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[qwetro]

2015/7/31 RELEASE -> Google Play

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Hi everybody, I'm gonna start a dev log here about my game CHetauGet. I know the name of the game is weird, has nothing to do with the game itself, it's only temporary. It has been temporary for about half a year, but haven't come up with a better name yet.
CHetauGet is a puzzle game, I got the original idea from a game on Windows Phone, and I've changed it a lot in my style.



Goals:
I'd like to make a game help players killing some boring time. Instead of making people excited, this game's goal is to provide a period of non-boring time. This is gonna be a small mobile puzzle game, I'm not very ambitious here. However I did tried to improve the mechanic to make the puzzle-solving process more excited.

Basic Mechanic:

The basic mechanic is to prick the bubble and release the star, the star will goes to the neatest square with the same color, embed into it, and finally vanish. The star will only move horizontally or vertically toward the center of the board, and will not jump over a square which is not embedable for it. The goal of the game is to clear the board, and level completed.

In the past 3 months, I've done building the mechanic, doing some artwork, and have designed more than 300 levels. It's playable now, but there's still many things need to be done, this log is going to start here, I'll keep updating and expecting you guys could give your opinions about my game here, thank you.

[qwetro]

Update: Core Mechanic & Level Generator



These 2 gifs should have shown the core mechanic of the CHetauGet pretty clearly.

The most challenging part is not implement this mechanic, as you can see, the board, the movements, the vanish logic, the judgement of endgame, and the judgement of stuck are all simple enough. The most challenging is to generate a SOLVABLE game.

Of course I could test every level manually, but I think a game like this should certainly has hundreds of level  to play. Testing every level would cost me a lot of time. So I made a Level Generator, that is the most challenging part about this mechanic.

Before starting to build the generator, I need a Level Solvability Judger to test if a level is solvable, I call this judger Line Walker. I’m gonna use this level to explain how Line Walker works.



The image on the left is the example level, the image on the right is a abstract of the very same level.

Every pair of star and square can be regarded as a line. The thinner lines could be paired without any preconditions, while the thicker ones can only be paired after their Pre-Node’s pairing. The relation between these lines is like the figure below.



To solve this level, there’re 8 nodes that need to be solved. And the nodes that have to be solved in a certain sequence form a chain ( such as the 1-4-2 chain ) or a tree ( such as the (7|8)-6 tree ). The black rhombuses means the current tree is at an end. The main idea of Line Walker is that only when there’s no closed loops in the tree figure the game is solvable.

So, what Line Walker does is to figure out the tree of the game and find closed loops to judge if the game is solvable.

Once I had the Line Walker, I started to build the level generator. Because I need only hundreds of levels, not millions, the efficiency of the generator is not my concern. So here’s my idea: start with an empty board, and choose a grid randomly to place a square, then choose another grid that is either in the same row or the same colume for the star, now I’ve got the first pair, I test the board using Line Walker, if it’s solvable, then go on place another pair and test the board again, and again until more than 80% of the board is filled ( 100% is not easily achieved ). The level is generated.

[qwetro]

I've been iterating UI art styles last month. I tried buttons looks like glass, and dialog windows show in the image.



I really love this style, but I'm not good at painting things. I could paint a button well, I could paint a window well, but when it comes as a whole, I lost control. I think I need more practice, more experience to handle these complex styles.



This is what I'm using right now. I guess the buttons could not be simpler than this, so as the dialog window. But at least I make them as a whole, better than feeling like switching from one style to another.
I changed all dialog windows, but I did still keep some elements of that glass looking style in game where it doesn't feel odd.

As many developer always said, Keep a small scope, I re-scheduled my developing plan, gonna leave some undeveloped features to future updates. Going to speed up developing, cause my day work would gonna get really busy next month.

[qwetro]

After a month's "Rushing Developing", I finally got a satisfied version, and have already put it on Google Play.
"The last day of July in 2015", I like this date. 

I haven't update this blog for about two weeks, that's because I've been dealing with some UI, some particle systems, essentially for game, but nothing interesting to post. Anyway, I've done it!
This is the first seriously-making game of mine. But weird, I didn't feel great satisfied about the goal's achieving. Maybe because my interest has already moved away. In the past month, while I was making an end to CHetauGet, I often thought about what my next game would be. I'm now really interesting in making a 3D third-person view open world exploring game. I know it's a big jumping from a small mobile game like CHetauGet to a 3D open world game. But every game starts from a big idea, and ends with a relatively small scope, isn't it? 

I downloaded CHetauGet from Google Play this morning, and played for a while, and found it much more interesting than everytime I played before. Weird. After hundreds of hours playing/testing, I thought it would never excited me again. However this is so great. I love making games, can't wait to start again. And oh, of course, I will keep a slow pace on updating CHetauGet, add some new features, fix some bugs, something like that. And more regularly, keep releasing new Stage QR Code on my blog. I haven't mention that yet, QR Code scanning is a new feature I added to CHetauGet last week. CHetauGet has 452 build-in stages, and it can get new stages simply through a QR code scanning instead of updating the whole app. I think that's convenient.

Lastly, wish you enjoy. All feedback are welcome. Thank you!