We demoed LazerGrrl over the weekend at the 8-bit gaming conference in Griffith College Dublin.
It went down really well! A lot of people really got the game and dug it. Some people kept coming back to play it again and again. I was also surprised by the number of young kids in this category. I never would have thought kids would particularly like this game, as at its heart its more like a purely strategic game like 'chess' or 'go' than an action game, but they seem to.
We got loads of good leads and made connections to help market it also.

Another thing that came out of it is that we are going to look into Facebook as an additional release platform for the game.

Here are some pics of us at the conference...

[Landing page draft 1]

Landing page draft 1

So I started a landing page. Here it is atm. Feedback very welcome!




Also demoed the game again at the games co-op and got some more great feedback.
I'm gonna try a few things to make the mechanics easier to understand.

More feedback and visual tweaks to make

1. Put the power generator symbol on the energy nodes, so they are clearly associated with one another.

2. Make th bank fill up linearly rather than in the current pattern of crosses.

3. Show the cost of the blocks as a linear row of dots.

4. Show the blank spaces for energy balls to be stored in the bank. So anywhere an energy ball can go: out of a power generator, into a laser, into the shop, will all be consistently represented.

AI

Probably the biggest problem this game is gonna face is lack of players. If someone else isnt online you wont be able to play. We're thinking about writing an AI. So say if a person has been waiting in the lobby for 1 minute they will just be matched with the AI... Or they can just choose the play the AI themselves. Not sure how we'll handle that.

I've started thinking about how to implement the AI and I have made a few decisions.
1. It doesnt need to be very *good* at the game. If the other player thinks they're playing another human then they'll enjoy winning and be more likely to play again (apparently 80% of people quit an online pvp game and never come back if they lose their 1st match)
2. It needs to appear human, so it needs to make mistakes, and not move perfectly, or do things perfectly efficiently. Also it should be as unpredictable as possible, so it doesnt just always do the same thing.

So, I'm going to bake in a lot of randomness, if that makes it a worse player thats ok.

I figured out how to make gifs!

Yeah, I dont wanna do that cus, they're busy streaming right then. Not exactly the best time for that. Also u'd have to wait till they are streaming, with timezones that could be pretty awkward.

I think, the simplistic nature of things, the homages to classic old games, and the CRT style graphics, definitely combine to give this game a great atmosphere. Sort of weird / mysterious / strangely sombre and nostalgic. It definitely worked for me (who did play those type of games on CRT monitors)

So just that atmosphere did hold my interest for a while. But the game mechanics did not. I think they were too obscure. Eg. How the asteroids / pacman and house stages worked together was not clear to me. You're supposed to kill wolves but doing so presents no challenge or threat, so I didnt want to. It seemed like the goal is simply to *wait* for 42 days.
I'd suggest some *clearer* little game loop to keep people occupied and invested while they soak up the great atmosphere.

So, I dont know anything about Twitch. But so far I have found that...

1. Searching doesnt seem to be very useful to find streams that cover certain topics.
Eg. I have searched for keywords relevant to my game (free, browser, pvp, multiplayer,strategy,action)

2. If you do find a stream, there doesnt appear to be an email address or any way to directly message the channel in order to ask them to look at your game.

The above points dont apply on Youtube for example. Twitch seems like a cool new way to get eyeballs on your game. If someone who is clued in could explain these mysteries to me I'd really appreciate it.

Here is a promo video draft. Feedback very welcome!

Because the game has such a steep learning curve at the start, I decided to make the video explain how to play somewhat. So people have a rough idea what to do before they actually load the game up.

It just shows one game being played from start to end, with text explaining what to do, but edited so it is not too long.





Also I learned how to make gifs! I used giphy for the 1st time, very cool site!





Still looking for people to try the beta by the way!

New victory music. Check it...

[Block and base art tweaks]

Block and base art tweaks

Over the course of development we regularly play-tested, and got really good feedback about the art, and how it could be clearer and more useful to the player. Over several iterations we made big improvements and we could see them having an effect, as new players would no longer tend to make the mistakes they did in the previous iteration.
The only problem with this was that we made lots of little changes one at a time. The end result was a little inconsistent or muddled.
We have revised the last iteration of the block and base art, incorporating all the positive changes we made, but rationalising the final product somewhat.
This boils down to..

1. White borders are skinny again now.
Because they act as health bars and 'go down' rather then turn black as damage is inflicted, they now longer need to be so thick.

2. Reactor is a circle now.
All the blocks are different shapes now, which should differentiate them, also the wall block does appear to be the strongest (which it is)

3. Reactor has 'sun' on it.
So there arent many symbols or ways of representing something that says 'makes energy'. Previously we had a nuclear trefoil, but we didnt like that as it was too 'real worldy'.
Power generators / sources of some kind, *are* quite common in games, but they also generally arent very distinctive. They tend to be circular or symmetrical glowy things. So thats what this is now.

4. Black lines
All blocks now have black lines on them denoting how they can connect to neighbouring blocks.

5. Energy ball receptacle
So for quite some time we have had this representation of a place where energy balls go when they are consumed, in lasers or in the shop. For a while they've been grey circles. I didnt like having that extra color there (grey) as the art style of this game involves a limited color palette.
Now any place where energy balls are used, or generated, is a black circle with a transparent hole denoting the place where the energy balls go.
So, this is all now consistent and also does not use any extra colors.

The proposal


In game

We took a break from this to work on other stuff.
Back working on it now and MVP is pretty much done.
Here is one of the final features, the 'match found' screen.

Just a quick update showing the new health bars. This was a requested feature and really helps imo.
Now players will be able to see how quickly their base and blocks are being damaged, and how long they have left to live.





Discord.. Playable link for the game is here

[https://discord.gg/Fnr2qQR]

I'm making a little multiplayer game atm.. Its a quick PVP game sorta like Bomberman combined with an RTS.. I'm looking for people to join the beta, I have a discord for it. The link to play the game is there.

https://discord.gg/Fnr2qQR

[https://discord.gg/Fnr2qQR]

I'm making a little multiplayer game atm.. Its a quick PVP game sorta like Bomberman combined with an RTS.. I'm looking for people to join the beta, I have a discord for it. The link to play the game is there.

https://discord.gg/Fnr2qQR

Menus done

Check it...

[Tutorial 'AI']

Discord.. Playable link for the game is here

Our MVP is nearly complete.
From a programming point of view I have reached the stage where I am simply cleaning up a few things, optimising, bug-hunting.
We have reached that stage in the project where progress is art-bound rather than programmer-bound. I am now thinking about marketing the game.


Tutorial 'AI'

We found through demoing that for an action game, Lazergrrl has a steep initial learning curve. Its a big step to learn that in order to start earning energy you have to..
1. Buy a reactor
2. Place it on power node (green glowy thing)
3. Connect it to your base. 
But, we also found that once people get over that initial step they are good to go and will start discovering different strategies on their own.

The purpose of the tutorial is to get new players past that 1st big step. Once they can do that they are ready to play online.

Instead of a normal tutorial, we just immediately dump players into a match with a *very bad* opponent, Lazertron 9000, we also thought it would be fun if he was megalomanical and trashtalked.

'AI' is in quotes because he is a literal automaton, always making the exact same moves.
The idea behind this, is that brand new players will be able to watch him make the basic opening moves and emulate him. They will see that he built a reactor, then connected it to his base, and then energy balls started flowing into his bank.

Lazertron normally randomly trashtalks the player, but if they are not progressing, eg
not moving, not buying anything, not building a reactor on an energy node, not connecting it their base, or not building any lasers, he will make more helpful comments hinting at what to do until you remedy the situation.





Final tweaks for MVP.

Every time we demoed we got really good feedback and insight. Usually through people not understanding the game and doing completely 'wrong' things. Eg. people would try to connect directly to their base, or wall themselves off for no reason.
Through demoing, and then refining our game based on the insights and feedback we have noticed that these sort of problems are becoming less and less common.
The latest round of demoing was the best yet, but we did get some very clear feedback [the SAME feedback from multiple indpendant people] on a few things. They were..

1. Purpose of blocks is not clear.
   Its quite unclear at 1st look that they are reactor, lazer, and wall. The very bad original dev art was probably clearer in this regard.

2. The base needs a health bar.

3. Energy ball production and movement should be more apparent.
   I can improve this by..
   Making them travel slower.
   Giving the energy balls a bigger glow.
   Show the energy balls being generated in the reactor and then bursting out.

We have already made good progress on all of these issues. We'll probably do one more pass before release.


Whats left to do.

* Menus

[New minor features]

So we are barrelling towards getting our MVP together and making it playable by the public...

New minor features

* 1st properly implemented lobby
When searching for a match, you wait in the arena where you can practice, also you can *stop* searching for a match.

* Improved lazer graphics.
The beam is made from several animating lines. There is a big flare when the lazer starts, and also a kamehameha build up of energy as it is charging.

* Improved lazer sound effects.
The lazers are now in the same key as the music. The different players lazers play different notes, also the MEGA-lazers are deeper and louder chords.


Music

We have added a 3rd member to the LazerGrrl team, Peter Jones, who is making music. The arena music is already done, you can hear it in the video above.
Our art is kind of oldskool inspired, it has a very limited color palette and is simple and diagrammatic, but, it is not pixel art, it is high-res. So its like a sort of retro-modern look. I think Peters tracks compliment this perfectly, they are reminiscent of oldskool video-game music but have a modern richness and production quality.

I (the programmer) had already made some music for Lazergrrl, but it just had a NES style chiptune sound (you can hear it in the video in the last post). I was just going to go with the NES style rock track because I thought it would suffice and it was quick and easy to do, though it did jibe, having a retro-modern art style and a simply retro music style.
Not being a specialist in audio it would have taken me weeks and weeks to achieve anything like this rich retro-modern sound (if I even could).
Getting Peter on board has meant a huge step up in our music game.
 

Netcode: perfection vs responsiveness

One thing I had been planning to do all along was a serverside gamestate. There would be a single source of truth for where solid things were, on the server. This would have made it impossible for two players to move into the same square or place a block in the same square if they both do so at almost exactly the same time.
When I actually started implementing it however I changed my mind.
In order for the server to confirm moves, you might move, and then after sending a message to the server and getting a response back, end up being denied and moved back to where you were. I thought the lag involved in this would really hurt the responsive feeling controls.
Lets say you make several moves really fast and then recieve the response that the 1st move was invalid. It would be very jarring to be moved back several spaces. Conversely, making people wait for a response from the server before being able to make a 2nd move would be frustratingly laggy in my opinion.
I decided to favour snappy responsive controls over a perfect gamestate. I'd rather have some weird things be able to happen in some corner cases rather than have every single move laggy at all times.
Instead of the server-side gamaestate I am just making the game tolerate imperfection, two things being in the same space.


Whats left to do for the MVP?

* Tutorial AI
For tutorial purposes, we are prioritizing an AI you can practice against..(Lazertron 9000) He will be very very bad. We're hoping new players will pick up the basics by watching and emulating him,

* Menus
The concept for these is done (see images below). Just a matter of implementing them. Pablo is gonna really make them pop. Its an opportunity to flesh out the games image, art-style and attitude.

Its Saturday so here is a recent video of my game in action.. I hope I'm doing this screenshot Saturday thing right!

[Try it out]

Try it out





Games Fleadh

 
We demoed at the Games Fleadh in Thurles, Which was atteneded by college students and primary and secondary school students. I was actually suprised at how much the young kids enjoyed playing it. They'd play over and over again and crowd around the screen.

A few things we picked up from testing there and the last games CO-OP were..

*  The items in the shop need to be clearer, perhaps just buttons with text on them POWER, WALL, LAZER

*  *No-one* bothers going for the mega power nodes in the centre of the map.

*  *Everyone* loves the maga lazers and builds them even if they cant power them.

*  Because of the 3 power nodes in a row in front of your base people have a tendency to connect them all up and wall themselves off.

*  Some people try and connect the power node in front of their base directly to their base.


Zeroing in on an MVP

So the stage of large gameplay changes appears to be over. We're gradually zeroing in on the 1st version of the game to be available to the public.
We are really concentrating on a sort of MVP (minimum viable product). We're often going with the simplest implementations, the ones that will work best for new players, which is *all* players at this point. If the game is in any way popular *then* we can fill it out with more features, eg. more levels, customisable rules for games, but right now we are just trying to make that *one* level and ruleset that works best for new players.

One example of this is that the map we are going with is more like the prototype map, with a fairly even grid of single power nodes and no super ones, and also no walls. We've concluded from testing that getting people over the initial learning curve of buildings pgens on the nodes and connecting to your base is enough of a challenge, anymore details people seem to ignore. So they were ignoring the power nodes in the middle as it was just too much to take in.


Visual / Audio tweaks.

* The energy balls are now bigger and volatile looking.

* There is screen shake with chromatic aberration when things explode

* Explosion are no longer pixelated (we had this idea that the floor was a TV, which we've ditched) they have particles and a cloud now.

* Power nodes look like green (ie. neutral) energy balls.

* The other player will always appear as a different color to you on your machine.

* I've done the 1st draft of original music (its like 8bit punk rock) + it now also only plays when action is happening, after the enemy player dies it stops.
 
 
Next steps

So this MVP could easily be done and ready for the public by the end of April, the main programming tasks left are..

* Build lobby system
* Build tutorial
* Build practice AI
* Add Metrics