I'd like to try it. Follow.

I like this, follow.

[Demo's here -> LINK]

Demo's here -> LINK

Last month, I made a game named Boom Box, and I made it for Mini Ludum Dare 63. Here's the Entry if anyone's interestd.
The theme of Mini LD 63 is "Fusion", and Boom Box is trying to be a fusion of Bomberman and Sokoban.
Though the Mini LD had ended, I found this mechanic kinda fun. So I decided to push further. After 3 days of developing, here comes the demo. There're still so many things I'd like to do with this project, so I'm starting this DevLog.

I'm doing this alone, the graphic is definitely not good enough now, and I'm not a artist, so I may try pixel art. Or maybe I'll meet some artist who wanna join me

I have a problem with the demo that I still haven't decided how to solve yet, so some help may needed, and appreciated. The problem described here: the game space is based on a square board with grids like chess, each grid has a coordinates with both x and y are integers, the hero(the charactor that player controls) is only able to move horizontally or vertically, when player stop pressing any moving keys, the hero must stand in a grid, that means the coords must be integers, if it's currently not, it will automatically keep moving until it reach the nearest grid in front. This automatic "Position Correction" cause players to feel like the ground is too slippy and they can't control the hero well, it slips away.
More details: I didn't used the physics engine to control movements, I control the board status from my own script called BoardController(it's a singleton), and everything that wanna make a move(one grid a time) on the board must firstly ask the BoardController if the destination grid is available, if yes, it will start moving. If the player released the key right after this "Destination Available Check" process, the hero will goes forward anyway, that really looks like slipping away.
I've come up with 2 solutions, and don't know which one would be better, hearing some voice may help
1. Change the way the hero moves from walking to jumping. If the hero jumps a whole grid each time, I guess players would not try to keep pressing the direction key when they only want to move a single step. One touch for One jump, no slipping anymore. In the case that players wanna move straight alone, I guess that they would likely release the key after the hero taking the final jump and before it has actually landed, that's a moment before the Destination Available Check process, and it's OK.
2. Allow the hero to stand between 2 grids. This won't cause any problem before it make a turning from horizontal direction to vertical direction or the other way around. So if only make the "Position Correction" before turning, that would be OK to everyone? I'm not sure actually.

Any voice helps, not only about the problem I mentioned above.

Here's one screen shot, I'll try to put some gifs in next update. Thank you.

It seems quite old fashion for the art style, looks comfortable. I think the key of this game would be the story. Good luck, see what you can do.

A small game like Flappy Bird could be make in hours, that's really quick, but a game small like this doesn't need a writer. And a bigger game will take a long time to development for a team with usually only 1 or 2 members(check IndieDB, you'll find out this is a fact for most indie game developers).
If you write story for a game that will take 1 year to complete, you will have nothing to do about the game in most of the time. And I doubt that what you could learn from such a process. It's just too slow for a writer.
IMHO:
If you really interesting in making a game, maybe it's better for you to learn and do more things besides writing.
If you only interesting in writing for games, just go find a job in a game developing company instead of an small indie team.

I barely give out any yes votes because I'm trying to stay honest about the stuff I think I would actually buy.

Me, the same.

I released my mobile game CHetauGet on Google Play 20 days ago, and I did no effort to market it, and there's no surprise here, I got nearly no downloads.
Your post is great, I'm gonna try all these ways.
I checked your game on Play Store, it says its download is 1000-5000, really great compared to my own. You did a great job. 

Very useful tutorial.   

The art style is realy cute, and the gameplay makes me excited, I kept playing it for nearly half an hour, that's a bit too long for me to spend .
I have the same suggestion like defufna said, constantly pressing move up button don't feel quite good. Anyway, it's a good game. 

Really love this art style, following!

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!

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.

Resources are good when you're familiar with them, bookmarking them won't make them useful. I believe the huge list will help you a lot.
Another thing I wanna say is that 5 years? that is too long, many things have changed, many technics are out of date, so, instead of going over every bookmark again, searching some new things maybe more effective. 

[Update: Core Mechanic & Level Generator]

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.

[2015/7/31 RELEASE -> Google Play]

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.

It seems like a wonderful game, I wish I could play it soon. 

Any chance you'll be at E3?

No, simply just too far for me, I'm here in China.

These are truly wonderful! It's amazing that you can create levels so fast with such high quality.

This is a nice trying for your first game. It runs smoothly, no obvious bugs.
For gameplay, the aiming feels bad, not easy to control, besides, I don't have much to say. The game is just too simple. There're so many features you could add to it, and I'm not gonna choose what to add for you, It's your game. If you're going to build up more things, I'll be glad to play it.

It seems like a wonderful game, I wish I could play it soon. 

I was interested in astronomy when I was younger. There's an issue about where to get power for spaceships to travel a extremely long distance, and a possible solution is Gravity assist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
This is a very interesting idea to me, I thought it was genius. Now I've made it into my game, Floating Magnet, but it seems to be too difficult than I would expect.

Here're some screenshots:

And the link on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.Zinget.FloatingMagnet
I haven't build a version for iOS, sorry.

Is the gameplay boring? Is it too difficult? Any suggestions to make it better?