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posts tagged with: design

Dev Log: Upgrade Queued

Dev Log: Upgrade Queued
One of the main pieces of feedback I recieved about Sky Sisters was something like "it would be nice if the players had a proactive goal instead of just reactive goals." Meaning that instead of just dodging things all the time it would be cool if the players could work toward some goal.

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Right now the idea is to have some sort of outline of a shape in the arena. The players can use the orb to trace that shape. Whenever a lap is completed the shape will change into something more complicated. Right now I have this tied to getting upgrades, which I'm still a little unsure of. The first time you complete a lap you unlock an upgrade. The second upgrade requires two laps, and every upgrade after that requires three laps. I have yet to try this out with two players though. I kind of like the upgrades always coming every 3 or so events, but it also seems like the most worthwhile reward that this shape tracing thing can give you.

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This might have to go through a lot of refinement as right now even I find it tough to find time to complete laps around this thing during all the madness of the gameplay. Having a proactive goal though also introduces the problem of cheesing certain events so I have to come up with ways to address that as well. Basically I don't want the optimal strategy to be to leave events running as long as possible to get more upgrades. We'll see how this turns out through play testing, and this might have to be something I possibly address or change after the first release of the game.
sky sisters dev log design gamedev
Posted September 30th 2016 2:50 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Bullet Reflectors

Dev Log: Bullet Reflectors
One of the quick ideas I dropped into Super Sky Sisters after PAX was two big ole glass looking reflector orbs in the arena.

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I'm still trying to solve the issue of one player being "left out" of certain events in the game. Boss fights are the worst offenders of this still, but I think this is going to help fix that issue a little bit. Again my ideal scenario is that players make the conscious effort to switch out who is attacking, but usually that ends up not happening. With these reflector things on the edge of the arena the players can then try to line up with the boss in a way that lets both players attack at the same time. I'm excited to see if this actually makes any difference in my next play test.
sky sisters design
Posted September 26th 2016 10:32 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Progression Progress

Dev Log: Progression Progress
One of the big ideas I had from PAX was changing out the unlockable system in Super Sky Sisters to something a little bit more straight forward. Before PAX the system would unlock things like special abilities and game modes based on achieving certain goals. Like beating the second boss would unlock something, or passing 100 game events would unlock another thing. Although I thought this idea was cool, I decided to scrap it to go for something way more obvious.

I want the points in Sky Sisters to feel like they're contributing to some sort of larger goal, so the new progression system uses the player's total score to unlock new stuff. I even made this fancy new menu screen that shows how far the players are getting.

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I'm still trying to figure out how many points will be needed to get every level. For me right now it seems pretty well balanced but that usually means it's going to be way too difficult for the average player. I don't want unlocking things to take 50 hours of gameplay, but I do want the player to strive to improve their average score per session to unlock stuff faster.

For a long time I had no unlockables in Sky Sisters -- everything was available from the start, but over the past year I got a lot of feedback that suggested I should have some sort of unlocking system for two main reasons: One is that limiting the options of new players can be good for guiding them into the game, and the other is that players do really want that feeling of accomplishment of unlocking stuff even if it does feel like arbitrarily gating content. I am worried about the leaderboards feeling unfair to new players since they wont have all the options of long time players, but hopefully it wont take too long to unlock the same options.
sky sisters dev log design
Posted September 23rd 2016 1:03 PM (General)
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Exploring Explosions Talk

Exploring Explosions Talk
Last night I spent an hour or so talking about explosions! It was an internet talk that I gave from the comfort of my room to the fine folks at Warp Zone in Louisville Kentucky.



All the materials from the talk can be found here if you want to follow along with the animations and video footage.

It was a lot of fun to put together the talk, and get to share my excitement over particle effects to other game developers!
gamedev art programming design
Posted February 19th 2016 1:13 PM (General)
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Side Trip to Web Design Land

Side Trip to Web Design Land
Things have been pretty quiet around here for a couple of days! I'm still working on video games, but recently I decided to take up some (hopefully) quick web design work! Although I can't share the details of what I'm working on, I can share some resources that came in handy for prepping me for the new world of web design.

My work flow for sites is terribly outdated in the modern world where 55% of web traffic apparently comes from mobile devices. Then on top of that, some desktops are now reaching resolutions of 2000+ horizontal pixels with retina displays and just plain ole huge monitors. The web is always changing, and it has changed a lot since I've really buckled down for a design project.

Responsive design is all the rage now, and my old work flow of mocking up an entire website in Photoshop, slicing it up into separate images, and reassembling it so it's pixel perfect just no longer applies to how modern sites are built. Now sites are built using responsive designs. The layout is determined by the resolution and the device that the site is being viewed on. So here are some helpful links that got me up to speed with all this newfangled HTML and CSS and Javascript and what have you:

Web Field Manual
This is a link to a collection of more links! A lot of the stuff here was pretty useful for getting set up with a new work flow, and to catch up on recent trends in web design. Separated by category, I think I looked through almost every link they offered.

Flat Icon
About a billion of free to use icons (as long as you attribute the source) for any sort of design needs.

Responsive Workflow
A good article discussing the changes in the web development work flow from back in the old days of PSD mock ups to the new way of prototyping directly in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

HTML5 Templates
Useful for taking a look at various styles that are designed with responsiveness in mind. See how various templates respond to various mobile device resolutions.

Responsive Grid System
A pretty nifty responsive grid framework to use when developing a responsive site.

Unsemantic
Another nifty grid system for responsive design. I used this for the Otter website.

Font Squirrel
This is blowing my mind but apparently fonts can just be straight up embedded now in modern browsers. No more need for crazy flash javascript canvas hacks to render text of any font.

Unsplash
A collection of high resolution totally free to use stock photos, and it's updated frequently.

Web Creme
Pretty straight forward inspiration gallery of recent cool and/or hip websites. Some of these are a little bit too trendy but there's a lot of good stuff here to check out.
webdev design
Posted June 20th 2014 12:43 AM (General)
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Gravity Ghost Website!

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Gravity Ghost is now up for pre-orders! A lovely game by one of my house mates Erin Robinson. She needed a fancy pre-order page so I returned to the war zone of HTML and CSS to make some magic happen.

The big screenshot of the site is a little wacky because of some of the parallax scrolling and background positions that I used. Certain elements stay in place when scrolling, and some scroll with some parallax, it's very fancy. I also made use of a lot of the artwork directly from the game for a majority of the elements on the site. I think it turned out pretty well! Check out Gravity Ghost!
webdev yay! igh design
Posted August 26th 2013 11:57 AM (General)
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