Wait, acorns and trees...
Are you Peter Molyneux?
Ha! As tempting as it is, I'm not coding trees to grow from these acorns in realtime. Sorry
You might say, though, that not unlike trees, Spoïks is progressing slowly but steadily. That is, overlooking the fact that progress for the past two months (yikes!) hasn't actually been steady at all. Ha ha ha.
But wait!!!!!I've been prototyping, then investing more time in a tiny spin-off of Spoïks. Amusingly enough, that spin-off is set to be released before the main game.
SPOÏKS MADNESS : WHAT THE WHAT?Basically it's the answer to "What if Spoïks happened on only one quadrant, but tiles were randomized every couple seconds?"
A new set of tiles ('floor') happens every 1.5 second. Pressing anywhere on the screen makes the character move to a random tile. The game ends after 60 floors.
Leveling works just as in Spoïks. Explode enough monsters without dying = your HP is maxed out. It also increments a score multiplier, up to x4. Spoïks ('diamonds') are worth (1 or 5 or 25 according to size) x LEVEL x MULTIPLIER.
When you die, you lose all your stuff - keys, crit, multiplier - and can't move until you recover at least one HP.
Regardless of whether you're dead or not, you recover 1HP for every floor where you don't move.
To avoid situations where you could just click your way mindlessy through monsters, I added these to be wary of:
- Anti-crit traps : You lose your CRIT completely
- Anti-multiplier traps
- Empty locked tiles
WHY THIS GAME?An amazing friend had been requesting a "madness" (time-based) mode for Spoïks. I eventually though of something worth trying and ended up making a very basic prototype for her birthday.
PIXI.JSThat project is also a pretext to code something like Spoïks based on Pixi.js directly rather than Phaser, to see if it would improve performance on mobile. It's hard to tell to which extent it does that, if it does, but I prefer Pixi's nomenclature and structure (in part because it's so similar to ActionScript). Since Pixi is a renderer and not a game framework, there are things I had/will have to code back in like support for animations(done) and audio(to do), but I like that the codebase is shrinked to what the game really needs - not much, in the absence of any kind of physics.
WHAT'S THE PROGRESS?I want Spoïks Madness to be done this month and released soon after that - on web, Android, Windows as a portable .exe and eventually iOS. It needs a decent tutorial and more visual feedback of what does what. I'll start with that, more or less, then upload a testable beta.
I see it as a way to 'test the water', familiarize myself with the process of releasing a mobile game. And I don't want it to drag, as so many other unfinished projects. Once I can mark it as "done", I'll plunge back into Spoïks, the game this devlog is actually about!
Done:
- Mobile integration with cocoon.js (at least it works perfectly in the dev app, iOS and Android)
- Title screen
- Gameplay works and it's fun!
- Acceptable graphics
- Local hi-score storage
To be done:
- Level 3 monsters
- Tutorial
- Visual feedback
- Protagonist's animation
- Leaderboard integration (Play store for Android at least)
- Music and sfx
- Logo/credits page
- Bug fixes
+ Release/promotion
Stay tuned, testable beta soon!
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