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[cousin_it]

Yet another update to the game over screen, toning it down even more.

[cousin_it]

Yesterday morning I looked at the palettes again and decided that they all suck. So I wrote another quick tool to help me pick colors manually:



Just updated the game with many resulting palette changes, more still to come. Also I've removed the glow effect completely, because it was making my eyes hurt.

[cousin_it]

I've put up an imgur album of all the current palettes. With that and the recent UI changes, I will probably finish the project soon.

[cousin_it]

I just reached 01:49 in an unusually good run. As far as I know, that's furthest anyone ever got in the game. Maybe someday someone will prove me wrong!

[cousin_it]

My first stab at creating a mobile version of Zig Zag: APK for ARM, APK for x86. It's obviously not final, especially the splash screen doesn't fit the mobile UI. But it feels good to have sorted out Cordova and Crosswalk, touch event handling, portrait/landscape changes, etc.

[Ontaelio]

Previuos color themes were way better. New ones seem rather identical, less creative; but more importantly, it is harder to see the path in them.
(that said, the game rocks)

[cousin_it]

Thank you!

Colors are the trickiest thing about this game by far. This morning I discovered that picking colors on my laptop is a bad idea, because the display has a blue tint and also the viewing angle response is crazy. I tried some other desktop machines and mobile devices, the color responses are a bit different, but my laptop is by far the worst. So I manually tweaked all palettes to look good on my desktop PC (whose color response is a bit closer to average), and just uploaded another update that changes all the colors. Maybe tomorrow I'll be unhappy with that as well, and change the colors again. Then, once I'm happy with them, I'll need to make and upload another full set of screenshots/icons/etc. It's an unbelievable amount of hassle.

[cousin_it]

Colors colors colors...

I just uploaded another color update. And I'm still not too happy with it.

[cousin_it]

I've decided that the colors are officially done, here's an album.

As a programmer, learning to pick colors was very eye-opening. Now I know just how much work goes into games with good colors, like Snakebird (which is the gold standard for me). And I have a rough idea of the workflow for my next game if it ever happens: do everything in grayscale silhouette, then pick rough colors on my laptop, then refine them on many different displays.

The next task on Zig Zag is polishing the mobile version. I can't seem to come up with a good menu, feeling a little stuck now.

[cousin_it]

I've added raindrops!



How did I live without them?

[cousin_it]

I just got two minutes for the first time!



It's incredible, it seems like my game actually has more of a teaching effect than Super Hexagon. I remember how my record was 42 seconds and that felt crazy high.

[cousin_it]

Today I experimented with playing a random note whenever the player presses a key. Wth timbre.js or soundfont-player that takes only a couple lines of code. The notes were taken from the G# pentatonic scale, the same key as the song, so it sounded pretty good. When playing at low speeds, it added a nice feeling of timing, like playing a cool solo over the song. But at high speeds it felt so distracting that the game became almost unplayable, at least to someone with ears like mine. I've scrapped the idea for now. That's a shame, it sounded really cool.

[cousin_it]

Tuning the raindrops to look nicer:



Also showing off the speed at which I usually play :-)

[cousin_it]

Made the raindrops even more subdued, maybe this is the version I'll keep.

[cousin_it]

Tonight I spent several hours on audio:

1) Convert everything to aac wrapped in mp4.

2) Embed the smaller sounds in JS as base64-encoded mp4.

3) Use Web Audio API if it's available, to reduce playback lag, otherwise fall back to <audio>.

4) Check browser compatibility of various mime types for audio.

5) Play with adding various keypress sounds, find out that they upset the balance of attention in the game, scrap the whole idea.

The user-visible effect is zero, but I'm happier with the state of the game, and I've learned a few things.

[cousin_it]

New title screen:



Also I've uploaded a new mobile version: APK for ARM, APK for x86.

[prismsheep]

Hi is there a way to implement a mute button?

Great game btw

[cousin_it]

Hi! Thanks for the kind words. I think adding a mute button would be more trouble than it's worth. Sorry :-/

[cousin_it]

This game is now released on Google Play for free:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladimirslepnev.zigzag

The web version will also stay online for the foreseeable future:

https://vladimirslepnev.itch.io/zigzag

I'm bumping the game completion to 100%, finishing this project and moving on to the next one. Many thanks to all those who gave feedback, both here and elsewhere!

[cousin_it]

The postmortem is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/50s9n3/postmortem_for_my_game/