What is Locks and Keys?Locks and Keys is not your ordinary maze game. You take on the role of Mr. White, a treasure hunter, and you need to complete the maze set before you to grab the treasure, but in doing so you must get keys to open locks that block your path.
Game Mechanics and Features:Swipe / DPad Movement:Mr. White is going to be controllable by swipe controls or by a dpad.
Power Ups:Mr. White will be able to pick up various power ups in some of the mazes to help him out with trying to find the treasure.
Achievements System:Connected via Game Center on iOS and also storred locally (both iOS and Android) there will be achievements that will be earned throughout the course of play.
History:Locks and Keys started out from a speed challenge on Christian Developer's Network. I was given 2 hours and a theme of unlock, and came up with the idea and created the game under the working title of "Mazes".
Tools/Engine/SDK:I'm using CoronaSDK for this game, which allows for exporting to iOS and Android devices with one code base. Yes, CoronaSDK has its limitations, but the amount of work I can get done in Corona with the limited time I have to work on the project is amazing. I'm also leveraging box2d for the physics and collisions, which makes things super easy to work with. My main text editor is SublimeText. I'm also using FamiTracker to create the chiptunes and then using Audacity to export the wavs as ogg and m4a files. Photoshop is what I'm using to build the pixel art, a bit overkill I know, but I own Photoshop, so why not use it?
Marketing Angle:Retro game found in old mainframe archives:After showing the game to one of my friends, he said I should spin it up as if I found the game on some old mainframe and use a very old computer in a picture with me holding box art with the game "playing" on the monitor. I liked it so I created a little write up which is posted on Locks and Keys Facebook page.
Screenshots:
Lessons Learned so Far:Game Center Integration:Corona had a nasty bug that cost me at least a half a day (if not more) of development time with a callback that you can send to the game center's init function
Even though the game is "done" there's still tons of polishing:How quickly we forget as developers that there is a ton of polishing that needs to go into a game to make it not only look good, but perform as expected. Menuing systems tend to take a lot longer than expected.
Future Plans:Friend Mazes:I'm contemplating building a sister site for the game that will allow players to make mazes for the game and allow others to download them based off of a code that each maze will automatically get. Users will be able to rate mazes and provide feedback as well. The major hurdle that faces me is building the level editor in a web site. I'm sure I could figure out DOJO/JQuery enough to build something.
Links:FacebookTozSoftware Locks and Keys SiteThank you for reading and stay tuned for more updates!
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