Our game has a good solid base: inviting scenery, difficult and engaging puzzles, a great atmosphere and a polished GUI. But it still needed that emotional trigger, an element players can relate to and easily recognize. To this end, we crafted a storyline and created two main characters for Kings Can Fly. Despite the name [...]
We discussed how setting and maintaining a difficulty curve helps with keeping people interested in your game. However, the player can only experience it correctly if your levels provide the challenge intended by the designer. Our test data provides us with information about how many fans users place in each level. When compared to the [...]
Our level design was a bit of a trial and error process. At first, our leveldesigner drafted a progress in which the various game elements were to be introduced and used. Then, we all spend several weeks producing a whole range of ‘raw’ levels, that did or did not follow the guidelines. The leveldesigner then [...]
We made some sketches for blockades but spikes seemed like the best choice since most player refer to this as ‘danger!’. The harder part was designing the trigger/switch which lets the player pass the spikes. We’ve been experimenting with a lot of ideas… After a lot of ideas we realized that the we needed a [...]
Even without any professional knowledge of interfaces or interaction design… an interface has to be made. In the game itself the most important things are buttons that resemble the fans and the time control panel. The GUI has to look like its part of the game, not just some buttons that were ‘just’ placed there. [...]
Our first mountain tileset was actually pretty good. It looked cute and did convey the message: “I’m a mountain, don’t bump into me.” It had it’s problems however. First off, it did not tile correctly in every situation. And placing several straight tiles in a row to create a wall resulted in a hideous repetition. [...]
Sadly for us, the iPad 1 is very weak at rendering alpha (semi-transparent surfaces). So using clouds is a bit of a problem, seeing how they’re a significant part of the game’s look and feel. Performance-wise we can get a single alpha-rendered plane covering the entire map, and then only when the mesh below is [...]
We’ve added a new feature, where players can now also place fans on the ground, instead of just on the mountains. We’ve given the new fan more body and made them look cuter. The current model has 292 triangles. The original designs for this fan:
As our development progresses we’re closer and closer to a version that supports puzzles and can be played as a game (although it’ll be a work-in-progress). So we’ve had to think about how we’re making those puzzles and how to feed them into our game. Now we already stumbled upon the Tiled Map Editor, which [...]
After some minor issues with licenses and software we finally have our work in progress running on the iPad! This was amazing to see and test after waiting for so long, since it’s hard to guess what will have a big impact on performance and what our game’s performance would be at this point. After [...]
