Hey guys! Just announcing that we have released Puzzle Puppets to the app store and officially say finished our first game. Ive edited the original post to have some details of our trailer and websites so please enjoy and check out what we made.

Another Friday is here so its time to look back on the week. The iFest deadline is looming (next Saturday in fact) and so we hoping to give you all a great demo of the game. So lets talk about what we have been up to.

Yay play progression is finally in! This was a major feature of the entire game and one of the things I've been excited about. Basically this feature just carries over your progression through one play into each act in that play. Its a minor thing but I feel its something that you don't see in a lot of puzzle games. To put things in perspective you are attacking monsters by breaking blocks, which gains you experience points so you can level up and do more damage and earn more points when breaking those same blocks. So the idea of the progression is that a good player can go for big block breaks and combos and level their puppet up faster then other people so that when he plays the 2nd act of the play he will start at level 4 instead of 3 and be attaining more points when fighting monsters.

Now its ok, this isnt going to ruin the game for people who want to play it casually because the monsters level up with the character, this is more for people who love going for highscores. The only thing left to do with this is show the player when they have improved their score in a certain act that all the acts after that could be improved because they managed to progress further.

I spent some time fixing the progression curves of the game. This includes how many points you get for breaking blocks, what the blocks give you at different levels, how much experience points you need for each level, the blocking times for each group of blocks, etc. Needless to say there seems to be a lot to make sure the progression and difficulty of the game feels nice. Hopefully the thought and effort I've put in to make it all work together pays off because I have a giant worksheet of graphs, numbers and comparisons that I think explains it all.

The Monster Counter from last weeks blog has been implemented, as well as the profile picture in the top left has been replaced with a level indicator so you can see which level you are when you start an act.

Also we had lost some of the RPGness of the game but we may have an elegant solution to that which will also relieve some of the balancing issues we will run into later on but it wont be implemented before ifest so we will save that until we have nutted out the full details of it.

I had designed our business cards and some t-shirts for Aaron and I to hand out at iFest and they arrived this week, they are a little dark but still look great.

One final thing is a mate of mine has been nice enough to compose some music for the game. In the very short time he has managed to produce some great tracks, we have added the main one to the game which will serve as the battle music. Of course for his generous work we are going to name a boss character after him. So far its looking like he is going to be the final boss of the Gladiator Play where he will have a giant beard and be called Kirky.

It is Friday, and I've given you a wall of text so here is a picture of a cave troll and what it seems is a guy from the future with funky glasses.

So what have we been up to this week? Not a whole lot, the weather has been terrible in Melbourne all rainy and cold. But we have managed to do something.



Aaron and I have had some chats about old features that were needing to be added but since cutting certain ideas they have become less useful. We were going to add a 'Distance Bar' in the space between the stage and the block grid so that the player would know how much of the battle chain they had left. This made more sense beforehand but we have simplified the way we handled battles and so we thought it would be nicer to drop the bar, add in a monster count icon, and open up the stage space some more so we can fit in bigger and more menacing enemies like the Ogre. One of the other ideas was a character profile page to look at stats of your current puppets adventure, but since most of it was just for show we have decided to drop that and replace the puppet icon in the left corner with an icon to display your current level instead.

Some of this week was spent cleaning the game up so it looks more polished and less like a dogs breakfast. We added in transition states between most of the game screens so things fade in and out nicely. I finally settled on a font for the game so we have now gone through and made sure all the text fits in buttons and is sized and positioned correctly.

We have been adding more sound effects to the game. Most of what we had so far was Aaron making a noise in the mic to use as a placeholder. It served its purpose but now its time to get some real sounds, but I'd be lying to say I wouldn't miss them.

I've been looking at making some of our existing plays to have some more enemy variety. Adding some assassins and orcs to give the player some extra challenges when playing some of the different plays. One of the last things I did this week art wise was drawing the Colosseum. This will be a simple 4 act play with a boss fight in each one. When we add a new play we try to fill different gaps in play styles or gaming sessions the player would want. We have one play that is a long 3 act play for people wanting to commit to a big adventure, the Colosseum play will fill the gap where you can play the same boss over and over to improve your score because the play session is only about a minute.

The game is coming together nicely, I think next week Aaron's big focus is on the persistent score progression and mine will be on more content for the plays and polishing some of the stuff already there.

Have a nice weekend, and we will see you here again next Friday.

[Hima]

Hima - Glad you like the game :D We plan on talking more and more about our thinking and the interesting things that shape a game being developed because I know I love reading blogs about that aswell. Unfortunately with just the two of us we havent found a smart and easy way to allow a player to create parts themselves, but you can change the colour which is always nice. You tap the paint can and you get a sort of mixing pallete which you can then fiddle with until you find the perfect colour and then paint each row of items that colour. Every item is tintable but we also made most items have a second layer that I draw such as a belt or shirt markings that is always the same colour to make each item more interesting.

Venks - Hey, how the game works is that your puppet travels along a path meeting monsters to fight, and the fighting aspect is done entierly with the puzzle blocks on the bottom of the screen. So you tap groups of 2 or more blocks of the same colour to pop them, and the more of them in that group the harder you hit the enemy. This also adds to your score and the experience your puppet gains. When the enemy goes to attack you, you can pop the purple shield block to put up your shield for a certain amount of seconds which then becomes a bit of skill to read the enemies swing animation and timing the block pop. To give you an idea, popping 2 shield blocks puts the shield up for 0.4 seconds. It gets rather frantic when taking on boss monsters and you only have very small groups of shields :D

You can take your own pace with the game, we havent got any timers in place. Atm there is no potions of spells in the game, we had a lot more rpg stuff planned such as towns, quests, shops to buy weapons that do more damage but in the end we needed to change a lot of that stuff as we werent even close to implementing that stuff. We have some other ideas to bring back some more of the rpg aspects back into the game, we would like to make boss fights more interesting by adding fire blocks that do damage over time if the dragon lands a successful hit on you.

Skomakar'n - Haha yeah I spend way too much time in the building and designing then in the actual game. I ended up building my dream house and the perfect sim, then would build the smallest apartment flat to then spend the whole game saving up just so I could move into the dream house :D. Nice to hear from a fellow game maker, I always enjoy checking out other peoples work so feel free to drop a link.

Yes we have found people are enjoying the gameplay which is nice but we always want to add more to it. We have a nice way of rewarding players who want an extra challenge by chaining monster nodes together which gives them a bonus score at the end. Yeah we have had a few people want it on another platform, our current plan is to finish the game and if theres enough interest we will spend the couple of months porting it across to iphone and android while I work on more play content.


Always nice to hear from you guys and get your views on what you think of our game so feel free to keep asking questions. We are getting closer to needing to actually ship the game so all your feedback is much appreciated :D

So we were trying to think what we should talk about for the first devlog, and then it hit is, the PUPPETS! They are the stars of the show, they are what give our game character and life, how could we not talk about them.

We have spent a good chunk of time making our puppets the best they can be. The very first puppet started out as a static image that resembled a lumberjack dude that you can see on the left. However we always had the grand vision of these awesome puppets that actually animated, held weapons, and celebrate when they win battles. So Aaron set off to create a system to piece our puppets together and to make sure we could animate all aspects of them. I set off to make as many drawings of arms, hats, eyes, clothes etc so our puppets looked unique and interesting. The puppet we use now in the game is the one on the right and we are very happy how they turned out.

So we finally had our puppet for the game and we were very happy. Our system allowed us to make lots of monsters for the player to battle and make them look different by swapping various parts out between them all. The fantastic thing about our puppets is that no matter what the player decides for the look of his/her puppet, it will work with all the acting that each play requires.

So the puppets are created by using lots of little parts and attaching them to the main body, sort of like real puppets. For each puppet part such as an arm or piece of clothing we use spritesheets. You can think of sprite sheets as a giant picture with smaller pictures (such as our puppets clothing) arranged like a chess board.

Due to the use of sprite sheets for all of the games puppet costumes we have been constrained in how we go about bringing the characters to life. We have found that the best way for us to achieve this is to give the puppets plenty of facial expression through the use of different eye and mouth combinations.
The puppet’s expressive face combined with their exaggerated arm movements (because they don’t have elbows) has allowed us to let the puppets feel animated and expressive without them actually having much in the way of body language; many games that do use character body language just make their characters look awkward, which is something we wanted to avoid.

A Fun Fact (without the fun)
In the initial design of puzzle puppets there was going to only be two characters that the player could choose from (a boy and a girl). We found the system we had created to allow us to include many varied enemies fun and decided to extend the puppet show theme to include the dressing up of the player. Since then we have probably spent as much time creating awesome looking player costumes as we have playing the actual game.


So theres an introduction to the stars of the show, a little about how they work and where they started. We will be doing these devlogs every Friday but we would love to hear what you might like to hear included in these posts. We havent gone very techincal atm but there might be other fellow game makers out there wondering what we did and so we can dedicate some posts to explain the more detailed aspects of game making.

[Puzzle Puppets]

Puzzle Puppets

UPDATE - ALL DONE!
We have finally finished our game and its released onto the Windows Phone marketplaces.

I hadn't posted here for a long while but I have some of the development tracked on our own blog site. You can check out some of the history here:
History Part 1
History Part 2

Appstore Link

We are excited to finally get our first game out the door and as a new company with only the 2 of us any support or feedback is greatly appreciated. So please consider liking our social sites and sharing anything you can with friends.

TRAILER




Puzzle Puppets Facebook
Puzzle Puppets Twitter

So thanks to everyone who has helped, provided feedback and helped motivate us to finish our game. We hope you manage to check out the game and look forward to what we will do in the future!

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OLD POST
Introducing Puzzle Puppets! An in development puzzle action rpg currently for the windows phone 7 by the two guys from Byte Sized Wombat.

We want to show you how our game is coming along and hear what you think of it so far.

Links

Website - www.bytesizedwombat.com.au
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/ByteSizedWombat
Twitter - https://twitter.com/ByteSizedWombat

About

So this game is set as a puppet show which you act in all sorts of plays. The gameplay consists of popping coloured blocks to do damage against monsters and increase your score. You follow nodes in a map view to choose what to fight next, making your way up to the boss. After completing an act you get rated out of 3 stars on your score through the play. Theres heaps of costumes to dress your little puppet in to give them your own unique style.

Screenshots

Progress

We still have a little way to go but the main block popping gameplay is there. We do have some things planned for the near future. These are things like a shop to unlock costumes with money you earn from battles, cutscenes to round off the puppet show theme, and some extra puzzle mechanics that have rewards in them.

Notes

This game idea has been around for a while, technically the first iteration of it started with the assemblee compo here. http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9831.0

So we would love to hear what you think :D

Hi Im Matt, a 26 year old indie game developer.

We've recently started our company Byte Sized Wombat with my mate Aaron. We are currently working on our first game and are wanting to see what peoples reactions are to it so far.

Aaron is the main programmer, and Im the artist. I've participated in one of the tig comps so far and still hoping to get to do more in the future.

So feel free to check out our site, I will post a thread in devlog about our game aswell for people to see and comment on.

www.bytesizedwombat.com.au

Grr Ive had so much trouble finding anything  I've read that people can run and make xna games in windows 7 when the Game Studio is installed, but really you shouldnt have to install a gamestudio for it to work.

The only advice I have atm is that its compiled for x86 so no 64bit, and to check if .net 3.5 is installed as it seems to be using those libraries.

You said you tried running it in xp compatebiltiy mode, i remember on an xna forum that maybe installing the package in xp compat mode may help it.

Give it a shot if your willing, and thanks heaps for the assets Ive had fun with them. Im still keen to give a crack at programming the procedural rpg world and interactions. So I will still try to slowly develop something closer to my original idea and thus give the game some better purpose and direction.

Otherwise if you have access to an xp or vista machine it might be the only way 

Well thats no good  . Yes it seems the redists pack is for vista and xp and Im having trouble finding a solution to xna and win7. I would of thought (considering both microsoft) that it would work once the redists are installed. Ive got it working on a vista and xp machine atm, but I will post once I find a solution to the win7 problem.

Sorry bout it not working yet but Im sure I'll find something when dinner is finished 

Well its submitted. Yes monster attacking was a big part indeed lol. So i managed to get that in. Items I had to ditch and make a new diff way of getting health and mana. I threw together start screens, menus, character selects in a couple of hours so it atleast felt like a small game and not a prototype. So many things i rushed through. Added a boss guy but after submitting it I thought of a better way to do his leveling.

Oh and I submitted the game on my lunch break, and at work realised I had left all the cheat buttons I was using for quick debugging lol. So I've reuploaded a new version to my ftp so now you cant just press Q to levelup.

Now I can finally relax and start playing what everyone else has made. Cant wait  

[Puzzle Slash]

Puzzle Slash

Code:

<td style="width: 350px; vertical-align: top">
    <strong>Puzzle Slash</strong><br/>
    <em>by Matt Pearce - "Inferno Raven"</em><br/>
    <a href="http://users.on.net/~infernoraven/puzzleSlash/PuzzleSlash.zip">Download</a>, <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9831.0">Thread</a>
</td>

Thanks Oryx, i will definitely see this through but im missing a few of the major things for it to be a real alpha game.

Whats everyones view on what you want done first.

- Start screen / Character Selection (atm your that guy with my name  )
- Enemys dont attack back but they do agro to you (thus shield is currently useless)
- Cant distribute points once you level (atm they just go into attack and magic power)
- No item pickups (means no health bottles, no swords with extra damage, or special items)
- Monster Progression (its only a random string of monsters that level up every 10 monsters)

thats all i can think of at this stage, aaaarrghh so much to do and so little time.
Let me know what everyone thinks more important. Im thinking monster fighting back might be a good place to start until i hear back from ppl.

I had all intentions to actually play puzzle quest but going back interstate took up my entire holidays

Its great for you to summarise what you enjoyed in puzzle quest. PQ sounds more strategical and rewards good planning, where mine atm is a fast pace mashup but hoping to get more thinking involved during todays coding.

In terms of the hidden powers and such, im all on board for that. I have code in place to support that and im trying to do an item system today. But i definitely want to add powers that you can hit in your quickslots that say wipe out all blues and then more chains come from that too.

Also these are the supported blocks i have:

1. Empty
2. Sword - melee
3. Sheild - blocks next mosnters attack
4. Red - Fire
5. Blue - Ice
6. Green - Posion
7. Yellow - Light
8. Purple - Dark
9. Empty potion bottle - gives either a health or magic potion to item slots

I was sortof planning that your learn different spells over time, or at least customise what ones you have available, i think due to time ill just reduce some of the block types so you get bigger combos hehe.

So Im aiming to add in weakness and all that to monster types so that it adds a small bit of strategy to what blocks your focusing on. So yeah im gonna try very hard to get as much done today so hopefully i can add those things you like cause it sparks my interest too 

After yesterdays stint i got a fair chunk of the game together and i was starting to have fun. And ive only done some minor tweaks to how things are calculated such as combo multipliers, level xp, damage, monster strengths, etc. With more testing I could balance it a lot more but looks like I be shoving the poor thing out the door half dressed 

Anyways Im blabbing again, back to coding but hope ppl still post through the day cause I still have time to consider everyhting everyones saying   

Oh and heres a little pic, at least you can see the world and my guy shooting a fire ball. Oh and just ignore that debugging mouse coords there, lets hope thats not in the final game 

Well, it was complete fail over the holidays, i got zero time for programming So I havent nearly got as far as I would have liked on my game however I have spent all today doing it and have gotten somewhere respectable now

I know the compo finishes tomo so I'll definetly upload what I have so I've atleast given something for everyone to try.

I wont bother telling what I have finished or going to do next as its too late to post all that, if I had time to work on it over the Xmas holidays it would of been great getting you guys involved during the dev time.

Well till tomo guys, hope what I show is a nice taste of what I was going for in my idea. But either way im happy with my progress with the time I've spent on it and I'm sure I'll polish it up for a better release later on.   

JaMatthews - hehe, I'll try 
SirNiko & Mizipzor - Yeah I never played those games but finding out where they went wrong is a great idea. I'll download the demo and see what its like. 
Saluk - glad its looking interesting so far 
SimpleSyrup - if i can actually finish it ill be so overjoyed ill release it for free! 

Ill post again later today on my lunch break if ive had anymore thoughts on nutting out the finer details.

[Puzzle Slash]

Hello Everyone!

I've been following the last few comps, loving what everyone has done, but now it is my turn to contribute. I didnt want to post too soon if I couldnt get anything done, but im happy with how things are slowly turning out, so without further delay i present...

Puzzle Slash (title pending) - the hack and slash side scrolling RPG with a Bejewled-esque puzzle game.

Latest Screenshot

Grand Goal
So what I have in my mind atm is that it will be a traditional RPG where you fight monsters, quest, level up etc. All this takes place in the little side scrolling box down the bottom. You will be able to enter dungeons, talk to vendors, and explore the world.

On the puzzle side of things, while in combat all your attacks come from connecting blocks. You hit 4 swords instead of the regular 3 and you do more damage, get some combos from falling blocks and that means multipliers and extra damage.

Im open to all suggestions on how things could fit together, I've been wanting to make an rpg and puzzle game for ages so why not combine the two in this compo to help motivate me on finishing it. Most of the programming I do ends up being small prototypes for myself or my younger brother. So heres to putting it out there and submitting something fun for everyone! 

Current Progress
- Ok I've got most of what I need drawing to the screen, and the little rpg world only renders a pink void so lots to do on that side.
- I can swap puzzle blocks around, however no calculations to clear them yet  .
- I have my character saving out to a file and loading it so you can continue your quest.

So my focus will be getting the puzzle mechanics working and then fighting a linear line of monsters to test if the game is actually fun. Once that is working I'll get into the exciting side of making an rpg world. Having it procedural would help the replayability but one step at a time...

Note
Its been great seeing all the art/sounds/music ppl have done and the games that are shaping out from them. Goodluck to all!

[Puzzle Slash]

Puzzle Slash

Its a fast-paced side scrolling RPG with a catch. All your attacks come from playing the tile-matching puzzle game. Quest along killing monsters and leveling up in hope to take on the master boss demon!

Get the game http://users.on.net/~infernoraven/puzzleSlash/PuzzleSlash.zip

Well the compo has come to an end. It was a mad rush to get something playable out to you guys but I'm glad I did. My first released game on the net YAY!   So hope you all like it. Hope it gives you a feel for what I was going for. Sorry there wasn't enough time to tweak it so I'm sure its heavily unbalanced. But enjoy and I will catch you for the next compo!  

Also a big thanks to:

Artists - Oryx and Oddball
Music - NotWorthy

I loved your assests and had heaps of fun using them