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[Pixelulsar]

Videos
Basic Engine -


Spikes and Explosives -


Virus and Electricity - http://youtu.be/YotrnwYFkh8

Description
I make a bunch of shorter games but I never make devlogs for them, but when I'm half way done them I think I should of, so I'm going to make one for this one.  Weapons of Mass Blockstruction is a block based puzzle game that will be hectic and feature rockets, lasers, killer viruses, and plenty of other weapons of mass destruction.  There will be that colour matching stuff that's in all of these games, but it won't be the main focus.  So basically, this will be like a kind of crazy Tetris thing.

This is the original mockup that I made for the game.  I the game will probably look like this when I'm done. Some people have said that some stuff looks like it has no purpose and I'm gonna be honest even I don't totally know what everything is going to do, but believe me, everything will have a purpose in the game.
Some day


Original Progress
Right now I've only got the basics done.  There are only blocks that fall and they align nicely in columns.

[Pixelulsar]

Made it so blocks will disappear when they are beside others that are the same colour.  Ground-breaking stuff.  My first attempt to do it using collisions failed spectacularly, so I redid it with arrays.  Now it works well, time to add cooler stuff.

[ScaryPotato]

Tetris is one of my all-time faves...add rockets and lasers and you've got a winner in my books

[Geoffrey]

Tetris is one of my all-time faves...add rockets and lasers and you've got a winner in my books

I couldn't have expressed my thoughts as well !
Seems fun !

[Ouren]

Yea, but when can I have it?

[Pixelulsar]

I made it so blocks now come down in groups of 4 that can be rotated.  It's working fine, the only problem is that it added in a bunch of glitches that I need to fix now, so new cooler stuff might still be a while off.

Here is a gif of it, just cause.


Edit: I think I fixed all the glitches with placing the blocks!  While doing that I found out my colour matching system is a lot more buggy than I thought.  Need to fix that now too.

Edit 2: I think I fixed the bugs with the colour matching system too.  I'm on a role today.

[Pixelulsar]

I added in a kind of anti-Tetris mechanic. Filling in the whole bottom row is bad.  It will make the bottom row get destroyed, but it will be replaced by an unbreakable screw/piston thing that will rise from the floor.  You won't even get score for the row that gets destroyed. I'm hoping this will make the player not only avoid expanding their tower up, but also out.  I also fixed a bunch more bugs with colour matching and block placing

A screenshot with those screw/piston things.  They are taking up half the screen, but I don't think that they will be able to get that high without the player dying in game.

[Pixelulsar]

Added in a button that speeds up the block dropping, it makes the game play much faster and much less boring at the start.  Also more bugs are fixes of course.

Sorry for the two posts a few minutes apart, I wanted to edit the last post to add this on but I accidentally added in a new post...

[ScaryPotato]

Those pistons of punishment seem like a cool, albeit very harsh mechanic! Will there be a way for the player to reverse them at all?

I'm curious about the gameplay of this. It seems like the goal is for the player to keep as small a section of blocks as possible, is that right? It will be very interesting to see how all these features come together in the game!

[Pixelulsar]

For the few days I've mostly been doing bug fixes on the the block matching system, and not much else.  I wanted to make the game perfectly glitch free before I started to add new things.  There are still some glitches, though not nearly as many as a few days ago, but I feel like I'm never going get anything done if I wait until everything is perfect, so I'm going to start adding new stuff now, I can always fix the glitches later.  I hope I don't regret this later.

[sublinimal]

The piston thing is pretty clever, glad it'll be something more than just a Tetris/match-3 game with fancy graphics. Got a bit of a Squarez vibe from the first shot.

[Pixelulsar]

I made a

of everything I've done so far, just cause.  It's basically block matching and pistons for 3 minutes. 

[Pixelulsar]

Only added spikes today.  They destroy some blocks that fall on top of them, but other blocks break the spikes without getting damaged.  Here is what the spikes look like:

[ScaryPotato]

Looks like it plays smooth so far. You've got blocks that don't disappear right now, I'm assuming the spikes (or some other special block) gets rid of those. Keep up the good work!

[Pixelulsar]

I added bombs!  There are three different colours of bombs: red, green and blue.  The bombs don't do anything when they are by themselves, but when they are beside a bomb that is the same colour they will explode.  The explosion will destroy all types of blocks and each bomb will make a 3 by 3 explosion around it.  It may seem a bit overpowed, but bombs will be rare so they don't get overused, but strong enough that people who leave them open will be rewarded.

Looks like it plays smooth so far. You've got blocks that don't disappear right now, I'm assuming the spikes (or some other special block) gets rid of those. Keep up the good work!

Spikes get crushed by the stone blocks, so the only way to break them now is with bombs.  There will be other ways though.

[Pixelulsar]

I put nukes in the game.  They are really strong(obviously), they take out the whole column and row of blocks where they land.  Nukes will either be extremely rare, or only come after you do something special, like maybe matching a certain number of blocks.

[Pixelulsar]

I made a

showing off the spikes and different types of explosives.  I also added in a proper system that chooses the blocks based on their rarity so some blocks, like bombs and nukes, are much rarer than other types.  This obviously isn't shown in the video because if it was you wouldn't see many bombs and it would be boring.

[sublinimal]

Just a thought - maybe explosives could be based on some kind of chain reactions, like destroying all connected blocks of the same color? It might add more dynamics to block destruction.

[Pixelulsar]

I added in something that tells you the number of blocks you've destroyed, which functions as your score.  Also made a thing that shows what the next set of blocks you're going to get is.

Just a thought - maybe explosives could be based on some kind of chain reactions, like destroying all connected blocks of the same color? It might add more dynamics to block destruction.

Sounds like a good idea, I'll try and think of a way to make them chain but not be too overpowered.  I don't want to make them only destroy blocks that are the same colour, because one of their main purposes is to destroy the stone blocks that don't get destroyed from anything else yet.

[Pixelulsar]

Made virus blocks.  They spread to all coloured blocks beside them once every 30 seconds.  They're pretty bad for you because they turn blocks that are usually easy to get rid if into blocks that need to be blown up.  The best thing to do would be to keep them separate from everything else.