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[antionio]

EDIT: Last updated 2015-10-29

Throw away your shaving equipment, prepare your frying pans and iOS devices, it's here! Go! Go! Meatball, Parta Games' debut game has launched!

Google Play (Free ad-supported edition) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.partagames.meatball
Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.partagames.gogomeatball
App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/go!-go!-meatball/id999733752?ls=1&mt=8

http://www.gogomeatball.com
http://www.partagames.com

General

A bit of misplaced voodoo magic and a twist of fate causes a meatball come back to life! There is but one problem - everyone wants to eat him! Running for his life meatball has no time to dodge all obstacles in his way. You have to help him survive!

Help Meatball back to safety by jumping, ducking and rolling around in this cute, fast-paced and challenging platformer available only on iOS.

Platforms
The game is released on Google Play and the App Store!

Team & Schedule
Made by a two-man team of dudes with beards. Both left their day jobs and have been dreaming of doing this for a living since the last century. Thus, Parta Games was born.

Media

Launch trailer:



Screenshot #1


Screenshot #2


Screenshot #3


Screenshot #4


Game's Working title was "Meatball on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown"

[antionio]

Here's some concept art of the enemies. Of course they aren't going to be as detailed in the game since I'm currently using 16x16 px tiles for that oh-so-popular retro-ish look.

You can't eat a meatball without a fork!

[Zoe Coleman Music]

aw man I love the characters and the cutesy style of this game. That pirate mouse is bad-ass. :D Good work!

[antionio]

Glad you like it I'm trying to create a unified style so that nothing seems too much out of place. It's a challenging job but fun at the same time.

[antionio]

Log entry 1

- Tinkered around with blur shaders for focusing interesting screen elements for the player.
- Added a wooden sign that activates when player collides with it. It shows info about current situation for example tutorial tips.
- Ran first test run on iPhone 3GS and iPad2, runs pretty smoothly
- Some early bug fixing edeavours

Blur in action

[ROCKYIII]

Haha love the title! Looks awesome, keep up the great work.

[antionio]

Log Entry 2

- Studied trigonometry to be able to render some more advanced stuff
- Created a pipe that traverses the player around the stage
- Composed early music drafts
- Procrastinated on the internet and playing guitar

[antionio]

Nothing new much. Just trying out a more vibrant color palette. (Don't mind the tile clipping, it's a known bug. I'm really good at doing anything else but fix it.)

[antionio]

Log Entry 3
- Feeling pretty non-innovative, so created a collectable coin, not sure if it stays in the game but it feels good to collect them
- Added health for player. It felt pretty wrong to die from hitting one enemy.
- Went to JavaZone to learn new programming tricks and get inspired... and stuff

[antionio]

Hiya! It has been a while since my last update. Progress of Meatball was really slow for a couple of months and I spent the whole November taking part in GitHub Game-Off 2013. It was a really fun endeavor and I got some new ideas. I've rarely tried to finish a game in this short of time.

The theme was change and I wanted to create a Binding of Isaac -style game where you can change the game world's layout at will. You can see the result here.



https://github.com/antionio/game-off-2013

Be sure to also like my entry at the game-off viewer site

http://petarov.github.io/ggo13-viewer/

[antionio]

Still alive!

Lately we've been hard at work redefining the game to get it released quicker. Currently, instead of becoming a hybrid of an endless runner and a puzzle game, it is going to be more like a runner game in the vein of Bit.Trip Runner. We realized that the scope we were trying to achieve was too big because we have so little resources. It's still possible that we create the original idea as a spin-off game later but right now we need to prioritize.

Ultra hard endless running reaction-based obstacle avoidance ensues. I now also have a friend helping me with the game to get it finished.

Here's an alpha screenshot of one of the earliest levels.

[antionio]

Log Entry 4

Again it's time to do some more dev logging. Kept you waiting, huh?

We're closing in on a beta version slowly but surely. I still won't give an estimate launch window but we're getting there. A closed alpha build was distributed to our (carefully handpicked) testing crew about two months ago and based on that feedback we've tweaked the main gameplay and feel a lot. Finding the balance between challenging and fun has been one of the two hardest nuts to break, the other hard nut being the quality and amount of level design. Creating fun and surprising levels takes time and it's sometimes frustrating because this game could've been procedurally generated as we envisioned at some point. At some point we decided to handcraft all levels and that's how it's going to be at this point. No use regretting fundamental design decisions now...

I am not a guy who wants to make boring games that pose no challenge. On mobile creating challenging games seems really hard because everyone expects games to be easy and approachable from the get go. I guess Flappy Bird is an exception but it has simplicity on its side. "Meatball" is slightly more complex with its mechanics and at least the first versions really did slap you in the face with the difficulty level.

Almost every day working on this game has been a learning experience Sadly the only thing I can offer at this point are screenshots that really don't do justice to the amount of brainstorming and other work we've gone through "under the hood" these past couple of months. But enough about that, it's time for SCREENSHOTS!

Rolling around peacefully


First and foremost, JUMP


Second, GATHER COINS


Third, CRASH INTO STUFF


Fourth, DUCK


There you go, that neatly sums up the four main game mechanics that you rely on in this game. You can also spot the new tile sets, on-screen controls and maybe even a few particle effects in there.

Over and out
- Antti

[antionio]

Screenshot saturday

New feature, timer!

[antionio]

Log Entry 5

Everythings going peachy, we've added almost all of the intended features to the game. The biggest things missing or not ready right now are:

Music
We have some music ready for use in the game but not all of them are up to the task. We are also missing a lot of "transitional" music like fanfares etc. We've been thinking this a lot because - being a hobbyist musician - I would like the game to have really memorable tunes.

Levels
At first we envisioned the game to have hundred levels but the task has proven too big for a two man team that has limited available time (currently only one full working day a week). We will probably launch the game with 20 levels and soon after launch update the level amount to 30. After that we will see how the game does and if it does well, we will keep adding worlds and levels as free updates to increase the play time and content.

We could also use some help with this! If you'd like to design some levels for this game send me a private message and we'll talk about it.

Game Center
Achievements and leaderboards are a must and we don't yet have them.

Of course the final polish phase will take some time. We will release the game when it's done, but hope still lives that the soft launch is before the end of the year.

Over and out,
Antti

[nox]

This looks so good. You deserve more comments. I love the squishiness, the flames, and all of the other little effects. I want to play it; then I could tell you if I would be interested in designing levels

[antionio]

Thanks, glad you like it We might release a beta/demo build here at some point for people to try out. Even if level design is out of the question we'd like to get some honest feedback.

[Julien]

The main character reminded me of Kirby when it takes fire

Anyway, it looks good !

[antionio]

(Short) Log Entry 6

Like I said last time, almost all of the intended game features have been finished. We are missing some crucial game art (prologue comic) and around 60% of the game music and are mainly working on them. Also we are currently in the middle of a painful polish stage where we seem to be constantly identifying rough corners and trying to smooth them out. I honestly still have no ETA for game launch, because we've been having scheduling difficulties for a while. Hopefully the game launch won't slip up to next year! Otherwise, still looking good

- Antti

[Zorg]

The fireworks particles feel out of place and some pixels sizes are too small and should be adjusted to the 'main' pixel size imho, but everything else looks great, especially in action.

[antionio]

Log Entry 7

Hi everyone, here comes the now-almost-monthly log entry. The last month was really productive!

- Added Game Center support with achievements and leaderboards. There will be time-based leaderboards for each level for all you speed runners out there
- Finished origin story comic.
- Added hats. Because why not? Hats can be bought with in-game currency.
- Composed final pieces of in-game music. Only small fanfares are left.
- Fixed a lot of nasty bugs.

Check out the hats! HATS. The prices are not decided yet, we're just having fun with them.