Minor Setback

The hard drive I use to develop Outside the Box decided to crap out today, corrupting a bunch of scenes, scripts and assets. I only lost about a weeks worth of progress, it's a good thing I keep regular back ups. This wasn't the first time either, I've had previous problems loading metadata and the hard drive likes to disconnect frequently. Probably should have saw that as a sign it needs replacing.

Managed to recreate most of the progress I made today within a 6 hour long development session. Another benefit of working at Toast Space in an office like environment is that it really helps prevent distractions getting in the way.

All that's left now is to try and remember any bugs that I squashed during the past week that need fixing and to make more frequent backups.
Also need to buy a new hard drive...

Outside The Box - Development 4

It's now the beginning of July and Outside the Box is still under development. Many new features have been added, some removed, but I can clearly state the game is complete... mostly.

So in these past few months I've managed to finally finish off the last few 3d mazes. I've lowered my target from 100 mazes to just over 50 for the initial release. This way I can get the game into the hands of players earlier and continue adding more mazes in monthly updates instead for as long as the game keeps an active player-base.

Unfortunately the high score maze runner has been scraped to reduce development time. I feel it wasn't worth the time developing another game mode when there were two already. Instead I've added some of the features from the maze runner into the random maze, which includes upgrades and and an enemy to avoid.

There are now three upgrades the player can spend coins on in the random maze:
- Trail time, increases your trail so you can back track if you get lost.
- Power up, increases the time you stay in a powered up state to kill the enemy cubes.
- Field of View, increases your field of view to see more of the maze.

The Last thing I want to show is the Tower maze, the final level in the game. The maze took about two weeks to make, which includes building the maze and programming the camera. The biggest issue was the fact the player needs to move along the small ridge separating the maze floors to move up the next story. This caused a lot of camera flipping issues that took a while to tweak. All in all I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The average time for solving the maze is around 7 minutes.     

       Upgrades                                                   The Tower Maze

That pretty much sums up all the work from these past few months excluding some bug fixes and additional polish. All that's left is to get the IAP store up and running, find some royalty free music or get premission from artists on Soundcloud and finish the credits screen that's shown after you solve the Tower Maze. 

Here's hoping next update is about the games release!