SwapQuest has been invited to the Indie Prize Showcase at Casual Connect Europe in Amsterdam next week! I will be showing the game there for three days, hopefully talking to a lot of people from the press to promote the release, which will be at the end of February. If you should be at the venue, make sure to come over and say hello.
The beta is officially over and I’ve started implementing some of the excellent suggestions I got.
One complaint I often got over the course of the development is that you can’t tell the character to turn around and go the other direction (you can only choose a path when you reach a fork). I was a little afraid, that this might make the player too powerful and that the game would become super easy. But now that I’ve played it for over 20 hours, I think the difficulty lies (and should lie) elsewhere and not in the controls. To get to the point, you can now change directions whenever you stop your character, as you can see below.
Another thing that has been requested multiple times has been added: tapping instead of swiping to choose a direction. Now both works.
The next changes all affect the world map. You can now play the level you have completed before again to get some extra jewels or level your character up some more, should the next level be too difficult. Also bosses now have their own separate level, you don’t have to fight them right after you have finished the level, which should lower the difficulty considerably.
Last, but not least there are now damage numbers when you fight. This might not seem necessary at first, but I think it’s really nice to see how much damage you actually do, especially when you got a new weapon and want to see its effects. What do you think?
Today I finished implementing all the abilities. That took a lot longer than I thought it would, but I think it was worth the effort.
To give you an idea, each character class has one specific skill in the beginning of the game and learns two of four additional skills throughout the game. This means every class has 5 different skills and there are 25 skills in total.
The good thing is that each class finally feels different and it’s fun to acquire new abilities. As every ability can be trained and made more powerful, character customization is quite complex.
As a little preview I want to show you two of my favorite skills. They are part of the Trickster class and can be learned when the Trickster turns into the Mage.
The first is the Fireball:
The second is the Ice Lance:
I hope you like them! 🙂
Next up is the last part of the game, which includes a new cutscene and the ending sequence (and some surprises ;)).
Have a great weekend, everyone!
I’ve implemented a progress bar today that shows you how far you’ve come in the level, as some folks have been wondering about that as they played. Not as exciting as a boss battle, but a neat new feature (which you can also disable in the options if you don’t need it).
For those of you that are wondering why the marker on the bar is not moving constantly: the progress is determined by the rows of tiles that have left the screen, so only then a new progress value is calculated.
I’ve also been working more on the first boss, especially the balancing of the difficulty, as I kept losing.
Here’s a longer gif showing what it will be like to fight him (although the actual strategy is not revealed…)
I made a little gif showing all the status effects that are currently in the game.
Paralysis: randomly paralyses you when moving or in battle
Confusion: the hero will randomly choose a direction at forks and you cannot stop him
Blindness: the hero has a 50% chance of missing the enemy
Poison: the hero loses some life from time to time
I also made some changes to the way the hero reacts when a tile is swapped right in front of him (before you weren’t allowed to swap tiles that the hero wants to walk on). Additionally, the character now stops immediately when touched (before he would walk to the center of the next tile first, but that confused A LOT of people).
Finally I can show you something new. It’s the vine that grows from the Moonlight Flower in the Dark Forest. It slowly grows over the level and creates a new flower eventually. The vine can be cut by the hero, though.
Hope you like it. 🙂
Also there’s a strange hole that emits an even stranger mist that you should avoid. A strong enemy emerges near those holes. It is invisible as long as you don’t fight it, but you can still see its shadow on the ground.
There is a mysterious eye that appears out of nowhere and you have to touch it fast enough before it disappears again to get some extra jewels.
When I was not working on the actual game I had some more fun with this:
Today I want to show you more about the class system in SwapQuest.
In total there will be 5 classes in SwapQuest: the noble, the rogue, the fighter, and two classes that are still a secret. I’ll give you a brief description of the different classes to show their roles in the game and how they influence the way you (can) play the game.
In general, every class has three forms, an initial form that you start the adventure with and two subsequent evolutions.
Let’s start with the most basic ‘beginner’ class.
1. The Noble
Evolution: Noble > Prince/Princess > King/Queen
The noble class is a very balanced class with no big disadvantages, but also nothing it is exceptionally good at. The prince/princess and king/queen evolutions give the class a slight defense bonus, which makes it very suitable for the first playthrough.
The abilities of the noble class include the Royal Instinct, which marks tough enemies with a red aura, Expel, which stops the Horde for a short amount of time, and Last Wish, which gives you a second chance should you die, but only if you are successful in a minigame.
2. The Rogue
Evolution: Rogue > Thief > Ninja
The rogue class is leaning more towards speed than power. The rogue tries everything to stay alive by collecting every item on screen and moving as swiftly as possible. He/She is accompanied by his/her faithful dog, Shadow, whose role is to get items that are too far away to collect.
The abilities of the rogue include Jump, which allows you to get to a new position fast, and Lockpick, which lets you open a chest from afar.
3. The Fighter
Evolution: Fighter > Knight > Paladin
The fighter class is kinda the opposite of the rogue class, with a main emphasis on combat and strength. He/She gets high attack bonuses and also a luck bonus, which increases the probability of evading and critical attacks.
The abilities of the fighter class include Counter Attack, which does just that every time the enemy attack misses, Shout, which deals damage to every enemy and object in a certain area, and Battle Cry, which boosts the attack whenever his/her health is below a certain value.
That’s it for today, but before I finish this update, let me also show you a small effect I recently implemented that I really like, as it is reminiscent of old SNES and PSX games like Secret of Mana or Suikoden.
Leave feedback if you like and have a nice weekend! 🙂
After my horrible attempt to create a space adventure for the Ludum Dare earlier this year, I decided to give it another go in the Indie Speed Run, a Game Jam with actual prizes, in which you can choose when you want to start the 48h time limit by hitting on a big GO button.
As usual I already had a rough idea what I wanted to make before starting the timer. This is not very smart, as you get a theme and a mandatory element for your game as soon as you hit the GO button, so you most likely have to come up with something new anyway.
My theme was “Growth” and my element “Coffee”. While I really liked the theme, the element seemed kind of random. The first thing I did was thinking about how I could change the concept I had already in mind to integrate a growth element into it.
I came up with a physics game where you have to make objects bigger in order to interact with your environment. As I always wanted to do something with 2D ragdolls, I designed a scenario where you have to save a young man that wants to hang himself in his garage by making objects bigger.
It was really a dark and morbid idea, but I liked it so far, so I began doing the graphics with my graphics tablet. It took a few hours, but I was happy with the result.
Creating the ragdoll physics was really simple in Game Maker, as it has integrated Box2D physics. Still it was already late in the evening and I decided to call it a day to be fresh for the second. As I got to bed, I had really big doubts that I would a) be able to finish it and b) create something meaningful and/or fun with this game. So in a kneejerk reaction, I scraped the whole game and thought what I could do the next day in order to save this chaotic game jam experience.
Before I fell asleep I only had a rough idea…
As soon as I got up I started thinking about different ways to incorporate the growth theme in new and clever ways. This brainstorming session wasn’t successfull at all, so I began creating really simple graphics that looked like from an old Atari 2600 game. I liked the simplicity and atmosphere they created, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them.
In a burst of desperation, I decided to treat the development process like a mystery novel, where even I wouldn’t know how it would end. I implemented characters (a man, a woman, a girl, and a boy), objects (a hole, a seed, a watering can), enemies (plain and simple one type of enemy) and different terrain. To make things a bit more interesting I created all the graphics in shades of grey, so that I could blend any color over them while the game is played. This way the game looks different every time it is started and changes its color palette whenever something meaningful happens.
From there I let the concept grow (pun). The goal of the game – rescuing the family members from the monsters – wasn’t clear to me until the end of the development. I worked on the game for 24 hours in a row and especially the night hours created a great atmosphere to work on it.
To be honest, I like the game a lot. It is part having finished a game in 24 hours, part the symbiosis of simplistic gameplay and a creepy atmosphere.
You can play it on Game Jolt directly in the browser. Just click on the image below. Have fun!
This week has been really exciting, as there were two big events coming up: first the Big Indie Pitch on Tuesday, which was sponsored by Sega, and second the Gamescom, which I haven’t been to for five years.
The organizers of the Big Indie Pitch seemed to like leaving its attendees in the dark, as the only info I got was that I will be pitching my iOS game SwapQuest to ten journalists (from PocketGamer, TouchGen, Making Games, etc.) in some kind of speed dating manner.
As this was the first time I pitched a game to anyone, I was really nervous. I ran around Cologne for two hours just to walk off my tension and at the time the event started I was calm (or maybe exhausted) enough to enjoy it. The first thing I noticed was that the location was really narrow and after a few minutes overcrowded with developers and journalists. As I only knew one person at the whole event (from the german indie developer forum Indie Arena) I sat down next to him and tried to figure out how this would work. As it turned out, not even the journalists had an idea what they will have to do.
Upon entering the location, though, every developer got a number that told you when you would be pitching. I was number 8, so I didn’t have to wait too long before I could show SwapQuest.
In the end it turned out that the whole pitching really worked like speed dating, as you would sit down at a table with two journalists and present your game in five minutes. After that, you had to hurry to the next table, as there were no breaks between the pitches. It was quite funny to jump from one table to another, restart the game, greet the journalists, pull two business cards out of your pocket and get started with your presentation, all in mere seconds.
After that, the actual fun began. I talked to a lot of different indies and saw some awesome games, like Sky Arena by Hammer Labs or Fiete by Ahoiii (which won the BIP, btw). It was definitely an afternoon/evening well spent.
The only thing that really bothered me was that the organizers didn’t do their homework properly. There were 40 developers that each had 5 minutes to present their game. This means at least 200 minutes of pitching, not counting in any breaks or whatever. I’m not really sure why they hadn’t foreseen it, but after 25 developers had pitched their games to the press, it was decided that it would take too much time to let everyone pitch and the whole event just stopped to announce the winner. I spoke to one of the poor guys that weren’t allowed to pitch and he was really disappointed (and even worse, he had a great game to show!).
In the end, SwapQuest made the 2nd place in the competition and I was very happy with it.
The next big event was the Gamescom, one of the biggest gaming exhibitions in the world. I didn’t have high hopes to achieve anything there, but I wanted to promote SwapQuest some more by talking to people about funding and distribution and of course the game itself. Sadly, I made a really bad mistake. I didn’t think of buying a ticket for the business area. What that meant was that I was walking around the exhibition halls for four hours, fighting through hordes of teenagers, becoming almost deaf by the loud music and screaming entertainers on stage, putting business cards into the hands of irritated gamers and onto random tables, just to end up completely exhausted and dizzy and empty-handed. It was a disaster. From the moment I stepped into the large foyer I knew I was in the wrong place. I didn’t care much for the new games and AAA masterpieces and free giveaways.
The only thing that saved this day was being able to see the IndieArena booth, where ten brave indies collaborated to create the first booth for German indie developers. And it was great! The booth was quite simple and straightforward with ten stations where you could play the best of German indie games. My personal highlights were The Inner World by Studio Fizbin, Sky Arena by Hammer Labs (again), and Forced by Beta Dwarf Entertainment. But be sure to check out the trailer to see all of them, there’s just so much quality in these games, it’s amazing!
[youtube id=”VDIq3FoEr6o”]
I was on the Gamescom only for five hours, but that was more than enough for me. If I go next year, I will definitely make sure I’ll get a ticket that includes the business area. Lesson learned.
Did you go to the Gamescom or even the Big Indie Pitch this year? What were your impressions? Comment below.
I’m just about to add the last finishing touches to ScapeGhost and I’m at a point where I worked so hard on the game that I’m beginning to doubt whether it’s actually any good. :/
But apart from that, it all seems to come together. My ToDo list is almost empty and I’m planning to submit the final version tomorrow after playing through it one more time, hopefully finishing it 100%.
The last things I added were:
I have no idea how good the other entries of the competition are, but I do hope that my game can compete with the rest.
Wish me luch, everyone. 🙂
Constantin