Hi.
I have created a game using some of your assets. Your assets are fantastic, they really worth their price!
The thing is that I want to release my game as open-source. Due to the terms, I can't use your assets in the repository. I would like to ask if it would be okay if I use blurred and obfuscated versions of them?
I attached an example of how it would look.
You woke up alone in a medical bay of the cosmic station. The station is breaking up and you have to leave it before it’s too late. Unravel the mysteries surrounding the station, solve intricate puzzles and ultimately escape from it!
Space Madness is a short top-down adventure with puzzle elements.
The game is free and available at https://arti-dev.itch.io/space-madness.
Hi! This is my first game, which I made during the Devtober 2022 game jam:
https://arti-dev.itch.io/circle-of-harmony
I wanted to make something simple and came up with that idea. It is a puzzle game with light strategy elements. Your goal is to achieve a higher score. To do that, you need to choose positions for your animals based on their food preferences.
You can play in the browser or download the build for Windows.
I have added a short tutorial to my game. If you choose “Tutorial ON” you will see four tutorial windows with basic information about the game. Also, I have added popup hints showing the information about the species.
I am at the final stage now. I have sent my build to some friends for testing. I want to work on an itch page now and prepare my code for an open-source release.
After spending a lot of time playing my game, I have understood that a game session with the 6x6 field was too short. An average player couldn't even see all the animals in action. It felt too crowded and compact. I have decided to increase the field size from 6x6 to 7x7.
I spent some time working on the initialization of the game field. My initialization was completely random, and sometimes it led to a situation when a player couldn't beat the score regardless of their tactics. I have chosen another approach. The field initialised randomly based on a set of prepared initialization fields.
Also, I have tested the WebGL build for the itch.io page. It turned out much easier than I thought it might be.
I have completely revised my UI elements for the displayed damage. I have created a simple blinking heart animation for the moment when some specimen attacks another one.
I also have introduced an undo button. After that, the player can undo all the moves he made after the last building option refill. This makes the game much more interesting as you don't need to plan everything very far ahead. You can always go back if something doesn't go as expected.
I have added several features.
1) I have been looking for music since the beginning of the jam. I have finally found the theme that I like (https://vtakinovmusic.com/product/this-is-africa/).
2) I have started to add sound effects to the game.
I also worked on simplification of the game process.
I have been working on a menu. I added the main menu (some buttons still don't have full functionality) and the exit button for the game scene. I also have worked a lot on a game process. My idea that damage to the animal is equal to the given score points doesn't make the game simpler. I am still thinking about a solution.
I haven't been posting anything for three days, that's why this update is quite huge.
Finally, I have changed the graphic design of the animals. I have bought pictures of the animals on Shutterstock, as I hadn't found any fitting the casual style in free access. I have recolored them and changed some details to make the art more distinguishable. The result you can see in the attached picture.
I don’t have much to share today as I have spent time refactoring code and designing the progress system :)
I have added counters to the building buttons, which show how many entities the player can build. When the player achieves the predefined score, the counters increase and a new requirement for the score value is set.
I started to work on game balance. My goal is to make each of the species valuable. In the early stages of the development, I noticed that a player could ignore bugs and rats and invest only in antelopes, hyenas, and lions.
I have counted the number of points earned by the player for each type of animal. Based on this information, I have changed several things.
You can see the average points for each animal type after the rebalancing in the attached picture.
I have tried several designs for the button panel. My favourite one is a button panel which is enframed by a circle. The circle position shows the number of score points that the player has already got. I also have replaced the text on buttons with animal icons. I haven’t implemented scoreboard animation yet and will do it a little later.
I finally was able to play my game. I configured a whole pack of animals. Now I have grass, a bug, an African rat, an Antelope, a hyena, and a lion. I drew temporary sprites for all animals, as I wanted to have an approximate view of the final game.
I also played with the size of the game field. The 10x10 size is too spacious and makes the game session duration too long. I choose a 6x6 size and it feels like just the right vibe.
I have implemented the food chain functionality and the score system. Each animal has a list of feeding options defined by three parameters:
I have created two types of specimens to test the new systems. I am not sure if this graphic style is final as it doesn't align with the vibe I want from this game.
I took time off coding and thought about food chains. I want my game to be simple, that's why the total number of different species should be around 5-7. After some thinking, I drew this chain in the picture below. Arrow from one specimen to another represents the possible food source. If specimens aren’t connected, they will not affect each other directly.
The main question is how the predators can disappear as no one eats them. I did research and found out that hyenas and lions could kill each other in a fight. So, my solution is that predators affect each other. Also, this decision specialized my animal setting to savannah animals.
Each animal in my game should have an area of influence. When a player places an animal on the game field, it consumes all available food sources in its influence area.
I like to have flexibility in all systems which I develop and that’s why I wanted to be able to change the influence area right in the Unity inspector. To implement it, I use a plugin from GitHub, which allows editing 2D arrays in the inspector.
Then I added visualization. During that, I resolved a lot of bugs. For example, the influence area shouldn't cross the boundaries of the game field, which was the case before the refactoring.
I started with the implementation of a Grid class for my game field. The functionality of the standard unity grid class wasn’t enough for me, so I decided to implement my own. I watched several tutorials on YouTube and understood that it is a doable task.
What do I want from my Grid class?
After I had finished the Grid, I implemented a building button. When you push the button, the circle appears near your pointer, and you are able to put the object on the grid. The color of the circle depends on its position. The color will be red if you can’t build the circle and blue otherwise.
