I’m happier with the wall now, though I will revisit them. For me it was obvious here that the floor tiles need some variation as they are all the same making it look artificial and too uniform. I’ve also changed the toggle state of the floor tiles to show a hieroglyphic symbol – this ties into the theme much better so I think I’m onto something here.

I added more floor tile types here, but you can see there’s a few graphical glitches going on where somehow tiles are missing – I’ve mostly fixed this but occasionally the odd tile still does this … not quite sure why yet …

And here’s with more variation in the floor tiles and different symbols for their toggle state. I feel this is really getting close to what I wanted to achieve now and can almost commit to it. I’m using the same texture for the top of all the walls here though, so I will have to also change that, but I like it otherwise. Its looking very brown but I think changing the ball to something metallic will help …

Just got to stress that I am using positional art from iStockPhoto in the above, I use the low-res images from the site before deciding what to buy. As you can see the design can change quite a lot during the process so I try to contain myself and not buy artwork before I have settled on a look.