When I recently began making my journey into the world of making games for a living, I was under the impression that everything had to be a secret – that I had to keep my games to myself or someone else would come along and steal it. This was stupid. And purely my fault. I’m an indie developer, which means if I want people to take interest in my games, I have to be open, honest, and up to date with the product and what people know about it. Luckily I learned this harsh lesson early on, but can take so much from it as I move forward. So I will be telling all about the game, Don’t Go Bang!

(The image below is a hint to how the bombs will be changing, found nearer the end of the dev log.)

Last week was a very busy week in terms of bringing this game from prototype/proof of concept, to something that actually worked. But over the course of the week, rather than allowing myself to be proud of the current stage of the game my ambitions only grew stronger and I wanted to add more and more (whilst simultaneously being well aware of feature creep and techniques to avoid it). My ambitions grew but my core goal of making a simple game that anyone could play and an expert could master remained paramount.

So my solution is simply, in just about every puzzle, the road to completion will be tap or slide the right dials/puzzles/wires or something to that effect for completion. Complex tasks requiring 3-D models or anything too intensive is not going in. Just now, anyone who picks it up can play it until completion. I never want that to change. I want people to be challenged, and have to use their mental acuity to solve the puzzle, but I don’t want there to be a confusion as to how to interact to accomplish that goal. E.g. You tap to cut the wire, not swipe. Why? Because everyone can tap a screen and everyone tries it first. “Hey wait a minute… who can’t swipe a screen?” – To that, trust me when you’re in this position, some people simply either don’t enjoy it or it takes them a while to figure that out. That’s what I’m avoiding. Those moments of… “What the hell do I do?”/”This isn’t working the way I expected it to work.”

For instance, a few friends suggested I use tools, and you drag the tools onto a specific puzzle and it allows you to complete it/perform better at the task. I said absolutely not. I don’t want a tool to take up the space on the screen, I don’t want an unreliable drag feature to stop people from playing, and most importantly – it’s a game, so I don’t want people spending their time searching through a virtual toolbox.

It’s a puzzle game. The puzzle should be difficult enough. I shouldn’t have pointless/futile controls to add to that.

With that in mind, this week I began the necessary work on a Simon Says style puzzle for the bomb, where there are four colours presented as a diamond, and the colours will be selected randomly and played in order. This sound easy, but it turned out to be a little more time consuming getting it to work RIGHT. It had to know which colour it should display, at what times it should change, is this colour one of the colours in the order, at what point is it pressed in the order etc.

(The image below shows the puzzle as it’s just begun, it’s currently highlighting yellow as the first colour to be pressed.)

But while it was a little more time consuming, it now works like a dream, adding a lovely amount of variation to the bomb disposal. Currently it will only play once, so four random colours will be selected and played, let’s say the order is (red, yellow, blue, blue). Once you’ve pressed this combination in the correct order, the red light above the diamond will turn green, indicating you got it right, and a colour will be highlighted. (In this image it’s also blue)

This indicates which colour wire you have to cut. Once you cut that wire, the corresponding light above that will turn green also. Assuming you performed your task correctly, the panel will be removed, and the next tier of the bomb is ready to be diffused. As I mentioned before, it can only be done once, but the code is there to allow progress, e.g. first 4 colours are selected, then these 4 + 1, then 5 +1, etc, but it will take some reshoogling of code, and for the time being I’m going to leave it as is. It cannot cause conflicts with other code, so I can literally sit it in the back burner for now and upgrade it when I decide I’m ready.

Now onto the really difficult part of the week – and one that came a little quicker than expected.

Last week I mentioned daily challenges, or ideally tri-daily challenges to keep users coming back and improving their skills/increasing their rank and requisition points. You could infer I could also add in weekly and monthly challenges too, which is true! I do intend to do that. However, quick math lesson:

3 challenges a day every day ((3 x 365) = 1095)

1 challenge a week, every week ((1 x 52) = (52 + 1095) = 1147)

and special challenge a month ((12 x 1) = (1147 + 12) = 1159

That’s 1159 unique bombs for me to create. Absolutely no way. Completely unrealistic as a developer for a mobile game, or any game for that matter. So the only solution – make the daily/monthly/weekly bombs procedurally generated. If these difficult bombs have ten tiers (layers) and there are even just four puzzles, that’s 10^4 bombs, meaning 10,000 unique bombs with that alone. Obviously, the more puzzle we create, the better, and if each of those puzzles is in turn, random, then we can easily achieve what we need. So if we say that we currently have two puzzles (Simon Says and regular wire cutting), and there can be between 5 – 10 tiers, then we already have a max of 100 unique bombs. However, this only relates to the uniqueness of the order the puzzles are in, but as each Simon Says puzzle will be different, and each wire puzzle will have a random amount of wires + in random orders, that number is technically much higher. However, in terms of gameplay, I would actually reduce that number to much lower than the original. As in to the player it’ll feel like a handful of bombs repeating, rather than the actual number it is. But with more puzzles to add to the game, we can easily achieve this. Ideally, we could have 10 puzzles so that just 4 tiers would achieve the same 10^4 number that we need, but we’ll have to wait and see. It’s tough to judge, as the same puzzle is often different, but I’m unsure as to whether it will look as a repeat or if people will understand that the rules have changed and so thus the puzzle has also.

The next puzzle I have in mind, is an operation style game where you have slide your finger, all the way through the maze without touching the sides. This seems like a bit of a contradiction to my no dragging of objects rule, but in fact the code works quite differently and it might be okay, but a little testing will decipher that first.

Another puzzle idea, actually comes from the bombs changing. So the little hinted story, is that you are training to be a bomb diffuser, and are trained using bombs created by the Academy. However, at various points you will either train with IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), or will physically be in a different location diffusing a new type of bomb. As such, we can’t have the bombs looking so fancy all the time.

So work began on implementing art assets/styles to mimic an IED. (As a side note, research into IED’s even on Google leads to some disturbing images, I advise not looking.)

What my research told me is that mobile phones are often used as remote detonation devices, and simply battery packs are used to power them.

I thought this would somehow heighten the level of intensity when diffusing the bomb. The idea of seeing a doppelganger of a real live IED. While already when the timer nears zero, the flashing lights increase their frequency and a horrible alarm begins, as well as a flashing red over the whole screen – we thought perhaps the scariest thing you could see, is that with seconds to go to diffuse the bomb, the phone would light up, with the words, “Incoming Call: Unknown”. Written across it. The idea of someone ready to blow you up sounded terrifying. And then, just to be cheeky, we added in that your real life phone actually vibrates as the phone in the game vibrates.

I got a little off-topic, but to be clear on where we are at now, we already have procedurally generated bombs, but the code needs reworked in various ways to make the game winnable. It also just needs general improvement. The work I’ll be doing over the next week, is creating more puzzles and increasing the replay-ability and uniqueness of each bomb. Eventually I’ll get around to power-ups, but they are not a complete priority right now, more for as the bombs grow actually difficult. I’ll be improving the art and perhaps adding in a second bomb that looks completely different. Equally, we toyed with the ideas of rules which you have to remember after the immediate training sessions, e.g. [The bomb has a serial code] and the rule is that unless specified otherwise, you must always cut the wires in the order that the first letter appears in the serial code. So if your code was TYFUR1, you would cut the Yellow and then Red wires. But we’re unsure as to whether each bomb should be explained from the beginning, or whether an element of memory and technical skill is required, so what do you think?

Lastly I just generally want to make several improvements and securities within the code. From the way I’ve built it, each part should function irrespective of whether adjacent parts do or not, so that the bombs are modular and can be in crazy orders. I just want to make sure I haven’t missed anything, and that any combination can work with any other combination.

Let me know what you think of the game so far, if it sounds interesting to you or not, and any feedback or tips, either here or @DalriadaConnor

Wishing an amazing weekend to you all, looking forward to hearing from you again, but until then…