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AltRay Digital

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A member registered Mar 31, 2018 · View creator page →

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HEAVY BEAT

BUY NOW: https://altray-digital.itch.io/heavy-beat

In Heavy Beat, you traverse a randomly generated environment that reacts to the beat of any song! Choose between ascending an ever-growing tower under the pressure of a rapidly approaching death grid or endlessly running towards the synth-wave horizon without falling off!

TOWER MODE

Levels of platforms spawn on top of each other as you climb higher and higher! Find the jump pad on each level in order to ascend or use your trusty grapple hook!

Grapple Hook

A death grid moving to the beat of the song keeps you on your toes! Collect power-ups and gather diamonds for extra points and make sure to make use of the speed boost platforms!

RUNNER MODE 

Platforms endlessly spawn in front of you and the beat of the song is just so good you can't stop moving forwards!

Teleportation Tile

Run endlessly towards the synth-wave horizon without falling off as you collect power-ups and diamonds. Make strategic use of the teleporter platforms in order to avoid falling to your death!

ANY SONG. ANY GENRE.

In Heavy Beat you can use any .mp3 .wav or .ogg files to play on! The game will adapt to the song's beats. As long as you have the file in your computer, in the same place,  it will be loaded up the next time you start the game as well.

COMPETE ON THE LEADERBOARDS

Playing on the Official Soundtrack allows you to send your high-scores to the online leaderboards! There scores are registered under a nickname and will show up on the board after you sync them from the game. 

SOCIAL MEDIA

Website

Youtube

Twitter

GAMEPLAY CONTROLS

WASD - Movement

MOUSE - Look Around

CTRL - Crouch/Slide while moving

SPACEBAR - Jump/Jump higher if used during Slide

MOUSE LEFT CLICK - Hook (Aim at the hook spheres)

ENTER - Confirm

ESCAPE - Back

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Win10 (64bit)

2.4 GHz Processor

2 GB Video Card Memory

2 GB RAM

216MB  Storage Space

DOWNLOAD LINK: https://altray-digital.itch.io/heavy-beat

In Heavy Beat, you traverse a randomly generated environment that reacts to the beat of any song! Choose between ascending an ever-growing tower under the pressure of rapidly approach death grid or endlessly running towards the synthwave horizon without falling off!

TOWER MODE

Levels of platforms spawn on top of each other as you climb higher and higher! Find the jump pad on each level in order to ascend or use your trusty grapple hook! A death grid moving to the beat of the song keeps you on your toes! Collect power-ups and gather diamonds for extra points and make sure to make use of the speed boost platforms!

RUNNER MODE [Currently Unavailable]

Platforms endlessly spawn in front of you and the beat of the song is just so good you can't stop moving forwards! Run endlessly towards the synthwave horizon without falling off as you collect goodies and show off how well you traverse the environment to the beat of the song. Collect power-ups and gather diamonds for extra points!

Heavy Beat is currently in Public Alpha 2 and unfortunately due to a recent change in the code architecture of the game, the RUNNER MODE is unavailable at this time, it will make a brilliant comeback in a short while for Public Alpha 3!You can follow Heavy Beat's development on:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcn663iXs4MOgHFe4syuRpw

Here is the latest devlog going through all the features of Alpha 2:

(1 edit)

It's been almost three months, 80 days to be exact since the last update on this page regarding Typr's development. Pre-release hell is what I'd call this period. Bug fixing, constant distractions and a slightly unnerving feeling on my part about releasing AltRay Digital's first project to the public. 

It is all in the past now and I can happily say that Typr has just released and is available through itch.io's store or right here on this page :).

Thank you for everyone that has followed Typr's development. I apologize for the inconsistency in not having a proper release schedule. Everything from the devlogs available here and the game itself stand as a testament that anyone passionate enough about game development can release a game on their own.

For any questions or feedback, you've got the social links down below. Enjoy!

https://altray-digital.itch.io/typr

Links

 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/altraydigital/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AltRayDigital

Email: altraydigital@gmail.com

Well, we've finally done it. Development on Typr has officially been wrapped up! *queue fireworks*

It has taken exactly 10 weeks and 8 devlogs for the game to reach its final version, about two and half months. I am obviously really proud of this accomplishment knowing how hard it is for solo indie game developers to complete a project. One of the main reasons why I started these devlogs was to keep track of my work and to motivate myself every week to continue working on the same project instead of starting a lot of them and never finishing any of them.

As it currently stands, all devlogs are publicly available here on itch.io as well as other sites and forums as threads, you can check the other devlogs for the links.

So, what's next now that the development on the game is pretty much done?

Well, the final step is actually selling it. This final step as I mentioned previously in these posts is the only step that has eluded me in game development. With Typr, I want to change that.

I'm not yet sure about the pricing of the game or when it will be available but one thing is for sure, I need to double down on the marketing side of things. In 1 or 2 weeks, I'll be able to publicly state what the release date for the game will be, in the mean time there are a lot of things regarding the business side of this project that I have long since neglected.

Thank you to all of you that have kept reading these devlogs, especially to those uninitiated in game dev, I hope it at least demystified the whole process.

Andrei

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the eighth devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

Links

Discord Server for Active Development: https://discord.gg/nArn9Mk 

 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/altraydigital/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AltRayDigital

Email: altraydigital@gmail.com

Itch.io: https://altray-digital.itch.io/typr

Devlog

Good news folks! These weeks I've been very busy with studying for my university exams and so I've finally been able to create a demo of the game in its current state and release it for free for feedback.

The demo includes both modes as well as a total of 90 (more to follow) different sentences to type in Classic mode.

You can download the game using the link below: 

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https://www.mediafire.com/file/xqovnr66t42j1rf/Typr.rar/file

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I cannot stress this enough, the game is not finished. It still requires a lot of work as the last 30% left is mostly comprised of balancing numbers and sprucing up the game's aesthetics.

Please do not hold back from giving honest feedback!

Thank you for following me on this journey and I'll see you next week with a brand new devlog and further updates on the game :)

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the sixth devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

Links

Discord Server for Active Development: https://discord.gg/nArn9Mk 

 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/altraydigital/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AltRayDigital

Email: altraydigital@gmail.com

Preface

I'm so glad I've reached the stage where the changes I make to the game are so spread around that I require a full video of gameplay to feature it. It's a lot easier and faster than doing gifs of specific mechanics. This week has been all about over-all improvements as well as full reworks to existing mechanics. Here's the new gameplay video. P.S.: The sound for correct words still sucks and I want to fix it.


Main Features

  • Reworked time mechcanic
  • Reworked Gibbrsh mode text
  • Worked on overall sound
  • Added visual improvements and animations

Time Mechanic

I set the time mechanic in place from the start and until recently wanted it to remain the same even for release. However, after playtesting it for quite a bit I've grown to hate the fact that you gained time with each correct word you typed in. It essentially meant that if you're  a very fast typer, you wouldn't actually measure how fast you can type but simply prolong the game to infinity, especially in classic mode where sentences are considerably easier to type than in gibbrsh.

So in the end I changed the mechanic to no longer be dynamic but instead have a fixed amount of time that I can set for both classic and gibbrsh and the game will no longer reward the player with time when he completes words. This way, the player can truly test how fast they can type in a stable environment.

Gibbrsh Mode

With all the work on sound and animation, gibbrsh mode felt like it was left behind with its own structure of one word per screen change. While I loved the fact that the mode had its own unique thing compared to classic, it definitely ruined a few of my plans when it came to sound design and animation. So in the end I decided to transform gibbrsh mode's main mechanic to resemble classic mode more. It now simply generates a paragraph similar to classic but instead it contains words written with random letters. 

The result is a more fast paced gameplay with a bit more thought put in from the player since he can now preemptively type the next word in the paragraph instead of seeing a whole new screen with a whole new word every time he finishes typing one.

Sound

A few new additions to sound including music for the main menu that fits the over all theme of the game as well as a new sound for when the player completes a word. Somehow I still don't like it, I might have to change it by release but I'm not entirely sure.

I've also played around with the volume of the sounds and halved it on all sound effects. Apart from that, I had planned to include sounds for whenever you hit a combo mark on the combo bar but in the end I thought it would only bloat the sounds since a relatively fast typer will hear a lot of sound while he plays the game.

Animations and Visuals

Definitely proud of the animation work over all, it helps give the game that special "pop". I've added an outline to all the important text in the game to help readability on all kinds of differently colored backgrounds. Not all text uses the outline and I'd like to keep it like that since the balance between the two kinds of text offers a nice visual presentation. 

Apart from the outline, I've added floating text for whenever you complete a word, this way the player can see the amount of score that he earns with each word.

I've also finally added the combo bar that shows the current combo modifier. Every time the player earns points they get multiplied by the amount shown on the combo bar. I've also played around with the color schemes of these animations, trying different things to see how they look in the end.

Conclusion

Well, week 7 is finished and I'm gearing up for release sooner than I thought! Pretty much every logical piece of the game is in place and all I have left right now is tweaking a few things here and there. Unfortunately I've had to cut the fun animation side of the game where the screen would do different kind of effects to make the text harder to read, it simply is too much work to implement at my current pace. A playable demo will soon be available and afterwards, the grand release!

Thank you for reading and see you next time,

Andrew

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the sixth devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

Links

Discord Server for Active Development: https://discord.gg/nArn9Mk 

 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/altraydigital/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AltRayDigital

Email: altraydigital@gmail.com

Preface

This week I spent a lot of time on the overall feel of the game by adding sounds to most in-game mechanics such as completing words or paragraphs in Classic Mode. I also tweaked the multiple combinations of background colors and text. I also have a demo video available this week with sound, check it out! <3

Main Features

  • Added and tweaked colors
  • Added sounds for main mechanics
  • Fixed random bugs

Colors 

[Note: The paragraphs in Classic mode are written in Romanian for testing purpose and the reason why they sometimes keep repeating is because there is a very small pool of them, again, for testing purposes.]

After thorough testing, I've noticed that some background/text color combinations didn't go so well. I was happy to see that none of them pose any readability problems and most people I tested with were content with how little the changing colors affected the text's clarity, however, some colors such as dark green for the background presented an issue when combining it with the green color of the correct diamond above the words. So after going through all the colors, I made sure none of them would interfere in such a way with the other elements of the UI. I've also added more colors to the palette, there are now 30 different background colors to go through!

Sounds

Although the game had sound as soon as two weeks ago, it was only for the main menu and nothing else. With this week's update I've added quite a few sounds for the main mechanics of the game such as completing a word, completing a paragraph and typing the wrong letter in a word.

It certainly gives the game a whole new feel as it contributes to the overall experience. There are advantages to having sounds linked to certain mechanics of the game as well. Many of the senior testers I had for the game complained that since a lot of them don't spend that much time around computers they don't necessarily have the same way of typing things and so they cannot see their mistakes as easily when typing a word on the screen. 

For example, my own parents played the game and since they aren't that used to fast typing they usually look at the keyboard instead of looking at the screen when typing. This gave me a clue as to what the game needed in order to provide a fair experience to them as well. After adding the sound cue in that a word has been typed incorrectly, the testers immediately looked at the screen instead of the keyboard and proceeded to promptly fix the error and continue playing. This is miles better compared to the previous iteration of the game, especially for people that aren't used to fast typing.

I've also added a specific sound for when a paragraph is finished. This gives the game a satisfying feel as you complete paragraph after paragraph. 

An interesting design choice I made when it came to the implementation of the sound specific to completing a word in the paragraph was to have the sound increase in pitch the further the player got in the paragraph. So for example, the sound would play at its default pitch for the first completed word in the paragraph and then as the player keeps completing words it would increase in pitch, playing on a higher note each time the player types in a word correctly, culminating in a satisfying sound signaling the completion of the paragraph.

The pitch for the sound resets with each paragraph.

Conclusion

...and this was week six! I can't believe the game is quickly shaping up to release standards! With the progress I'm making I will be sure to have a working demo in the following weeks available to the public so you can test the game first hand! Next week will have a focus on completing the game's audio with background music and ambience as well as further expanding the mechanic audios and if there will be enough time I will also work on the gameplay animations as well such as custom ones when you complete a word correctly or complete a paragraph.

This marked the end of the sixth week of development!

Thank you for reading and see you next time,

Andrew

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the fifth devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

Links

Discord Server for Active Development: https://discord.gg/nArn9Mk 

 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/altraydigital/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AltRayDigital

Email: altraydigital@gmail.com

Preface

This week I spent a lot of time on getting the UI up to shape and to be honest its shaping up to be a lot better than I expected!

Main Features

  • Animation details
  • Adjusted UI 

Animation details

The best kind of UIs are those that are so intuitive that you don't need a separate tutorial showing you how to use it or navigate it. I ran into this problem with Typr very early on, I wasn't sure exactly what type of UI would benefit the game most. So after some thought I decided to go with a super simple one where I give the player only critical information that he needs to know. But, even after doing this and seeing positive results, the UI still didn't tell the player what he needs to do.

The solution was simple. This is a typing game, what do you see at the end of a text field when you type in it? A blinker. A blinker as big as the text font itself. It might seem as a trivial choice but it had a deep impact to the player since he will immediately spot the blinker blinking and subconsciously think that he needs to type something.

I've added this effect to both the actual game and the menu itself. The menu lacked some kind of animation when you navigate it from button to button, it still feels to me like it does lack something but with a blinker added at the end of the selections it does seem to have a bit more flair as well as it fitting in the theme of the game.

pic_01

Main Menu With Blinker

This wasn't the only design choice I made regarding the UI. On the in-game side of things, you might remember from past iterations of the game that I had a big old rectangle right in the middle of the screen showing if the current word is being correctly typed or not.

Well I'm happy to say that I've since moved from such barbaric practices and instead asked myself the question, where does the player look when they type the sentence or word on the screen? Do they look at the bottom of the screen? At the top? In the middle? No, they look straight at the word they have to type and then they type it, so I changed that ugly square into a diamond shape and programmed it so that it changes with the word that you have to write and always shows up directly above the word itself. So now the player won't have to look at a specific part of the screen to see if the word he typed was wrong or not, he simply needs to do what he was meant to do, type the word, and he will know in no time if he did it correctly or not.

UI Adjustments

The old UI was doing a lot of things wrong. The text was all over the place, the words didn't link up properly and the elements weren't aligned with the display. I've since changed that and the UI elements will now scale up or down and stay exactly in the same place no matter what display size or resolution the player uses.

Everything is now centered and intuitive and I've got to say, this, coupled with the changing backgrounds and text is really giving the game a bit of dynamism, something that it quite lacked before. I'll continue to improve on these aspects since I've yet to add a combo counter showing the player his current combo level when it comes to how many letters he correctly typed consecutively. 

pic_02

UI

Conclusion

Well we've just completed week 5 of development! It all went by so fast and at times it was a bit hard especially when I hit a few walls back at the start but I'm really glad I've kept my commitment to use devlogs as a way to talk about the game. There are a lot of things I need to improve regarding the game's overall feel, one of them that I will focus on for next week is sound design!

This marked the end of the fifth week of development!

Thank you for reading and see you next time,

Andrew

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the fourth devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

Links

Discord Server for Active Development: https://discord.gg/nArn9Mk 

 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/altraydigital/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AltRayDigital

Email: altraydigital@gmail.com

Preface

This week (and a bit, sowie, been quite busy with university) I split the game into modules. For the first module I chose the main menu and I worked on it extensively.

Main Features

  • Solidified the game's aesthetics
  • Implemented game intro
  • Implemented main menu animations

Aesthetics

The very term frightens me. Since I tend to lean on the programming side of things aesthetics are usually the last thing I think about.

Typr is a game about, well... typing and so there are a few principles I have to stick by when working on the game's aesthetics. First of all, the text must be readable, not only that but it must be easily readable and not give the player a headache when he tries to make out what it's written on the screen. Even though I planned on working on the main menu only I soon found out that the aesthetic of the menu plays an important role in how the rest of the game looks so I took some time to nail it down.

 So I started going through the fonts in search of the best one and after hours of comparisons I found out that even some of the best fonts like Times New Roman have faults and sometimes even I couldn't quickly decipher what was written on the screen or I simply typed in "l" instead of 1 by mistake. In the end I settled for the classic Arial, it seemed the best option out of everything else for a typing game.

Next up, I had to figure out what color the text should be. Well black background and white text, of course, I hear you saying but its not as simple as that. I wanted to go with black and white too but it is so simple and it becomes so boring after a while to only look at black and white so I thought why not give it a bit of color.

pic_02

Classic Mode in Action

First off I implemented different backgrounds for every time the word (in gibbrsh) or the paragraph (in classic) changes. They will randomly change colors (colors that I have chosen deliberately). And so with the background changing I also needed the text color to change depending on how dark the background is.

I've decided on having two colors that will highlight the text that the player has to type in. Orange for the dark backgrounds and blue for the light background (these colors are complementary). All the other text is either black or white except for the words that the player has to type in.

This gives the game some variety when it comes to the levels and its not just two bland colors on top of each other.

pic_04

Classic Mode in Action 2

Intro

I love the company logo and I had to put it in as splash art during the game's intro. So every time you start up the game you'll see the logo and you can skip ahead using any key on the keyboard to the main menu instantly (as long as the assets have loaded before).

pic_01

Intro Splash Art

Main Menu

After I nailed down the way the game would look I took the main menu and decided to make it pretty. While at first I loved the game's logo, over time I simply wouldn't care for it. I needed something simple, something easily readable and something that will give off the right impression on what kind of game this is. So yes you guessed right, I went with Arial again, bolded the letters and for the color I chose the same color that highlights the words (orange) on dark backgrounds. I've also added animations for both logo and menu that give a bit of flair to what was otherwise pretty boring.

pic_04

trello at the end of the week

As you can see from the trello plan, I wanted to also do a few sounds for the main menu but alas it was too much and I had to leave it for next week.

Conclusion

Unfortunately as you may have noticed I've already missed the deadline for this devlog by about 2 hours. I'm swamped right now with both work and university projects but I will do my best to keep this series of devlogs going as well as the development of Typr. Next week we're finishing the main menu with sounds as well as dive deeper in the color palette of the levels!

This marked the end of the fourth week of development!

Thank you for reading and see you next time,

Andrew

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the third devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

Links

Discord Server for Active Development: https://discord.gg/nArn9Mk

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/altraydigital/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AltRayDigital

Email: altraydigital@gmail.com

Preface

This week we had in store Prototype 3.0.. I worked on completely fleshing out both modes' mechanics as well as reworking some of the older implementation where it didn't couple well with the current one. This week concluded the work on the "Prototype" and as the next week comes by we will enter the proper development of Typr!

Main Features

  • Implemented difficulty stages for classic mode
  • Implemented difficulty stages for gibbrsh mode
  • Added GUI stats such as total words typed etc. (will add more in the future)
  • Implemented basic end game screen
  • Reworked time reward from static to depending how many letters a word has

Classic Mode

As I worked on classic mode I started implementing different stages of difficulty. Right now, in order, they are as follows:

Quotes -> Artistic -> Academic

So for your first 5 paragraphs you will only receive Quotes. Then for your next 5 you will receive Quotes and Artistic (song lyrics and poetry) paragraphs and then after your next 5 you will receive Quotes, Artistic and Academic (formally written sentences) paragraphs. Please note that 5 isn't the final number but only an example. This will give a bit of variety as the player progresses through the game mode as well as offer an increasing challenge as both Artistic and Academic are usually different from Quotes, the first being informal and the second being very formal as well as containing scientific words and respective scientific field terms.

Classic Mode - Here the player receives a quote and then its followed by a verse from a song by Bebe Rexha

Gibbrsh Mode

After I implemented the different types of paragraphs on Classic Mode I went to Gibbrsh and designed its own difficulty curve as well. Seeing as Gibbrsh does not have paragraphs of its own but randomly generated words, I broke down how these words are formed exactly. The game on Gibbrsh starts off with 3-6 letter words formed only with the lowercase English alphabet. As the player completes words, at some point he will enter the next stage of difficulty which contains 5-8 letter words formed with the lowercase English alphabet as well as digits sprinkled in between. As he continues he will at some point reach the last stage of difficulty which has 8-14 letters in its' words and uses the alphabet, digits as well as the symbols on the keyboard. These numbers will of course be adjusted to be balanced but as it stands, this is how Gibbrsh will get harder and harder the more you play.

pic_02

Gibbrsh Mode - Letters and digits

pic_03

Gibbrsh Mode - Letters, digits and symbols

Time Reward and Score Mechanic

Completely reworked from being static to being adaptive as the words get bigger. The time reward is no longer given on a fixed note but rather the reward is per letter. So for example if a word has 3 letters and the reward per letter is 1 second then the total time rewarded will be 3 seconds. As I built the system I also added a combo mechanic. As you type the word, with every correct letter a number goes up, if you reach a specific amount of correctly typed letters then you gain a combo bonus to your score. For example when you first start playing you have a combo bonus of 1 meaning the exact amount of time you have left when you complete the word gets added to your score, however if you reach a specific amount of correctly typed letters then you gain a higher combo such as 1.5. This modifier gets applied to your time before it gets added to the score so in the example of the 3 letter word and you have 10 seconds left, you would still gain only 3 seconds of time but instead of getting 10 points added to your score you will get 10 multiplied by the current modifier so 10*1.5 which will net you in total 15 points.  This combo however gets reset back to 1 whenever you mistype a letter, this will give an incentive to the players to also type correctly and not just spam the keys until they get the word right.

End Game Screen

Added a simple end game screen whenever the time runs out on both modes. It shows how many words you've completed, your longest streak of correct letters as well as your score. You can also navigate the game completely from inside the application! You no longer have to exit the game when you're done, you can simply press Esc when you're at the scoreboard and the game will take you to the main menu to play again.

pic_04

Scoreboard

Trello plan at the end of the week

Conclusion

And... we're here, we've finally completed the prototype! Version 3.0 of the prototype marked the completion of all the basic systems the game needs to enter proper development! So these devlogs will steadily become more focused on art and sound design as we move forward with the project. I'm really proud of what I've achieved so far and these devlogs really helped me keep on track and have a steady workflow. I have also received a few questions regarding the development of the game and I am thinking about making a Q&A alongside the next devlog. If you have questions as well then don't hesitate to contact me either on twitter, facebook, or on my email, links are at the top of the page!

This marked the end of the third week of development!

Thank you for reading and see you next week,

Andrew

(1 edit)

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the second devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

Preface

This week was all about Prototype 2.0. Nothing fancy on how the game currently looks, I simply expanded on the existing systems and tried to further develop the mechanics and flesh them out properly. Hopefully by the third iteration of the prototype I would have all the basic systems in place to start working on animations and the more aesthetic part of the game.

Going forward I'd like to list the main features that I implemented or worked on this week at the top of the post.

Main Features

  • Reworked Classic Mode, now substantially different than Gibbrsh
  • Reworked the time mechanic
  • Implemented basic native resolution support
  • Implemented basic main menu
  • Implemented basic separation of concerns

Classic Mode

Classic mode from the start represented the most challenging aspect of the game. Ideally I want it to be able to generate seemingly random sentences with a varying and controllable level of difficulty but right now it works using an array of paragraphs that I manually write. So for example I can copy and paste 1000 different quotes in my array and it will keep going through the array of paragraphs one by one (sequentially right now but that will change) until its empty or until you run out of time.  If the player runs out of paragraphs he basically "won" so he's taken to the menu screen (need to make proper victory screen).

I'm thinking of maybe implementing a sentence generator to make things spicy with seemingly random sentences but I would love to also have access to quotes and book paragraphs.

The cool thing I managed to do with Classic is implementing the checking of the words itself, before you could only see the word you needed to type but now you can see the whole sentence and the word that you need to type will now simply be a bit bigger than the rest of the sentence. This way the player can plan what keys he will need to press in advance of finishing his current word, the system works on a per-word basis so the player will only have to deal with one word at a time, when he's done with it he simply presses space and goes to the next one in the paragraph.

We'll see where I end up, last week Classic Mode was merely a copy paste of Gibbrsh Mode so there is no telling where I would end up with it!

pic_01

Classic Mode in action

pic_02

Classic Mode in action 2

Time Mechanic

I ended up reworking the time mechanic completely. Initially it counted up and added the current time elapsed to the score when you completed the word, you can see how this was absolutely wrong since the player could simply wait and complete the word only when the time elapsed was a really high number with no repercussion whatsoever. 

Now you are given a set amount of time when you start either Classic or Gibbrsh Mode (15 seconds) and it starts counting down to 0. If it reaches 0 you are taken back to the menu screen as a form of defeat and are forced to start the mode again (I need to implement Win/Lose screens).  Every time you complete a word, the current time is added to your score and you receive 3 seconds as a reward to the timer. This can be tweaked to reward the player differently on each word, for example the player could be rewarded per letter instead of the default 3 seconds per word, so if a word has 7 letter then the player could receive 7 seconds bonus in time etc. . This system works way better since the player is rewarded for speed, the faster he types the word correctly the more points he scores and the more time he will have to spend typing on the next word.

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Gibbrsh Mode with the new time mechanic

Native Resolution

When the game starts it will take the native display resolution from the user and use it when it renders anything to the screen thus making sure everything is scaled properly and nothing looks pixelated unless its meant to be. My thought process was basically that the game is extremely simple and won't benefit from different resolutions (although I'm thinking about adding them just because it adds player choice) and I'm still in the early stages of development so it certainly wouldn't help me working on such details yet.

Main Menu

A basic main menu that I can come back to and add things later on. It simply acts as a separator between the two game modes as well as a temporary victory/defeat screen (hehe).

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Main menu

Separation of Concerns

Separation of concerns was the main motivator and it is an ongoing process until I'm done with every big bit of programming. What I basically did was separate things in the game in modules so that I can safely disable one and the rest of the game won't crash. For example I have a separate entity for handling everything about the GUI so If I want to play without a GUI, I can simply disable it and the game won't crash. I have a separate entity for controlling the logic in the game, a separate entity for controlling the main menu and a separate entity just for debugging (where I draw strings to the screen with the different variables I'm currently testing). 

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Trello plan at the start of the week

Conclusion

Yup, still looks like shit, but guess what... yup, it works. I'm really proud of what I've done so far, everything from a programming point of view is working as intended. Up next it will probably be Prototype 3.0!

This marked the end of the second week of development!

Thank you for reading and see you next week,

Andrew

(1 edit)

Hi again folks, Andrew here with the first devlog on the game Typr, my brand new project.

For information on what Typr is you can check out the main page here on itch.io, it gives a good representation of what I'm trying to build and hopefully those extravagant devlogs will keep you around!

So, first thing is first, I wanted to build a game. Not only that but I wanted to build and release a game all by myself. Having failed multiple times in the past I buckled up and decided enough was enough, it's time to see this dream of mine come to fruition. What did I do first? I opened up notepad and laid down a few ideas for a bunch of different games. I came up with a lot of different things such as 2D space shooters, endless runners, platformers and so on and so forth, but they all felt so... difficult for one guy to make and I rightfully felt so, I know how hard it is to single-handedly make sprites, audio files, put them together, program the game and market it too and I tried to do it in the past and let's be honest, most of these projects would definitely end up in the abandoned projects bin or how I like to call it the "demo bin". 

So I knew from the get-go that I needed something small and feasible to work on and I had this idea of making a fun little game where all you needed to do was to write the correct word shown on screen, pretty simple huh? Well, I sure hope I made the right choice since there's no going back now. 

I proceeded to write the main mechanic of the game down and this is what I usually do with all of my projects at the start, I just lay down the main mechanic, and so I did! The main mechanic was to correctly type the word on the screen and afterwards I came up with a few extra complementary mechanics by asking a few questions about my main mechanic such as, "How can I make this more interesting?", "What would make this mechanic more challenging?", "How can I reward the player for playing correctly?".

By the end of the mini-brainstorm session, here's how the notepad file looked like:

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Initial notepad file

You might think that it's not that fancy huh? Well you don't need fancy in indie game development, the more stuff you put in the initial document for your game to have the more stuff you will have to program and polish by the end to release it. To be honest even some of these mechanics you see here might end up being cut from the game. You know what they say in Game Development, think small and then think even smaller and I wasn't going to abandon this project in the long run.

After finishing these notes, I started expanding on how I will market this project. I thought to myself, I can change quite a few things after I start development regarding marketing so I went ahead and put up some mediums through which I'd enjoy promoting my game and these (hopefully) interesting devlogs. For example I know already as of writing this, that I would post on quite a facebook groups on every screenshot saturday and I will update the marketing notes accordingly every time I find out a good way to market the game.

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Marketing part of the file

"Right, enough notes", I thought to myself, it was time to get started with the actual development of the game.

First up was deciding what tools I would use. I already had purchased Game Maker Studio Professional 1.4 a long time ago and I had advanced knowledge of the engine so I knew beforehand that I would develop the game on it. I also knew I would be using Git with Github to store my files and version control them, as well as a myriad of different software for image editing, audio editing and so on and so forth, things like Audacity and Aseprite. The combination of me not knowing anything about IOS or Android development and the fact that I didn't have the respective licences for Game Maker made my decision on what platform I would develop on a lot easier, I chose PC. 

So having nailed that, I needed an initial plan of attack, to know where to start developing this game. The first thing I had to make was the initial prototype, the bare bones of the game, the fake skeleton if you will, something small and quick to decide if the game is worth investing in and if the mechanics are interesting enough to further develop. I used Trello (amazing tool by the way) to organize this, I created a list called Prototype and added in all of the important mechanics that I wrote down in the notepad file above. This is what it looked like by the end:

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Prototype bucket list

This is what I had to implement for the prototype to be fully testable and I had to do it in a very fast and efficient way so that I don't waste too much time on it. 

And I'm happy to say that everything went according to plan, every card in the list was fully implemented and tested and to be honest, the mechanics feel pretty good, even though the game in its current state looks, well, horrendous. Here are some screenshots of how the prototype looked like when I was done testing it:

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Correctly typing the word

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Making a mistake

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Trello after prototype was finished

Yep, it looks like shit, but it works! I tested it and I knew for a fact that with these small implementations I could easily do the bigger mechanics.

This marked the end of the first week of development, one guy, a notepad file, some tools and a prototype and I'm happy to say that I will continue with these devlogs every week, posting them on sundays, each describing what I went through with the game during that week.

Thank you for reading and see you next week,

Andrew