We keep going with the development of the game: new power ups implemented, hi-score table, new tutorial screen and more!

Power ups in action

I talked about the new power ups in the last development update. By then there was only design but now we finally have them in place.

Here is the diamond item:

Pushy getting a score boost

As you can see the diamond will appear if you do match 3 with the pink blocks. The diamond will help you achieve hi-score since it gives you a lot of points! So if you want to beat the score of your friend make sure to push together pink blocks to get a diamond.

Here is the silver block item:

Bring the block around and crush monsters with it!

If you do match 3 with the green blocks you’ll get this silver block. You can pick it up and carry it on your head until you find a good spot to launch it to defeat monsters. This will be used later on to solve puzzles in some stages. It can also be helpful in the boss stage. You can align with him and throw him the silver block instead of waiting for him to be aligned with the current blocks of the stage.

Now all the power ups of the game are in place and ready to be used everywhere.

About the TNT block… we have decided to go back to the old bomb sprite. A bomb is the symbol that is carved on the yellow blocks and we think it fits better with the game. We have deleted the animation so the bomb looks less scary when it spawns.

New tutorial screen

This is something that we have been strugling to find the best solution for it. We have tried several things and I think we have finally come out with the most user friendly one.

The new tutorial stage

Instead of having to watch a video or reading some instructions we think it’s best explained if you actually do whatever you are supposed to do to play the game. So in this first tutorial screen you can see that the first block has an “A” popover above. There are also black blocks everywhere so there is no other way to go for the player than going down and hitting that block (by pressing A, you guessed it).

This is how it looks with two players:

Pushy and Pully learning how to play

In this screen the player can learn also about the black block not beign able to be pushed, about poping blocks if they are together and finally about the match 3 combos with the diamond one all over the place. The bomb will be introduced in the next stage, the one that used to be the first stage of the game.

We honestly hope this helps players understand the core mechanics of the game better than with the other attemps we made.

Hi-Score Table

Another of the main components of the game is the hi-score table. So far it has not been there but now it was time to implement it.

As with old arcades there will be the 10 best scores saved on a table and once you beat one of them you’ll be part of that hall of fame (aka hi-score table).

I’ve been working really hard on having a save/load system ready to support this functionality. This includes consoles and each of them have a different system. Fortunately it’s finally implemented along with the table and enter name.

When you finish the game (because you defeated it or you lost all your lives) if you did hi-score you’ll see this screen:

Players entering names in the Hi-Score table

The first player appearing in there will be the one with the highest score to enter. In this case it’s Pushy (player 1) but it could have been Pully. Once you’ve entered the name the table will keep scrolling to show all the scores that have been saved.

We think it looks fantastic and gives the game that arcade feel that we wanted. How much do you like it?

1up conference in Belgium

We are going to go to the 1UP Conference in Belgium on February 15th and 16th. We’ll bring a demo of Pushy and Pully in Blockland so everybody can try the latest changes.

If you happen to be there please drop by to say hi and try the game! We may have some goodies to give away!

That’s all folks

It looks like we didn’t implement a lot of stuff but in reality the majority of the work was made for the saving/loading system of the hi-score table.

From now we will be focused on finishing a polished demo for the 1UP Conference and we’ll start coding the second world as soon as possible.

Stay tuned and see you in the next update!