Hi guysI'd like to share with you progress on my game I've been working on for about 4 months -
Matris.
I work solo on everything besides music which I just cannot handle.
I started somewhere in November. Not counting holidays and some other small breaks I'd say I've been working on it 4 months (7 days a week, ~12-13h a day).
The main idea was to make a game where you have to
arrange puzzle pieces in chains - Combos in such way so every next piece has to touch the last one by the edge.
When Combo is started, timer starts to count down, faster with every next piece, so the longer the Combo the harder it is to keep it up.
I had two ideas for controls.
The first method was to make a piece shaped
indicator that would follow the cursor, and just hover a piece over the board and click to place the piece there. Something like in game Chime. But there was too much clicking and it would be to hard to implement keyboard and gamepad controls. Overcomplicated, so I ditched it.
The second method, which is the current method, works like this:- to place a piece you need to mark 2 blocks that would be a part of that piece.
- if there were more than one possibilities to place the current piece using two marked blocks, you could switch through them.
- after every piece placed on a board the game highlights the area around the last piece from where it is possible to start placing the next piece
With the controls ready the prototype started to take shape
Destroying blocks generated
too much noise - too many single blocks stayed on the board, that could not be used to place a piece so the obvious choice was to add Gravity.
At First I added simple gravity and everything always fell down. It worked but it was missing something. So I wrote an
algorithm that detects if a block is a part of a solid group that is supported by ground and it looked like that:
At first I thought about
extra points for rectangle groups (like in Lumines)
but it didn't play well. It was way overcomplicated to implement. The pieces combination is too irregular to use this methood.
So then I tried with lines.
Extra points for a line of 10+ blocks, horizontally and vertically:
And that Idea clicked. It was easier to score extra points, than grouping in rectangles, so that idea stayed for good.
First design concept was to make it
futuristic neon-like flashy line design
It didn't look bad but I didn't like it much, so the next idea was
Minimalist, Clean and Flat. The first draft looked kinda promising
So I went with it. It felt a little empty so later on I added some touches to it:
- Stripped pattern to make the frame more interesting
- GUI Bars on the sides for various functions visualization
- Animated background
- Juiced up the animations (juice it or lose it )
- Smooth out block color transitions
- And some other small tweaks.
Currently it looks like this:
I kept thinking what else could I do to
spice up the gameplay. I came up with a Bonus system.
Every 5 pieces placed on a board a star shows on on of the surrounding block. If a piece is placed over that star there was a
bonus.
At first the bonus was just chosen at random and because these Bonuses could be Good or Bad and it was unknown what it's gonna be it was kinda discouraging to even try to "catch" them.
I remade it so after "catching the star" the box shows up where you can
choose one of two available bonuses. Most of the time one of them is unknown, but this way it's more encouraging to catch it because even if the known one is something bad, there is still a chance that the second one will be something better.
The main gameplay mode is rather dynamic, so I thought it about some more
relaxing game mode.
Fill Mode is just about covering as much of the board as possible.
- No restrictions on where to place pieces
- No time limit
- Additionally I added 4 lifelines that lets the player to reshuffle the pieces queue, change a current piece, skip current piece and undo the last step.
I'm really happy of how the Menu system came up. Although the final version mechanics is not very complicated I spend a lot of time tweaking and polishing it.
I got good feedback on that Menu system so I made
Tutorial on how to achieve that sliding effect if someone is interested on how it works:
Sliding menu system using Texture Mask shader tutorialThe main reason for customization is to make the game more interesting but I also had
color blindness in mind.
I was surprised how often I saw comments, that some game is not playable for color blind people. I wasn't aware
how common color blindness is, and apparently 8% of men and 0.5% women is color blind.I created a
96 blocks themes that differ in shape and can be set up separately for idle and active blocks and additionally added
10 color schemes. I tested all the schemes using color blindness simulation, and whatever color blindness type I tested there was some palettes that were fully playable.
Additionally I added
2 fully customizable color schemes so I think that mission is complete
I would say that the game is 60-70% finished but there is still many things to do.
- I have to redo all the sounds, because I don't like the feel of what I have now
- Implement audio playlist system
- I'm thinking about maybe adding some Multiplayer, but I don't have any experience on that subject so I have a lot of reading to do to even start.
- Progress saving, achievements, leaderboards, in-game tutorials and many many other little things, but I think the hardest parts are mostly done (mechanics algorithms especially).
What do you guys think?
I'd love to hear some of your feedback.
I made a trailer for the game if you'd like to check it out.
If you like my work please
Like me on FB or
follow me on Twitter. It means a lot to me
Also, if you like my game you can visit my Greenlight page for more details:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=638442767Cheers
Leaghorn