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[Florent]

In Lico, your are challenged to link all the squares of color in the level so that they are all linked together in a (possibly ramified) chain.

But a color can only be linked to itself or the two closest colors, knowing that all squares are a tint of red, yellow, green, cyan, blue or magenta.
The actual tint is different every times.

The capacity to link each squares to their neighbours on the grid is impeded more by the fact that some of them can't make as many links as you would like.

The game currently possess a couple of tutorials and a customizable random level generator with shareable seeds.

I aim to create a calm and relaxing experience with nice visuals and music more than a challenging environment with scores and effects all over the place.

The game is resolution and aspect ratio independent so it can be played in a wide variety or screen sizes.
It is mostly targeted for the web but it can also be played on mobile devices (via a browser). Desktop versions for Win/Mac/Linux can also easily be supplied.
The game is made with CraftStudio, btw.

Note: old UI.

I hope I will be able to release a first playable version during January, but I still have plenty of things to take care of first.

Here is two vines of gameplay : 1 and 2 (older "art")


In the meantime, thanks for reading and tell me what you think !  

[sidbarnhoorn]

Very cool! :-D

[Florent]

Update #1

Here is what I worked on last week:

The icons

I used icon from Font Awesome but I replaced them with handmade, pixelated ones.
They are really simple yet looks way better IMO (see screenshots below) (new and old screenshots in the first post).

The tooltips

I researched new styles for the icon tooltips but did found any that was more convenient or lloked reeally better than the current ones.

Levels and options menus

I spent time to improve their look too. You can see below the options menu.



As you can see, there is a "color-blind" mode.
When activated, it darken the node's color and adds numbers on top of them.
As the colors, the numbers change every times but always stay in the same range for each colors (ie: 1-16 is red, 17-32 is yellow...).

I actually added the sounds last week. I am not sure how I feel about the musics yet, but the sound gives nice feedbacks when you select a node, create a link or win a level.

Splash screen

I completed the first scene your arrive to when the game loads.



At the center of it, there is two fake nodes and an animation that shows you that you are supposed to "link them together" (like in the game) by hovering one, then the other with your mouse in order to move to the main menu.

You can see the animation, the transition between scenes and a glimpse the level menu in this vine: https://vine.co/v/ODh9LnBqVqE

I hope this will act as a sort of tutorial and that people will understand that this is what you have to do in a regular level.

Two new screenshots :

What I will work on this week:

UI

As you can see in the option menu, you have a "UI Size" parameter.
This change the orthographic scale of the UI camera, basically making everyting in front of it bigger.
This is coupled with some "Hud components" that reposition some elements at the top and bottom -left corner of the screen.

This is useful because the UI shouldn't have the same size (relative to the size of the screen) if you play the game on your desktop monitor or your smartphone.

Next week I will add another system that will prevent things to get outside of the screen, whatever the UI size or resolution is.
I also need to make sure that the level grid is rebuild properly taking these factors into account.

Because it's not enough, I need to work on how a level is looked at.
For now the scale of the camera that look at the nodes is changed so that the whole level just fits in the screen.
This is a problem for big level (the generator supports up to 9x9 grids) as the nodes appears already small on big screens.


So I think I have enough to do for this week !
But once this is done I only have a couple more things to improve before releasing an alpha.

On another note, I will start streaming gamedev (for this game) on my Hitbox channel.
They will probably happen on the evening, in Europe (UTC) time. If I am not mistaken, that's late/early morning EST/PST time.


Thanks for reading and see you next week ! :D

[Zorg]

Interesting! Closest colors means i can link red to red, yellow or magenta?
0 1 2 3 4 5
R Y G C B M

Are you planning to allow curves/corners in the link paths, like this?

Start / Fail / Victory (2 swipes)

Edit:

Victory (1 swipe)

[Florent]

Yes. No.

You can only create straight links between two nodes, but their length is not limited, as long as the nodes are on the same column/row and there is nothing in between (another node or link).
So you will encounter situations were you won't be able to link two nodes because you already made a link in the way (in the same spirit as your fail case).

The gameplay in Lico is just different than what you described but it's still very interesting.
I am concerned than my gameplay is to limited and won't be able to produce very interesting levels, so I am keeping variations in mind...

[Florent]

Update #2

Well, last week I almost did nothing mostly because I had the occasion to work (for money, not in gamedev).
So yeah, that takes time, but is also kind of necessary !

What I did was important, though, since I rendered the game completely free of resolution and aspect ratio.
I implemented a simple system that scale down some elements so that they always fit inside the screen whatever your resolution, aspect ratio or UI size is.

A completed random level.

The other reason I didn't do much is because I trained with a new engine that's so WIP that it hasn't a website yet.
This engine, named Superpowers, is the spiritual successor of Crafstudio (the one I use for Lico) and is made by the same folks (Sparklin Labs).

As last year where we made Karkass with CraftStudio, we will team up again for this year's Global Game Jam in Strasbourg and hopefully gets a cool game out of it.
Despite being not even out of the womb yet, the team behind it managed to create the great Hunt the Yeti for the Ludum Dare 31 Jam.

Training further with it is mostly what I will do this week too, so don't expect a new devblog update before the very end of January.
The planned alpha is also pushed back in February, obviously.


Thanks for reading, and good luck for your projects and the GGJ if you are in !