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[slarti88]

Hello there!

Didn't expect to see me this soon? Neither did I! Its a new post in just a week :D

Today I wanted to introduce and discuss a feature we'd implemented a while back. We call it barriers. If you've read the thread, then you hopefully know that the game is about using different kinds of weapons against hordes of enemies that come at you. Hitting the enemies adds to your ammo so the more you kill the stronger you get! Obviously we were looking to constrain the number of enemies you can hit in one shot in many ways. The result of this was our new feature 'Barriers'

Basically these are areas that don't allow a certain kind of weapon to pass through, this forces the player to think and use his/her weapons smartly We've made a few neat levels with this feature and in conjunction with other features we're hoping to make some great levels

The narrative in the game is now the biggest unknown for us. We're thinking of taking the middle route, i.e animations + text to convey the story. The story itself has become  much simpler, a story about actual particles of light instead of an abstract world inside the mind of a scientist, which was our idea earlier. We're hoping this is clearer and easier for people to relate to the actual game.

The animations are also used to give meanings to the various in-game features. Here's an example of a part of the animation that shows the story when reflective walls are first introduced.

Our concern is that just animations may not be enough to convey the story itself and we need to sprinkle text in somewhere to give more context. We're also concerned that if just animations/visuals or even text will generate curiosity and interest in a player and hopefully give him/her more motivation to play on.

These questions mixed with self-doubt is my life right now :/

[slarti88]

Another week another update to our devlog! I'm crushing it these days :D

So this past week has been crazy. We're closing in on a launch date for the game. We're also getting into gear for designing levels for the game. And finally we've almost finalized on the narrative and working towards building the in-game cinematics and the text that'll go along with it.

Today I'd like to show a new kind of weapon we've been building. But I think it might be good to do a quick recap about weapons in general

In our game the main character is made up of small particles of light. These act as your health and as ammo for your weapons. You can equip one weapon at any given time by passing through a weapon region, We've had 3 weapons up until now.  
1. The ray - This is a straight shooting weapon with a fixed range. Requires 4 particles
2. The fan - This is more of a shotgun style weapon which has a high spread but a short range compared to the ray. Requires 8 particles
3. The bomb - A projectile weapon that'll destroy anything inside a fixed radius from where it lands. Requires 10 particles

Apart from this we've built two more weapons. The one I'm talking about today is called
4. The chain - This is a different kind of weapon, it is shot in the same style as the ray, but it stays on the ground for a few seconds. Any  enemy comes on top of it will get destroyed the instant it hits the chain. Here's a nifty gif that'll make this clear

The chain is different from the others in that its not simply about aiming and shooting. Because the real power of the weapon comes out when you draw the enemy towards the chain after shooting it. This makes the game a little different and a lot more interesting. We're stoked about the kind of levels we can create with this :D

Also I completely forgot to say. We've sent out test-flight updates to those who'd signed up. We dropped the ball miserably when it came to this and so the update comes almost 2 months after we got everyone to sign up   If you're one of the people who expected a build and didn't get any, I offer my sincere apologies. We're also still open to more testers, do fill out the form below if you want to test the game and help us make it awesome

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1U3IgXNyFfeVLsJeU6ZC6xWh_d0Y-uRGVGSOKZorACtc/viewform

[slarti88]

Hello  again!

I'm back with an update! Boom! :D

We're pretty much done with all the features in the game at this point and are busy designing levels which is something I really want to discuss. My level design skills are rough at best, and I have no formal training in this stuff. But before I share some of that with you, I need to cover a very important aspect of the game. Namely the enemies.

The enemies in The Light Inside Us are evil forms of light. They keep coming close to you and trying to erode all your particles. For the first few levels you're exposed to the simplest kind of enemies, which are easily killed and don't cause much damage unless they are really large in numbers. But as you progress the enemies get stronger more varied and dangerous, apart from the initial enemy type, there are four different types of enemies in the game. We currently call them

1. Fat
2. Smart
3. Long range
4. Evolved

In case you're wondering, yes the names are work in progress 

Today I'll show you the smart enemy. TBH they might be the toughest enemy in the game. As the name suggest these enemies are 'smart' meaning, they can dodge your weapons if you simply fire straight at them.

The only way to defeat them is by constraining their movements using terrain elements and or using other features in the game to kill them quickly. Like reflective walls for example

Hopefully the next update will shed some insight on our level design process, which has been quite the learning experience for me. Till then, let me know what you think of our progress so far and if you have any suggestions feedback etc!

[slarti88]

Hi there,

No update for almost a month! Looks like I fell off the wagon again (is it off the wagon? Or on the wagon? I can never be sure)

Anyway a ton of stuff has happened in the past few weeks. Mostly good stuff. We sat down and polished many different aspects of the game and now I think its almost complete! :D Actually for a while we thought it was "complete" until a few things emerged which I want to discuss. (I wanted to do a level design post as well, but I'm thinking I'll do that the next time around).

Firstly we showcased our game at NASSCOM Game Developers Conference in India on the 6th of November. This is India's only major conference for game developers and it was pretty awesome seeing other devs and their work and getting a ton of good feedback on the game. The conference also has its own award ceremony and we ended up winning the 'Upcoming game of the year' award.. so yay! :D

We'd initially planned on releasing in late-November but we've been overwhelmingly adviced against it, so we're going for a January release. This change in dates allowed us to test our game with people a little more and handle any gotchas before release. We'd already sent out testflight builds to the people who'd signed up and we've been getting an idea about how people are playing the game. This brings us to our first and biggest gotcha..

People get really into the game and they play it for a while, but after the first few levels.. which they take some time clearing. They stop. This is understandable because you don't want to be stuck playing forever. But the problem is they're not coming back after a while.
Let me clarify that we know a lot of this using in-game analytics which doesn't collect any user data per-se but just tracks their interaction with the game... since there are very few people playing the game at any given point (usually 1 or 2) its easy for us to figure out what happens for a particular user session.

Our second gotcha was that it took people a while to clear the first levels. A lot longer than we expected.

We could be completely off in or assessment because,
A - The data set is ridiculously small to derive any solid conclusions
B - A lot of the people are friends/well-wishers who might play the game to try it out but might not feel like investing time to complete the game.. unlike say a paid customer?

Given all this we'd still like to see our testers play more than 10% of the game, as there a ton of features, strategies and great gameplay that comes later on in the game, and we also have no clue if the levels with these features are good enough to engage players

To tackle the difficulty problem we're smoothening our initial levels further to make the first 20 or so levels (there are 57 levels in the game) easy and completable in one sitting. THe concept of weapons and health being interlinked is also not going through very clearly, and that is essential for players to get past the levels, so we're experimenting with a few more cues to make that link obvious.

For the first gotcha we're still not sure how to get people to come back to the game. In one play-through it is obvious that this isn't a casual game and so when people look for a more casual release they probably won't pick this game up again (another assumption.. I know) . There is a narrative element in the game, but it acts as a sort of background and the focus is primarily on gameplay and the mechanic. We're thinking of changing our level select screen to resemble a map of sorts so people feel like their progressing towards a goal.

Currently the level-select screen is a series of sections showing thumbnail views of the levels in each section like so. There are 15 sections overall. As you can see its pretty basic.We're also planning on bringing the player out to the map after finishing all the levels in a section so he/she can see their progress towards the end-goal.

We're not sure that the engagement and thought the game requires will suit the mobile audience, maybe a Steam port might be our best bet? But there are longer,more strategic and mind wracking games on mobile which have done decently, so here's hoping there are people out there who'll enjoy this game 

Phew that was a long, rambling post. If you've read this far, you Sir/Madam are awesome 

But there it is, these are the struggles we're having, apart from trying to get freelance side-projects and earn money. I'll have a quicker update soon with progress on our attempts at resolving these gotchas and the promised post on our level design process Do let us know if you have any thoughts, suggestions, questions or words of encouragement (especially if you have words of encouragement!)

[slarti88]

More than a month since the last update! I should probably just stop promising quicker updates to this thread

But anyway... here we are. We've fixed our release for mid-January and at this point are starting with some PR work and trying to get the folks at apple and other blogs, youtubers etc to try the game.

We've never done this before so we're experimenting with what kind of mails to send, when to send them and to whom.

Mostly we're trying to keep it short. Describing the gameplay, link to our press kit, trailer and send a promo code for the reviewer to try the game even though its not released yet. We started adding small screenshots in the mail to try and give people a glimpse of what the game is like even before they actually click on anything. We're worried about reaching out a little early and a little too close to holiday season but better early than late in my opinion.

We did get covered by the good folks at indiegamemag but haven't had too much success with other publications yet. We're hoping they try out the game sometime soon and write about it at the time of release.

One of the key things for a paid iOS game is an app-store feature, for this we decided to try and contact the promotions team at apple directly. We're hoping they'll evaluate the game and find it worthy of featuring. We're also toying with the idea of adding maybe a couple of iOS 9 features, like ReplayKit as this can increase the chance of them showcasing the game in their 'Replay' sections on the app-store. It is a bit of a gamble to add that this close to release, we're not completely sure yet.

Regarding the problems we were facing earlier, we did see a few people have longer play-throughs on the game, and we also found quite a few people completely finishing the android demo we'd released a few months ago. This gives us a little encouragement that there is an audience out there for the game.

We've also decided to scrap the cut-scenes from the game entirely, seeing that it was taking away from the experience a lot more than adding to it. Our game is centered around the gameplay mechanic, the cut-scenes were sort of breaking that experience, and were doing more harm than good. The first cut-scene establishes the premise and the last one provides a decent amount of closure, so by way of story, those are the only two things the game contains now.

We've added a 'map' that shows up every few levels, and gives not only a sense of progress but also a glimpse of the features yet to come.

Hopefully that should give people the extra motivation to move forward!

A level-design post is in the works and should be out soon hopefully! There I go promising things again 

[slarti88]

Hello everyone!

The Light Inside Us is OUT! Yes we finally managed to release the game on the appstore.

https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1013478481

We're incredibly relieved and also excited to share the news with you! Thank you for bearing with us on this journey, which was at times a very silent one, due to the infrequency of our posts.
However it was a great experience sharing everything on this forum and also the feedback and encouragement we received from time to time was invaluable,

We hope you give the game a shot, and if you have any more suggestions for improvements we're all ears!

Finally I'd like to end this with the post on level design I promised. Now neither me nor my co-founder are trained game designers per se, we're just learning things as we go along, so our level design process wasn't very systematic or even the same for different levels! However this is a general idea for how I approached making most levels for this game.

We decided on levels based on the features we wanted to put in it. These features included

• The kind of enemies
• The type of weapons available
• The terrain elements the level should contain

Sometimes the weapon would take precedence over the others, while at other times  it was vitally important that a certain terrain element must be present in the level. Apart from the feature we also try to highlight a quality of the feature or a trick/technique to use a feature in the player's strategy as part of the level design.

Of course we begin with some impossible to decipher scribblings in a diary

Then we proceed to create the level in an editor, based on the level we have the ability to change other features in it to better enforce the goal of the level. This includes what other terrain elements can be added, how can we change the enemies , the count of enemies, the frequency with which they spawn etc. This starts enforcing certain constraints on what you can do and brings the goal out a little better. However its entirely possible to play and defeat the level without even bothering with its stated goal, its just somewhat harder to do so.

I thought I'd illustrate all of this best with an example of a level in the game.

This is a level that was designed with one goal in mind. Show that portals can be used for multiplying attacks and can be done so efficiently! So what we needed was a level which would be reasonably easy to defeat if you use that feature... and reasonably hard (not impossible though) if you do not!

So we started obviously with a ton of portals. The three at the bottom right are connected to each other. Shoot within one will bring it out of the other two. We made it so that user spawns near the center and the enemy comes from both sides. Giving the user a slight incentive to use the portals this way. But this isn't very obvious. Because by the very nature of how a person has been playing till now, they'll mostly likely aim at the enemies directly.

This is why the edges of the tiles on both sides of the player are lined with barriers. Barriers stop a certain kind of weapon from going through so now its impossible to shoot the enemy from the sides. We also added barriers between every tile on both 'arms'. This was because it would make it hard to just go to the front of the tiles and shoot everyone.

However the defaul enemy, whom we call 'The Corrupted', is fast and also not too powerful. You can safely shoot clusters of them while standing very close. Hence the obvious choice for this level was the 'The Sinister' or what we call the fat enemy, who is slow, but extremely dangerous to get close to. So you must shoot them from a distance and the portals now become extremely useful.

The weapon of choice for the level was also an easy one. The pink weapon (or The Ray) is a lot less expensive. Taking repeat shots makes it a lot safer, while The Fan (which is a spreadshot) is more expensive, can kill more in one hit and also perfect for ensuring you get the perfect shot. Multiplying the fan weapon also makes the shot that much more powerful. And so The Fan had to be the choice of the level.

Finally just to enforce the portal multiplication we added another 'leg' to the level and four portals facing the leg from the same direction, Again we added barriers so it would be tough to kill the enemies coming from there head on, but shooting at the portals makes them much easier targets.

Hope that made sense! If not leave a comment and I can clarify further. You can also leave a comment if you wish to congratulate us on the release! 

Thanks again for reading these posts!