Update 4/18/18 - Greetings and summary

Hello all, Juan Barba here!

Its the very first time I post a devlog for Matter at itch.io, I just want to say hello to this vibrant community, and also show the progress of this game for those gamers, game-devs and curious people that would like to follow me in this journey of game development I chose to take 3 years ago.

About artwork and aesthetics

So far this game had a lot of re-work and lots of iterations due to learning process, each time I found a better way of doing things, I mention this in case you wonder: there are screenshots and GIFs of this game with artwork, so why the latest demo doesn't have artwork at all? well... Changes from Unity 4.7 to 2017.2 made me change my art workflow, and some graphic assets just didn't work anymore, and I'm still figuring out the best way to implement lights without hitting game performance... besides, I have to work harder to make this game playable and funny with its bare game mechanics, rather than work on an environment that might be impressive and gorgeous to look, but not playable at all.

What has been done since the last time I published the demo?

Word of honour: from now on, I will post at least weekly, maybe Wednesdays at this time, even if I wasn't able to develop anything at that week.

So. my little demo was uploaded at February... its been a while actually :D in that time the first thing I started to work was on the feedback I received and issues I saw on the video @PattisonKathryn created to play Matter (if you see this, thank you once again for that video and the time you took to even understand my game!) After that, I had ahead some tons of bugs and missing features, which are required for the demo I want to achieve:

• Bullets from turrets not detecting impacts correctly
• Balls not being placed in sockets properly
• Powerups!
  • Explosive matter (that one is on the demo)
  • Bounce matter
  • Invulnerable matter
• Mechanics to guide player about what does he have to do (where to place balls, what would he achieve with that)
• Bugs on checkpoint system (user progress is not always there even if you already achieved, that's not good!)
• Improved mechanics for turrets, now if you touch them you get killed (those are at the very first level... if you dare to find them)
• Added tutorials so player doesn't get lost
• Sounds! This won't be a mute game anymore.
• Fixes for the 2nd level to make it easier, Miss Blue and a friend of mine had a real bad time trying to pass that level
• Jump mechanics: it feels kind of uncomfortable, andI saw how a friend of mine that tested this game was not able to control the character with enough fluency

Next goals

• Before next Wednesday: Continue adding as many sounds as I can... unfortunately some of these sounds require to program events that doesn't even exist, for example I have to reproduce a sound when a spheric ball is rolling
• Goals for this month: Finish all sounds and start doing level design! You have no idea about how long I've been waiting to start this task, and I feel I have enough pieces to start building challenges and puzzles

Feedback request

Matter is open for feedback and comments! Please feel free to comment about what do you think about this game!

Follow @matterGame on Twitter for more updated screenshots and GIFs

Stay tuned!