My first devlog, please let me know where I'm going wrong
Cellephant was my entry to the 48hour solo competition of Ludum Dare 39, the theme was "Running out of power". The LD results have just been published, and Cellephant placed
22nd overall in the compo. I'd been getting some really nice feedback but I still wasn't expecting that.
"Cellephant is a game about a robot elephant, who has to collect batteries (aka cells) in order to power him to reach the exit. Your current battery charge is shown at the bottom, and that’s how many steps you need to take to reach the next battery (fail to reach a battery = die, reach a battery too soon also = you die, because your charging circuit can’t handle it or something…). It’s a path finding puzzle."
I made it for LD using
Pico-8, which is a "fantasy 8-bit console" with built-in dev tools for gfx/maps/sfx/music and lua scripting. Pico-8 is a lot of fun and perfect for making a small game quickly for a game jam or for prototyping. I'm going to continue working on the Pico-8 version of my game for now, while I improve the gameplay etc, and I like the built-in tracker so I'll probably keep working on the music with that and export it later if I need to. I'm thinking of rebuilding the game in Unity (or similar) later, for improved mobile support, more detailed graphics (representing a robot elephant in 8x8 pixels was never going to be ideal...) etc.
So far since the compo I've started working on a couple of things I got the most feedback about - fixed the delay after collecting a battery until you can move again (the higher the number on the battery, the longer the delay was), stopped it from quitting the game if you press both buttons by mistake, maybe something else. I also fixed a graphics bug nobody noticed and started thinking about improving the difficulty curve so it doesn't stay too easy for too long at the start.
To-do list for the moment:
- Tweak difficulty curve
- “Generating (please wait)” screen between levels
- Show a line for the path you've taken, instead of crosses
- Backgrounds behind the game grid
- Remix/expand music
- Instruction screens
- Touchscreen
- Remake in Unity
- Figure out new graphical style - thinking 16-bit era pixel art
- Animation, juice
- Start-level selection
- Other features
- Other game modes
- Online scores?
- Figure out what else should be on to-do list
- Woop or boop!
More stuff to come, I'd love to hear your feedback if you have any (you can play the LD version of the game from
here, and please follow if you're interested!
Updates:Follow me on twitter to keep updated!