Evolution Complete
May 17, 2013 In every phase of development I have been slowly improving the look and feel of the game and now, after many iterations, I have come to a style that I am calling "final".
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At last the style is at a level that I'm happy with and is still simple enough that I can actually finish the game someday. Depending on your eye it may or may not look like it's improved much but you can definitely see the difference when you compare it to how it looked a few years ago.
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Not only do things look better but there are a million-and-one things behind the scenes that need to be built to exist in the world and react as you would expect.
The trees seem simple enough, right? Here are a few things that something as simple as trees need in order to work in the game world. Since everything is physics based, they need a collision skeleton to allow them to be hit and affected by forces. The foliage makes leaves fall when hit and it slows down objects that pass through. When knocked down they drop "wood" collectibles which are used to build other things. They needed to handle various situations like bombs, gravity fields, direct hits and landing in water. The water in particular has probably doubled the amount of work to complete the game but I estimate it has added at least 325% more fun.
I know I keep saying this, but games are an insane amount of work! Admittedly, much of that has been brought on by myself. I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity. The best example of this is Blizzard Entertainment. Yes they take forever to release their games but you are guaranteed a top notch product. Since I have yet to release my first game I don't have a lot of klout but it seems that all successful indie devs, at some level, understand that quality is key. I'll let Jonathan Blow say it because he's got that klout thing I'm missing.
"I think this is a difference that a lot of the more successful indie games have with the ones that languish and you only hear about on tigsource or whatever. With the really successful ones, usually they didn’t just ship the first thing they got together that was playable. Things have really been refined and thought about, and there’s been a lot of attention to detail — not just in terms of obvious things like graphical polish, but also relatively intangible gameplay details"
This is definitely true for my game. I haven't created the game so much as I've just made myself available to help with its natural evolution. It tells me what it wants to be and I make it happen.
Now, one thing I've learned in making this game is to never make promises. I don't know how many time's I have promised something and then was unable to deliver because something more important came up. That said I am very confident in this one. I will have a new video to put up soon. It will be part trailer, part developer walkthrough. It's time for everyone to see exactly how the game plays.
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