This sprint has been used to polish a bit more how the game looks. That means adding some animations, new assets, sound effects, etc.

Before entering in details I’d like to explain two things:

I am adding a water mark to the images. I didn’t do it before because I wanted to show how good the sprites look like, but I think that’s a mistake. So from now on they’ll all have a water mark always. Sorry if it bothers too much.

Due to that the gifs will lose some quality. I can assure you the game looks (and feels) much much better in real time. I try to keep gifs to 30fps, but the game runs much smoother. Also things don’t look blurry as in the gifs.

And now let’s see what happened this last sprint.

Second Player

The second player was already implemented in the game but it didn’t have any sprite. So that is solved this sprint. Here is how the second player looks like:

Second player while idle

And here you can see the animations in place:

Second player walking around

We liked it so much that we though about giving the possibility of choosing the character to the player or even using that sprite for the first player! But so far we’re going to keep it like it is in the gif.

Ready?… Go!

In order to give a bit more of a “gamey” feeling, I have decided to put some extra details. One of them is adding an “intro” to each level.

Feeling a bit more “game-y” already?

So every time you load a level you’ll see a Ready?? Go screen during a couple of seconds before starting the game itself.

This also allows the player to have a look at the stage so that the start is not so sudden as it was.

Stage Clear

Same as with the previous addition, now the end of the stage has some seconds showing a Stage Clear screen.

This is also the introduction to another extra function which is the star rewards. I’ll talk more about it in a later post when I have it propperly implemented. But the idea is that depending on how good you do in the stage you’ll get 1, 2 or 3 stars. You’ll need stars to progress in the game later, so this will encourage the player to do it better. It will also improve replayability.

So far, the stars given at the end are just random, just to see how it could look.

Some rewards at the end make it feel progress

Of course this Ready?? Go and Stage Clear screens are temporary. They may change the design later, as usual.

Score number animation

Another nice tweak related to that “gamey” feel. Now every time you kill a monster it shows a little score number animated on top of where the monster was.

Doesn’t it feel better to push the blocks now?

Since the animations of the monster dying and blocks popping are still missing this makes killing a monster feel way better.

I am thinking on adding also something similar for other actions that gives you points but not before implementing a propper score system which is still missing.

Animation tests

The designer is working hard at having the animations that we are missing. These are the blocks popping, the bomb exploding, the monsters dying and the player dead.

These are some tests of what could be the blocks popping animation:

We need to decide which one we will keep because personally I love both.

Two Player gameplay

I made a small video showing how the game would be played with 2 people. I usually try the game myself alone. So it’s a bit difficult to see how 2 people will play together. For this video I asked somebody else to sit with me and test the 2 player mode.

This is how it looks like so you can get a feel for it too:

Two real players together!

We clearly need to adjust the difficulty since now it’s too easy for both. But I think it’s going in the right direction.

New monster!

We are desinging also new monsters! This new one will be very different than the green ones. He will stay quiet somewhere, sleeping, snoozing… Until the player gets in his line of sight on the sides. Then he will cast a bolt that will go till the end of the playing area that can kill the player.

Introducing deadly bolt monster

The way to avoid that is to have anything blocking his line of sight. That means you can move any boxes around to protect yourself before passing close by and killing him.

It is still not implemented in game but that’s a work in progress. Can’t wait to test the gameplay with him.

That’s all folks!

I also fixed some bugs and polished a bit more, as usual. But since they were minor things I don’t think it’s worth to mention them.

That is all for now. The build is getting more and more complete! I’d like to keep introducing more “gamey” details as well as introducing new things (like new monsters, a boss, etc). So I can give it a more polished feel.

I hope you can see progress in these blog posts. Let me know if there is something you’d like me to talk about! See you in the next update.