Oops! My last update (4 days ago) introduced a bug. I just fixed it.

Writing music for my game turned out to be very hard. I'm slowly figuring out exactly which mood the game needs, but it will probably take a long time. Here's a small tune I wrote this morning that sounds nice but doesn't have the right mood: https://clyp.it/ett0yev3

I've started looking for new songs to add to the game. Requirements: melodic dance music, no vocals, steady 130ish bpm, starts softly and escalates (with bass drops, fillls, key changes and such), the beginning part should be pleasant to listen to over and over, later parts should be fun to anticipate. "Funky Stars" is a good example, another one is "Cheat Codes" by Nitro Fun which I probably can't use due to copyright. Just installed GarageBand, maybe I'll write some music of my own.

I noticed that the game had a few frames of annoying stutter upon each restart, and it was seriously bugging me. Eventually I had an idea that it might be due to something going "cold", either the canvas or requestAnimationFrame. So I made requestAnimationFrame happen during idle times too, and started drawing a 1x1 rectangle on the canvas every frame. That helped, now the stutter is gone and the game starts silky smooth. Curiously, a 0x0 rectangle didn't work, I guess it doesn't keep the canvas "warm".

Another blue one:

Some panicked gameplay with the speedup mechanic:

Just made this one:

Four new palettes:



Now I have twelve and I'm happy with all of them. Bumping up the game completion to 40%.

The tutorial text at the very beginning of the game has been giving me trouble. The very first version said:

left to zig
right to zag
space to start

That was cute, but a bit too minimalistic and several people asked for more clear instructions. I changed it:

Press left to go counterclockwise, right to go clockwise, up or space to start.

Then some people said that it would make more sense to talk about turning from the perspective of the line. Next version:

Press left or right to turn (from the perspective of the line), up or space to start.

That was clear enough, but a little stuttery. This morning I had an insight:

Press left or right to steer the line, up or space to start.

That's the version I'm going with now.

This morning I got frustrated with the colors in my game, so I read up on some color theory and wrote my own in-game random palette generator! It makes many bad palettes and some good ones:



I'm liking these much more than the style I had before.

New palette I made this morning:



I'm also working on mechanics, but it's pretty slow. Most things I try, like Super Hexagon-inspired twirls or smooth color transitions, end up feeling "wrong" for the game somehow. But the speedup mechanic immediately felt "right" to me and now I use it all the time.

I just uploaded another update to the game. Now you can speed up by pressing the up arrow. It feels incredibly good.

I decided not to do the transitions, they are too distracting, and not in the way that I want.

Just uploaded a new playable version, with one new palette and a redesigned game over screen:



And a new quote: "The only person you should try to be better than is you". It certainly has the right flavor for my game.

Or even



Still not happy with it though. I may scrap this whole idea and go with something simpler.

Thanks!

I've started making a new animation for palette transitions. This is definitely not final, but there's something about it that I like:

New title screen:

More work on the game over screen, now it shows a randomly selected quote in a cursive font:



Not just any kind of quote will do, though. I'm looking for quotes that have a certain kind of peaceful, soothing stupidity. Here's the list so far:

• To be great is to be misunderstood.
• There are more stars in the Milky Way than there are atoms in the universe.
• On the sea of life, sometimes the best ships, are friendships.
• It's hard to be someone's everything. It's easier to be everyone's nothing.
• We are infinitely complicated in every possible and impossible way.
• If you love someone, put their name in a circle, instead of a heart, because hearts can break, but circles go on forever.

The first version of the game title used the default kerning from the Roboto font, which looks pretty bad:



ZA is too close, AG is too far, etc. This was bothering me a lot.

At first I had crazy ideas like exporting the letter outlines to SVG and moving them around, or editing the TTF to change kerning data... But then I realized that this is HTML, so I can just wrap each letter in a <span> and adjust its position. That only took a couple minutes. Here's a better kerned version:

Why I'm making this game:

I'm a big fan of Super Hexagon (http://superhexagon.com/) and have gotten pretty good at it, e.g. beat the last level five times in a row just to prove that I can. The difficulty in that game comes from visual confusion, not pure reflexes or high APM. And it has an uncanny way of teaching you to react faster than you thought possible. But it's still not quite perfect for me:

- It has "dead man walking" states where you know you'll hit a wall, but have to wait until it actually happens.

- It makes you wait for the next obstacle even if you're perfectly ready for it.

- It encourages pressing hard on the keys in an attempt to turn faster.

- It has patterns that you must memorize.

So I decided to fix all of those. In my game, passing an obstacle takes a single tap instead of a sustained press; you can pass obstacles as fast as you can see them; there are no patterns to memorize; and every situation is salvageable. As a result, Zig Zag feels very different from Super Hexagon: my fingers actually get more relaxed the faster I play. Another bonus is that there's no learning curve for the input lag like in every other game, because there's no penalty for pressing keys faster. That makes my game perfect for HTML5 with its unpredictable response times.

But the main idea of confusing the player with a zooming and rotating screen is obviously taken from Super Hexagon, and I'm very grateful to Terry for making it.

This morning I decided that this way of displaying time isn't ideal:



So I made a seven-segment display instead. The design took me about four hours to get right, now I'm really proud of it: