Outside the Box - Release!

It's finally finished!
'Outside the Box' is now a published mobile game. It's been quite the journey.

You can find it available for Android over at the Google Play store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Hungryum.OutsidetheBox&hl=en

Apple App store coming soon... (Technical issues)

So after an entire year of development, starting as a small tafe project and working it's way up to a completed, fully polished game; I can truly say that it is finished. I have to say it's been a great learning experience to develop a game from a simple prototype, all the way to a polished, fully functioning game. Before I started the project I had no idea the amount of work needed to actually complete a game. All past experiences have been either just prototyping an idea or getting bored and abandoning the project to move on to something else; never seeing it to the end. I'm glad I stuck by it, even though part way I worked on a side project, another Tron game... (Which was just a small break to revitalise my motivation).

Unfortunately It hasn't all been smooth sailing from launch; what with Apple reporting a crash after they tested the game, preventing me from publishing to the App store. Hopefully I can resolve this issue soon, but here at Space Toast we are short on Apple devices to test on.

So what's next; well, me and the guys at Space Toast plan to work collectively on a new project, hopefully tripling our output. It's still in early development but we hope to announce the game soon. Look forward to it!

We also plan to showcase our games over at the Perth Games Festival next month and hopefully meet some local indie devs while we're there. Come see us if you get the chance to try out Outside the Box on October 1st at the  Perth Town Hall, cnr of Barrack St & Hay St, Perth.

In other news, the guys I work with at Space Toast have also recently published their mobile game 'Break Time!'. An Office simulator where the aim is to break as many things a possible.
Give it a shot if you have some spare time!

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spacetoastgames.breaktime&hl=en

App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/break-time!/id1133138365



So that pretty much sums it up. If I can share any experience from working on Outside the Box, it would be to always overestimate how long a task will take. The easy part is getting the basic premise running, it's the polish and content filling that are the most time consuming. I'll be sure to have a better plan for my next project.

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!

Outside The Box Development 3

Alright, so it's been a while since I've mentioned any progress with Outside the Box so I thought I would share a bit of what's new.

First up is the newly implemented Unlock System for cube skins, backgrounds and player skins. The game starts with all skins being locked, unable to purchase until the player begins the game. As you complete 3d mazes you're presented with the chance of unlocking any skin or additional coins through rolling a dice. After the dice lands and a side is chosen, say background, a row of backgrounds appear and start rolling sideways. Eventually the backgrounds stop and whatever is in the middle when it finishes will be unlocked. Now that a background is unlocked the player can find it in the store and purchase it using the in game coins.

I chose this system of unlocking then purchasing because if everything was unlocked from the start the player could just purchase their favorite background/skin/ball first, making the rest obsolete and the currency worthless. I think players will find it exciting unlocking different skins using this system.

GamePlay Footage and Unlock System

Next I've added the Save function, as you probably can tell, saves the game. A lot of planning went in to getting the save function working correctly. The game saves a multitude of data from which levels are completed, the levels time, your current currency, all the unlocked skins and all the purchased skins. These arrays are loaded from the start of the game and are saved at the end of a level and when the player returns to the menu.

And Lastly I created a maze walking A.I that wonders aimlessly around the 2d maze. I haven't quite figured out a purpose for the guy but he makes the maze a little more interesting. I might have him as an enemy in the Maze Trial game mode I plan to work on next. The Trial will have the player solving increasingly difficult mazes as fast as possible before their life runs out. As you travel through the maze the ball will shrink and when it's gone the game ends and you're presented with your score. There will be health orbs scattered throughout the maze that increase your size to go a little further and possibly the enemy to slow you down.

Well that's about everything, not much else is new besides a few bug fixes here and there and some graphical improvements. I've now finished 30 3D mazes out of a planned total of 100. Just 70 more to go! maybe... I always say the game will be released in the next month but this time I really am aiming for release! Thanks for reading and hopefully you'll try my game when it eventually comes out. :)

Space Toast and Encom Release

Over the course of Feburary I've been busy setting up my equipment over at Toast Space, a work space in the city that me and a few mates from tafe are renting. We also plan to collaborate on a few projects under the name Space Toast, check out the Facebook page! Now that everything's set up I can set aside my time and get straight to work developing the rest of Outside the Box.

In other news the side project I've been working on, Encom, is finally bug free and available for download. I've added a lot more since the last build including bike explosions, more sound fx, death cams and an arcade survival mode. In the future I plan to add an obstacle course featuring Recognizers to really test the players.

Download link for Encom:
Itch.io
https://hungryum.itch.io/encom

Or if you prefer to play in browser try:
GameJolt
http://gamejolt.com/games/encom-tron/120894
or
Kongregate
http://www.kongregate.com/games/hungryum/encom-tron

Encom(Tron) - GameDevelopment

Lately I've had a lot of free time; with my studies finally out of the way I can finally work full time developing games, except I've still got a part time job. Most of my development time has gone towards polishing Outside the Box preparing it for release, but as a side project I've been recreating one of my earlier games I made during high school, Tron.

The original game was made using Game Maker, a 2D game creation software that barely supported 3D. This time I had a greater advantage using Unity; in the span of 2 days I programmed the bike's movement and trail and had a playable build by the end. I've uploaded a video time-lapse of the first few days. It probably took me about a month to develop up to the same point while using Game Maker.

Time Lapse

Around a week later the game is almost ready for release, it just has a few bugs to fix and a bit of polish to be done. I also plan to add a few single player levels for those that want a challenge. After the first two days I forgot to continue recording so I left it for a while until I had a nice build to show. Here's some game-play footage of the game closer to completion.

Game-play Footage

Games Festival and Polycon

So for the past couple of weeks I've been kept pretty busy and haven't had much of a chance to post. Here's a summary of what's been happening.

First up was the Perth Games Festival. This year I had the chance to showcase Kingdom and Outside the Box at this years Games Festival thanks to my lecturer Andy at Central. The festival was amazing, I got to see some great local indie games and was happy to see people enjoy playing mine.

After the festival was Polycon, an expo for both the games and animation students graduating from Central. Again I got the chance to show of Outside the Box and a show reel I created a few days before. It was great to see everyone's work and have a few drinks to celebrate an awesome year.

So now that I've graduated all that's left is to get Outside the Box ready for an early release next year. (Hopefully)

Here's my Show Reel for Polycon