Week 21 went OK!
I reached 1 000 followers on Twitter! That might not sound like a lot but it really is! On Twitter the number of followers you get tend to grow exponentially, meaning that the first thousand followers take A LOT more time to get than the second one. But anyway, it really means a lot to me so here’s a thank you Pico8 cart I made!
If you follow me on Twitter, thank you! If you don’t, you totally should, I tweet and retweet lots of good stuff!!
Most of this week was spent on JOY, my paddle game! A bit of gameplay and a lot of experimenting with GFX happened. Also I very much underestimated how much time experimenting would take. But it’s OK because look how good-looking my game is!
Let’s talk about the gameplay that is currently in the game. It’s divided in two phases that loop around indefinitely (for now) with a number at the center of the screen indicating how many bounces you need to get before getting to the next phase. On the first phase you have to make the ball bounce off the Paddle (rather than letting it fall) until it explodes and you get to the next phase. And on the second phase, you have to catch smaller balls which explode when you do.
What this should turn into is: First phase stays the same except sometimes the balls have different, more challenging behaviours, and the second phase can’t make you lose, it only gets you points if you get everything. Also, for each pair of phases passed, a level counter should go up. I still don’t really know about the score system or if there should be one at all.
About the GFX now! They certainly are lot of fun to make but they can also prove to be quite difficult to get right. At first I thought I would just keep the effect from the previous GIF and only change decoration objects in the center which would change color over time. I tried this and it didn’t look very good. Rather it didn’t look as good as it did without them. So I decided I would go only with different GFX, although that will be a lot of work. But at least it’s interesting work!
Here’s something new that’s only partially related to the game: I changed my work rhythm (again)! I now get up early in the morning and get to bed at “more reasonable hours”, whatever that means. But something else that changed is I decided to tweet more GIFs of what I’m working on, with at least one in the beginning of the afternoon and one at the end of the day. Last week I mostly posted fucked-up GFX in the afternoons, and one of them was this one:
Wait Game no whatareyoudoingnooooooooooooooooooooo#JOYthegame #debugtime #gamedev pic.twitter.com/wPOK7c4O5p
— Trasevol Dog (@TRASEVOL_DOG) September 14, 2016
This tweet, posted on Wednesday actually got a ton of attention two days later when it got retweeted by a developer who is working on a very beautiful game and then got picked up by a ton of other very cool people such as JW and Rami Ismail from Vlambeer and a lot of people caught a glimpse of the game this way! (that’s also the moment I reached 1k followers)
So this was a big win!! Here’s the advice I got from this experience for my fellow game developers:
If you fucked something up but it looks hilarious. Before fixing it, get a gif/screenshot of it and post that on social medias. You won’t regret it.
Without any transition, yesterday I finally uploaded the HIGH CLIMB 1.1 update to Itch.io and to the Pico8 BBS. After the very rushed and badly-handled release of it on Kongregate I forgot about it or didn’t find the time when I did think about it. But now it’s done and there’s lots of achievements to get so go get’em!!
Also I’ve started a super secret Pico8 collab project with a very talented pixel art person and even though we barely started making it I’m very excited. For it I’ve already written one of the cleanest bit of code I’ve ever written on Pico8 and then I used that bit of code to make a totally unrelated cellular automata gif with animated stars!
Hopefully I’ll have more to share about this project next week!
Week 21 was actually pretty good! Some harsh but necessary realizations were had for JOY and progress happened even though it happened slower than I would have liked. I’m also very excited about that collab project!
Next week I’m still gonna be working on JOY. I’ll be making the logo for the game or at least a provisional one, so I can make stickers and then I’d like to work on gameplay some more, maybe making one of of the more challenging ball behaviour, and I’ll keep on working on GFX as well.
Have a great week!
Take care!
TRASEVOL_DOG
* TRASEVOL_DOG * 
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