TIGSource Forums

Gameplay
The goal in Blockadillo is to smash all colored blocks of a level with an arduous armadillo! The armadillo moves up and down all the time and the player can only move it left or right. Blocks can only be smashed if the armadillo has the same color as the block. To change color there are special blocks.

Besides this central game mechanic there are a few other elements like blocks that kill the armadillo instantly, blocks that can be moved around, buttons that drive platforms, doors and other stuff.

Development
Blockadillo is written in Java with the wonderful libGDX framework. Currently we are three people in the team: A musician, a graphic artist and me as programmer.

Screenshots
Here are a couple of screenshots taken from the current version:

(http://i.imgur.com/OdVwTf8.jpg) (http://imgur.com/OdVwTf8)
This level is pretty much complete, with background, some plants in the foreground and the blocks placed.

(http://i.imgur.com/bpXSzOf.jpg) (http://imgur.com/bpXSzOf)
This is one of the earlier test levels that shows a (moving) platform and parallax scrolling. If you want to see it motion click to see an animated gif (gfycat) (http://gfycat.com/UnluckyUniformGlassfrog)

(http://i.imgur.com/gaSbYkj.jpg) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dJTUyu5zGo)
I recorded a short video today to show the basic gameplay. But beware the video is crappy and stuttering. I guess we'll have to do a proper gameplay video the next days!

Contact

Twitter:
@24_Bit (http://twitter.com/24_Bit) (André, the musician)
@quixoticproject (http://www.twitter.com/quixoticproject) (that's me)
@blockadillo (http://www.twitter.com/blockadillo) (the game)

IndieDB (http://www.indiedb.com/games/blockadillo)

Animations and Platforms

Although we already showed this over at IndieDB it makes sense in the devlog too. So here some thoughts about animations and platforms:

We started with simple sprite based animations of a torch. This was hacked together in a few hours including support in our self made editor. This is what it looked like:

(http://i.imgur.com/aeq9REl.gif)

To juice things up a bit we added a particle system that consists of four different emitters. The first two emit dark and light smoke, both with the same cloudy 24x24 pixel texture. The other two emitters randomly emit red and orange sparks. This results in a nice smoke effect:

(http://i.imgur.com/zx62C1x.jpg)
click for an animated gif (http://i.imgur.com/SI5RML1.gif)

Pleased with the results of the animations we went on to create platforms. After a little brainstorming we came up with the following requirements for platforms:
* We want to support at least 2 directions (up/down, left/right)
* We want some graphical indication where a platform is moving to
* We want at least 2 modes of movement of the platform (back/forth, onetime, circular)

We started with the graphics of the platforms and made four different tiles that could be used to create a variety of different platforms:

(http://i.imgur.com/YjUj2af.jpg)

In the editor we had to create a new move component that could be added to a Sprite to make it behave like a platform

(http://i.imgur.com/n16ybMM.jpg)

In the screenshot you can see the four waypoints of the selected platform. Currently it is in the mode "back and forth", which means it moves from one waypoint to next until the last one is reached and then it moves back to the first one. The initial direction is "forth" and the speed is set to 25 px per second.

In the next screenshot you can see how the movement range of the platform is indicated via the wheels and the rope.

(http://i.imgur.com/9FSsmz1.jpg)
click for an animated gif (http://i.imgur.com/coPTR1X.gif)

We are pretty happy with the results and will now move onto the next things on the todo list. The next weeks will show if the platform editor is sufficient to create new and exciting levels.

Feedback is very welcome!

Cool! The editor looks funny actually (I know it's not made for that but it does look good and intuitive!)

Thanks ephoete! The editor is custom made for blockadillo. Below I added another screenshot of the editor that shows all the subwindows that there are right now.

Right now there are:
Settings - controls where the scrolling borders are
Grid - controls the grid and if the tile movement should snap to that grid
Tilesets - contains the all registered animtated and static tiles
Properties - we use a simple entity systems for every game object. In that window you can turn certain components on or off.
Layers - defines layers to which tiles can be added and which offer basic z sorting.

(http://i.imgur.com/APWkTYQ.jpg) (http://imgur.com/APWkTYQ)

You know what seems missing to me?  Armadillo-ness.  Since it spends the entire time as a ball, it's just a ball in my mind.

Any chance of giving the armadillo a couple frames of animation where it rolls up as the level starts, or maybe uncurls at the end, and/or uncurls for the death/failure animation?  Obviously wouldn't do anything gameplay-wise, but I think it would help the feel/theme.

@boxmonger thanks! that is true and a great idea! Right now we have an armadillo explaining the tutorial levels, but this is not quite finished and therefore not yet shown here. I like the idea of showing a litte animation every time a level starts!

definitely read the title of the game as "blackdildo"

About physics and switches

The development on Blockadillo continues, this is the second devlog. In the past two weeks we added a couple of new graphics, new levels and first and foremost physics!

(http://i.imgur.com/pMnOmyJ.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/kEm3vsk.jpg)

We had a box2d implementation in the game the whole time, mostly for collision detection and decided to spice things up a bit by letting the player move around various blocks. If you want to see it in action, I'll link a youtube video at the end of my post.

The player now has a trail to make the armadillo more visible on small screens:

(http://i.imgur.com/Gu6fSVC.gif)

In the animated gif above you also see the switch and brazier we added. Switches can be used to activate almost anything, from the braziers to platforms or hidden doors, traps, etc etc. Another shot of the brazier and switch in off an on position.

(http://i.imgur.com/TUZoAdg.jpg)

Playing around with shaders we added a fullscreen bloom effect. We liked it, so we kept it. Below is a screenshot of 3 different bloom intensities. We liked the middle one the best. Click for a higher resolution

(http://i.imgur.com/nMVje7q.png) (http://i.imgur.com/nMVje7q.png)

And finally there is a gameplay video showing all the things from above:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osc-O0ek3Pk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osc-O0ek3Pk)

About lava and heat haze

The development of Blockadillo continues, this is the third devlog. In the past weeks we added a couple of new graphics, new levels and a nice shader effect.

This is what one of the current levels looks like:

(https://i.imgur.com/BOSUmlg.jpg)

If you followed the development of Blockadillo you'll notice that the concept of lava is new. The basic idea is to have another visually interesting element in the game that the player is not allowed to touch. Up until now we just had the skulls, now the lava. Lava is rendered with a post processing effect shader called heat haze. It basically mimics the distortion of the view above heat radiating things. If the effect is turned off the lava becomes really static:

(https://i.imgur.com/q3xiI6T.jpg)

The heat haze effect really shines when in motion. See this gfycat:

http://gfycat.com/NegativeHeartfeltAtlanticsharpnosepuffer (http://gfycat.com/NegativeHeartfeltAtlanticsharpnosepuffer)

Here is a short description on how to achieve this effect. Since we implemented the effect as a post processing effect we first have to render the whole scene into a texture. Then we render that texture with a quad that has the size of the screen. Now we have exactly the same result as before. But we don't stop here! Next we setup our heat haze shader and send some geometry to the GPU that should be drawn with the shader activated. In the shader we have access to the texture we rendered the scene into and to a second texture that contains distortion information. The distortion texture can look like this:

(https://i.imgur.com/wj1aLsS.png)

The red channel stores the distortion in x direction and the green channel stores the distortion in y direction. Now we do two texture lookups: first we have to look up in the distortion texture how big the distortion is for the current fragment. Afterwards we lookup the color of our fragment in the scene texture. In the second lookup we distort the uv coordinates by the values we looked up before. That's it!

The development of Blockadillo continues! This time we want to give  you some insights on how we create levels for Blockadillo.

The video shows a timelapse of a level building session that took about 30 minutes. It starts from a fully working prototype of the level with very basic graphics and shows how we gradually add new graphics and more detail to the level.

The level editor itself is custom made for Blockadillo and has a rich feature set that includes things like layers, grids, wang tilings and property editors.

(http://i.imgur.com/zNTtSvB.jpg) (http://youtu.be/aUoW2Xfzsa4)

Blockadillo is all about the colors!

(http://i.imgur.com/QQnGTci.png)
Blockadillo is about smashing colored blocks with an armadillo that moves constantly up and down by itself. You can only steer it left and right. There are five colored blocks in Blockadillo (shown above): blue, yellow, pink, red and blue. To smash them the armadillo has to have the same color.

(http://i.imgur.com/4tiglce.png)
With these blocks the armadillo can change its color by touching them. As long as it can reach one of those there is no limit on how often it can change its color.

(http://i.imgur.com/Im0zZ2I.png)
These blocks can be moved and pushed around by the armadillo if it has the same color. Sometimes they will block the way out of the level and it can be difficult to get to the right color changer to change to the color of the movable block.

(http://i.imgur.com/60CUvVH.png)
The armadillo cannot safely touch every block in the game. If it touches the skull block shown above, the level has to be restarted. This block has been used in many intereting and challenging levels, but there is one thing some player didn't understand directly: The skull blog has a red background, so is it safe to touch when the armadillo is red? Is it unsafe to touch it when being red? The simply truth is: It is never save to touch a skull block :)

(http://i.imgur.com/Ew1cYGg.png)
To circumvent these questions we redesigned the skull block and made it more neutral in terms of color. It is as deadly as before :)

(http://i.imgur.com/lE2xIwr.png)
While the skull block serves its purpose very well, it kind of gets boring to see it everywhere where the player is not allowed to go. So we needed another graphical element that signals DANGER to the player. So we added spikes or thorns to the game. What do you think? Do they fit the game?

Menus!

In the past weeks we added a couple of new graphics, new levels and polished the game a lot.

For example we've redone the entire main menu, options menu and credits:

(http://i.imgur.com/jQjcgWB.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/8caRHg9.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/vgOAmNe.png)

Instead of having three separate screens we combined them! In the image above you'll see how it looks like now. If you press "credits" or "options" the central part slides down and will be replaced. Then the block slides up again and it shows the credits or options. I made an animated GIF (http://gfycat.com/FavoriteShowyGnat) which shows the menu in action!

The menu feels much better now, because with the three screens before you always had a short loading screen in between the menus, which is gone now. What you can't see on the screenshots is the sound we added to it. When the parts are sliding up or down a nice stone grinding sound is being played.

Additionally we started to polish the world selection screen. This is not done though, there will be more details on the middle and right one.

(http://imgur.com/FuKDNuQ.png)

Finally a couple of levels I've been working on lately

(http://i.imgur.com/J94NLTf.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/g6nxT4X.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/Yf2HegE.png)

The next steps are to finish the second world, which means to design 40 levels and draw the map, and then we're going to release it :)

(http://i.imgur.com/jFJ7d6w.png)


Blockadillo now has a public beta test! To join you need

• A Android device
• A Google Plus account

Go to this Google Community (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/110680128749209437320) and join it. Inside the Group you'll find a link to the Play Store to download the game.

Here are some recent screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/7leso (https://imgur.com/a/7leso)
(http://i.imgur.com/zEt3jB3.png) (http://imgur.com/zEt3jB3) (http://i.imgur.com/tIPJBBw.png) (http://imgur.com/tIPJBBw) (http://i.imgur.com/E652ojn.png) (http://imgur.com/E652ojn) (http://i.imgur.com/Nr8vxHh.png) (http://imgur.com/Nr8vxHh)