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[Skopgat]

SnOrc

What is SnOrc?
A clumsy little orc who roams mountainsides seeking villages to pillage and plunder with his tribe of anti-heroes. But first, he must hone his skills of destruction to become the ultimate destroyer!
This is where SnOrc will begin, and where you come in.
Snorc, being tiny, is able to turning himself into a massive snowball, and has the 'ball skills' to control it with some fair accuracy.




What is the intended gameplay?
SnOrc becomes a snowball to wreak havoc, growing in immensity as he picks up speed and takes out the enemy buildings, avoiding the TNT and steering straight on the path.
The gameplay will differ between careful control between obstacles, and heading straight on towards the intended targets.



The aim is for there to be quite a few levels, but at the moment, I have one brief playable demo on my site. The game will change quite a bit over time. I update the demo every few days, so with some feedback and ideas I will be able to quickly show some improvement of the game.


Where will SnOrc be played?
The aim is to first get the PC version up and running, and then in time to ensure that there are playable versions on mobile as well. At the moment the demo is only available as a web demo. I have already tested the demo on my android device, but will still have to go through some optomisation to ensure that the game runs smoothly on more android devices.

How was SnOrc made?
I use Unity, love the engine, have been dabbling with it for far too long, this time however, aimed to actually complete one of my game ideas. Unity makes it easy for me to port the game to the target devices. It also takes care of the physics for me (well, as much physics as it can, fair amount of tweaking required to get the ball rolling the way I wanted it to)


Who is Skopgat?
I am a single developer with a love of indie game development, so I try do this in my spare time (as much as I can possibly find!). I have established Skopgat Studios (being the Afrikaans word for kick-ass ) On my site(links below) are all the details on the game. I also send regular updates on twitter, instagram and then this Devlog.

I would love some feedback on the game, as it is still in early stages it can change quite a bit, as long as it stays fun, then all is good. Even some ideas that you guys want to see in future levels, I am working on a few ideas, and will post here once they are up.
www.skopgatstudios.com

You can contact me via this forum

Follow me on Twitter - @skopgat_studios
and Instagram - skopgatstudios
for updates and further pics of the game in development.

[Skopgat]

Hey

So I continued work on the level designs, have to say, it is a lot harder getting something I like out of the designs, always feel that there is some way to improve them...
For now I am quite happy with these ones.
At first I was not sure if I would like an imperfect spiral, but found that it makes it a little harder to steer. It's a slow drop all the way down, so will still place obstacles in the way.


Next level idea I was playing around with was a much steeper and narrower run.
Turns out to be quite difficult... reason being that the snowball gets larger and heavier the longer it is on snow. This makes the steering quite a bit harder. I could not get the snowball round that last corner, so had to put up some walls to bounce off of. Definitely a work in progress level that.


Was really keen on this level idea... but sadly I don't think it will work quite as planned. At the moment the ball is driven with force as opposed to torque(found that using torque made it quite a bit harder to steer) So the issue here is that the ball will gather some speed on the way down, but as soon as there is a mild ramp it slows down far too much. Makes for quite a disappointing jump haha. Was hoping to get more airtime with this one... Might revisit the way I handle the ball.


This last one is just my favourite pic at the moment, I really like the idea of rolling at night. Makes it a bit harder and adds quite a nice touch to experience. Will play around with them more before I add them to the current demo.


Let me know what you guys think of the levels, and any level ideas are more than welcome.
Will still add all the destructible objects, goals and potential powerups to the levels. Figured I should get some more level ideas out first before I work on those.

[Skopgat]

Hi Guys

We decided to play around with some different terrain ideas, modified the original story quite a bit as well. Will test things a bit more before we reveal what the background story is, just to make sure that it all works well.

We have also added in some new elements, namely, small NPC characters. They are the knights protecting the towns


At the moment they dont do much, apart from panicking as soon as the ball is close enough. The idea is to have them patrol aroung the town, and run away when the ball gets closer.

This is a what the new terrain looks like for the new level, thi first pic is an older one, as we have added more to the level by now. Added in some more destructible buildings, objects and then just made the level look a bit nicer as well.




Will be creating more terrains to play with, and then go back and finish up the current ones.
Have to say that some of the brief level designs really are difficult, makes me wonder if they are too hard or if I just suck at my own game haha.

Had some feedback that the ball physics is not quite right just yet, so will tweak that still in the days to come.
I have uploaded the new demo to my site, feel free to test it out.

[Skopgat]

Hi All

So since last I posted, we have started work on the overall look and feel of the levels, pick ups and other collectibles. Also worked with the ball that we play with quite a bit...

Unfortunately it seems that the level of today went corrupt... importing it into the demo leaves the web build unplayable, aaaaaaaarg... but I do have a copy I made this morning though, so all is not lost...

Biggest change of all... the new TOON look.
This is the same level that has been posted here before, we really like the new toon feel, feel that the handpainted textures go very well with the toon style.




Next post I will have added in the other level with the new pickups

For now, please try the demo and let us know if you prefer the Toon or Realistic look.
Level 1 is still the original 'realistic' level, and level 2 is the Toon one.
www.skopgatstudios.com


Much appreciated

[EDIT: I have added a quick poll to the game, please feel free to vote]

[Skopgat]

Hey all

There have been a few changes to the game this last week, and should release the updated demo to try out this weekend.

First off, the look and feel. Decided to go Toony... So all the levels and characters (more on that in a moment) will be toony. Felt this was a good way to go. Took a fair bit to get the new textures. Most of our textures did not really do the toon feel any justice. So retextured in quite a few places.

Also changed the ball, to no longer just being a snowball or boulder... it is now a mad looking Zorbing character. managed to get some small animations running whilst the lil guys are rolling around. Still need more work done on them.


Also added in a basic patrol route for the characters in the second level, but this turned out to just be them all walking to the same spot (or panicking if they see the ball). Was a bit of a silly mistake on my behalf, made it so that the guys would walk to an end point... then reparented the endpoint object to the character themselves to make it quicker to add the routes to all the characters. But this means that the end point moves with the character, hehe so much for patrolling as opposed to just walking ahead.


And last but not least, included coins for pickups on the one level, still working out which pickups will work best on the other levels. The idea is to have it so that each character has unique pick up type, this is to add to the scenery for each level. At the moment the Dragon collects gold, thought I would go for the old stereotypical approach with these. Still need to work out what to do for the werewolf... hmmmm, that will be next on the list I think.

[Skopgat]

Hey all

So since last I wrote we implemented a little bit more... released our new big demo update, that has all the changes shown so far in. can be downloaded from www.skopgatstudios.com

So this week focus was on the 2nd level in the demo, the werewolf level.
The main issue here was the Knights. So in the game the knights are essentially just moving pickups. Each one adding to the score of the player.
Originally there were just a few knights scattered over the level, but that did not do that much for the player.

The next idea was to get the knights coming out of the buildings, but that was a little messy, so went for another approach rather. Once a building is destroyed, I will let the knights come out of the tower.
I created a script that creates the knight objects, places them in front of the tower, and uses the local rotation of the object.

However, the only issue with this is that the knights all come out in a straight line. Is that an issue? well, it makes for collecting them all pretty fun haha


Also found a nicer way to post my WIP levels, easy way and somehow does not look too horrible haha

[Skopgat]

It's been a while since my last update, there have been quite a few extra developments with the game since last...



There are a couple of characters in the game, 3 of which are currently in the demo.
Each character, has a different play style, although, we kept the basic game mechanic the same between them.
1) SnOrc - the game's namesake, he has to collect enough powerups (which increases his size) to destroy x Towers and reach end location within a certain time.
2) Scruff - the fast moving werewolf, has to collect x Knights and reach the end within a certain time.
3) Roknor - needs to collect x Coins and reach the end goal within a certain amount of time.

Took a while to align the three characters and the goals, I find that the game plays a lot better now. Does not feel so random anymore.

So the following changes where made
1) SnOrc - Added in a pickup that decreases his size back to normal, figured this would be beneficial for being used as traps as well as adding in some very basic logic to the game. I fixed the issue where there were multiple collisions with a Tower, resulting in it counting as multiple.



2) Scruff - Biggest change over here was probably the way that the Knights move. Originally they would essentially just walk in a straight line and thus follow the contours of the terrains NavMesh. I have modified it now to do the following:
1) choose a random distance between 5-30
2) choose a random direction within a unit sphere
3) cast a point on that distance away in the direction chosen above.
4) if no spot found to be valid, try again (max five times, after try 3 the random distance changes to shorter distances)
5) after moving, redo above steps.

This actually works very well, the Knights all move around quite randomly now, which looks much better, but it does make it more challenging to try and catch them all.

The next item added for scruff was to get a 'end' position for him to go to. built a little 'doghouse' for him. Upon reaching it the level ends, at which point I see if there have been enough Knights collected.



3) Roknor - Not a lot has changed for him, the main difference was the addition of more coin types. Not just Bronze, but also silver and gold.
This helps with guiding the player around the map.

Overall change that has been made was the UI. took a while, but got the UI to match the look and feel of the game.
Still have some work to do with it, but not too much more.


Intro Levels
We also found that some users mentioned they did not really know what to do... Fully understandable, we just had the demo's up as technical demos, and to see if the game would be fun.
So added in 3 intro levels, which explain a little about the character, as well the game mechanics for each of the characters.


Last thing that we did was to tweak the difficulty, it was too easy at first, but changed that now, so it is quite a bit harder to get three stars on a level.

Current Demo version (at time of writing) is Alpha v2.0.2, its available on the site, have a look...