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[Son of Bryce]

Hello Ya'll!

This be Bryson Whiteman again. This is my 2nd DevLog. First was for Donut Get!

My next game is called The Crazy Program.

Now available on Android!

THE TEAM

Ricky Enriquez - Character Design
Cryptic Circuitry - Music & Sound Design - http://soundcloud.com/cryptic-circuitry
Bryson Whiteman - Game & Artwork - http://www.sonofbryce.com

SCREENS

PLAY IT!

Target Platforms: Android, iPhone + iPad, PC, Mac and OUYA

Web Alpha Version: http://www.sokay.net/play/the-crazy-program

============================

Check out the website at http://www.thecrazyprogram.com , I just whipped it together today!

It's a match-3 Puzzle game. Nothing crazy, just a game I've been wanting to make for myself for a while. Just something to keep you busy while waiting in line at the bank.

This game is being developed in Unity. I've been experimenting with techniques to bring Flash animation into Unity so I'll see how that goes.

The theme is a monkey on a space ship. We're still working out the monkey designs.

I've got some sketches to show...

I started development while finishing up the Unity version of Donut Get!, mainly to test how the controls felt and get a jumpstart on it. I loved how the prototype worked but had to drop it to find some work to pay the bills.

Here's some UI sketches...

I've been focusing on knocking out all of the UI screens early on to not have to worry about that stuff later on. I've found it's good to start testing on the devices as early as possible to start finding quirks in the sizing or touch-controls.

For previous Unity projects I've been using NGUI for the UI stuff. It's super helpful for a lot of things but it's quirky as shit. I had some strong recommendations to try ex2d and I started redoing the UI stuff earlier this week and it's coming along awesome so far. The downfall is that it doesn't have all of the great UI tools that NGUI has, like buttons and sliders. I found a helpful ColliderButton script on PixelPlacement that I've been using for buttons.

It's kinda tricky deciding what to show because I don't know what'll be changing. But now that I've got this started I have a good excuse to start posting progress.

Also, I thought I should say something about an OUYA version. I went to an Unity Meetup in Los Angeles and some folks from OUYA talked about it. It was mostly a Q&A and it answered a lot of questions I had about the console. I'm skeptical about the whole thing but there's a lot of heart being put into it by the team and other developers. The excitement for it gave me some faith. And learning that it's not too difficult to convert a Unity Android project to OUYA makes it seem reasonable to port as far as time in concerned. I wrote a blog post summarizing what I learned here: http://blog.sokay.net/2013/01/23/unity-la-meetup-meet-ouya/

I actually don't have an OUYA dev unit because I'm not baller enough to have bought one, but I bought a little Android mini-pc that I intend to test with on my TV.

Thanks for checking it out!

[Son of Bryce]

Here is some art for the game's background.

Here's the 'final' sketch I decided on. I'd been sketching up lots of ideas that were never good enough. Eventually I just settled on something and used it as my blueprint

I redrew it digitally and this is what I came up with...

I just got it in the game, I might have to make some small modifications but I'll try to avoid it.

Right now we're working on deciding on the final designs for the characters in the game, hopefully we'll have that sorted by next week.

[Son of Bryce]

Here are some sketches I used to draw the in-game blocks.

Some block design sketches

Some character concepts.

The star of the show. Sketches by Ricky Enriquez.

I've still been hacking away at UI stuff, believe it or not. I've been going through trial and error with ex2d and setting up the structure of all the menus. Right now I've got the Title Menus and Game UI is separate scenes that are loaded in when they're needed. Their respective GameObjects are destroyed when I need to get rid of them.

I've been planning out how I'll be sizing UI elements for different phone resolutions/screen sizes. I think it's in a good place now.

Big goals are to start getting new iterations of music and final character designs within the next week or so. I need to get the first batch of sounds into the game. And I need to fix some touch-related bugs within the gameplay. Multi-touch is fucking things up right now.

[Son of Bryce]

The title screen's looking something like this...

I've got it working well on different sized screens but I think I'm gonna have to force the menu's into Landscape view for phones/tablets because I'll take too much time to resize some screens for portrait view. Gameplay will be able to be played in either Landscape or Portrait.

Here's what it's lookin like on TV, testing it on my little Android device...

There's still some quirkiness to how Android handles mouse differently from PC that I'm still trying to figure out. Some buttons aren't working and the mouseOver stuff doesn't work. It'll eventually be navigable through controller but I have to use mouse for now.

We've finally finalized the character designs but here are sketches for the other characters, the enemies.

Gotcha concepts by Ricky

Overflow concepts by Ricky

It's not looking like I'll have much time to get some story and character related stuff in, but it's always a focus of mine to try to tell a story. Even though it's just a puzzle game. I'm trying hard to not overdo it like Donut Get!

Now I'm planning to dive into my hacky game code and see if I can fix some multi-touch bugs that I've been putting off forever. I'm aiming to get a fairly playable version of the game this weekend.

[Son of Bryce]

I've been advancing at the pace of a snail, but advancing nevertheless! I fixed some nasty bugs with the block swapping so now it's baseline playable.

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I've created a video of the current build of the game.

The Crazy Program WIP - Feb 26, 2013

This is my first time doing a little video so I'll aim to improve with these!

If you like what we're doing, like us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/sokaynet

Please let me know what you think so far.

Thanks!

[Son of Bryce]

Here are our character designs for the game.

This is Shermy, our monkey protagonist!

This is Gotcha, our digital trouble maker.

Now that we've got characters in the game, I've gotta integrate them into the game. I haven't decided in the exact presentation of the characters while playing. The tricky part is making the game and UI elements fit on the screen even on a phone in portrait mode. So there will be bit of a trial and error process with that.

As with every Sokay Game, we have a commitment to telling a bit of a story with our games. Initially I was thinking of something like "Pac-man style" cut scenes in between groups of stages. Which would be semi-related segments featuring the characters and gags. But as of now I've decided to show a simple yet cohesive story. I'm aiming to keep the segments short to avoid Donut Get-itis. It'll be a bit of R&D involved as I'm planning on animating the scenes in Flash and bringing them to Unity through GREE's LWF tool. I did some demos earlier with some Donut Get character animation and it worked, although there were some weird clipping issues.

Right now I'm working on wrapping the game up for a first release as a minimum viable product. I'm gonna put in some ads and some social game kind of energy system to encourage in-app purchases. I'll see how it goes.

The OUYA Folks are gonna be ready to launch games on March 28, so maybe I should try to be ready by then?

[Son of Bryce]

Been capturing animated GIFs of gameplay for the Screenshot Saturdays thread.

Recently I've been working on getting the game polished enough for release. The focus has been getting all the screen elements finalized and coming up with resolutions for getting everything to fit on a phone in portrait and landscape mode. Also getting in the little animated touches.

I created a Sokay intro scene which is loaded into the game on the start. The intro triggers the game scene to load, when it finishes loading, it then animated out and start the game.

I also created a little "Ready! Go!" animation for the start of the game. Although the gameplay doesn't actually pause yet... ha. I've still gotta polish the whole transition of the game start because the play area just pops in right now, gotta make it animate along with the camera move I added in.

I created an IndieDB profile for The Crazy Program. I'll see if that helps promote it any. I had created one for Donut Get! but it never got approved, guessing because I didn't put any screenshots in or something.

Also you can like us on Facebook!

Check it out if you're interested!

[Son of Bryce]

Just finished putting this "box art" promo piece for the game. Character artwork by Ricky Enriquez! I did the colors.

[Son of Bryce]

I'm working out a lot of the smaller details for the game -- the polish. Yesterday I added in some feedback to let the player know they were about to lose. I did this my flashing the blocks in a pattern, with it being more apparent near the top. Added in some sounds that were missing, like the lose song. I had to rework some elements that I wanted to tint.

At the moment I'm working on animated display for when you clear a 4+ group of blocks.

It's these small accomplishments that keep me excited moving forward! I'm loving how the game looks. This stuff's a lot slower to put together than animating in Flash, but that comes with the territory. I'm liking how it's looking and it's time to integrate it to see how it works.

Most of the graphic related stuff is in place so I'll mostly be doing bug fixes and polish from here on out.

[Son of Bryce]

I'm feeling this thing is starting to come together! Here's a the final effect, all animated in Unity with billboard sprites and timeline animation.

I'm liking how it's looking! Good feedback for the player!

[CasePortman]

The game is looking great, it's something I'm very interested in and can imagine getting addicted pretty quickly. That new effect looks pretty swarve! 

[psyguy]

I like a lot of character designs and mockups.  It did catch me off-guard though, when I checked out one of the gameplay videos, to see that it's one of those tetris-ish games.  I think with all of those interesting characters, I assumed some kind of adventure game. 

But, that being said, the game is looking pretty slick to me.  It looks like it controls well (to the extent I can judge just be watching it of course) and the effects look smooth.  Good work!

[Son of Bryce]

Thanks for the response guys!

Characters and story are a big part of Sokay Games. We'd spend a great deal of effort on characters if we were making a tic tac toe game.

You can play a new web demo of the game here:

http://www.sokay.net/play/the-crazy-program

Screens:

da box!

If you're interested in getting a testflight version of the game on your iPhone, or whatever PM me and I'll see what I can do.

[Son of Bryce]

Been more steadily hacking away at the game.

I hung out a bit with the Glitch City crew in Culver City to work. I had to buckle down and get serious about some bugs that were ruining the gameplay. I fixed a lot of the bugs dealing with matching pieces. A few new less serious ones popped up. I fixed some lagginess the game had on mobile from too many simultaneous sounds playing at once.

Today I implemented some revised music from Cryptic Circuitry. Sounds even better now.

Just finished a website for the game:

www.thecrazyprogram.com

I'm aiming to get a first release out by E3 in a few weeks! Lots of work to do!

[Son of Bryce]

Hey everyone!

Progress has felt glacial, but it's coming along slow and steadily.

Here's a Vine video I made of the game today:

https://vine.co/v/hz2v6lQKezD

E3 has come and gone, had the opportunity to let a bunch of people give the game a shot. I managed to tone done most of the nagging gameplay bugs so it's mostly a smooth experience right now. Still some polish and optimization to be made but that's less worrisome for me.

This past weekend I started hacking away at some Facebook integration for high scores. A couple of my friends had suggested it and I decided to go through with it for the first release. It'll basically allow you to save high scores and see the scores for your friends as well. I made a quick FB version of Donut Get! late last year (https://apps.facebook.com/donutget/) and I'm using that as a template for how it'll work.

As I'm ripping out all of the story/progress based goals for the game, I'm trying to see if competing with scores is enough to keep people playing it. We'll see!

I had received some comments about the game not being "flashy" enough so I added some particles to the block clear effect. It's borderline overdoing it, but I like it. I added some additional effects to make the blocks shake when you're about to lose as well.

I've got some controllers from MOGA and OUYA is finally released. I'm planning to have a first release on mobile before I implement controller support. I ported Donut Get! to OUYA pretty quickly so I'll probably do an OUYA release as soon as I can get it working with a controller (and I should probably get an OUYA to actually test it with!).

[Son of Bryce]

The Crazy Program is released on Android!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sokay.TheCrazyProgram

Check it out!

iOS Coming soon!

[Son of Bryce]

Whipped up a trailer today, check it out!

[Son of Bryce]

Our first press attention for The Crazy Program and what do you know, it's in French!

(and Google Translated)

A couple weeks ago I released the game kinda blindly. I put it up then went on vacation. Didn't get much downloads, just like 40 in the 2 weeks I was gone.

Over the last weekend I spent some time spamming out the game on Android forums. I got a nudge in downloads over the next few days. But when FrAndroid wrote their review I got 500 in one day.

Through the powers of Google Translate, I ascertained that it was a thoughtful review. The authors perspective was "this game is an independently developed game with some heart in it, let's feature it." I'm glad that they focused on a lot of the attention to detail we put into the game, like making note of the shapes we used for tiles help for color-blindness. I'm also glad that they didn't call out areas of weakness for the game (hey, we're still working on it! ). But it feels good to me to have some good payoff, knowing that someone liked it and from the stats the people that are playing it are enjoying it (the average play is to level 20).

I spent a week integrating Facebook high scores into the game. About 5% of people are actually using that feature which is better than I expected. I was expecting more like 0%, haha. I'm hoping that will help retain users and help it spread virally a bit. I'm writing a blog post detailing how I integrated it using Prime31 plugins.

One of the biggest issues I have with the game is people expecting it to play like a Bejeweled clone, and thinking its a scammy "pay per move" styled puzzle game. Most of the audience doesn't realize that puzzle games were fun back in the day! 

I'm kind of burned out from working on the game, so I'm trying to take a break from development. I've gotta do some testing and adding a few more features for the iOS release. Which will probably hit in October. Just trying to pimp it out for now!

Check out the Android version if you've got time! Peace!