I do love these final stages of game development where everything you’ve had scribbled down from ideas to character designs to neat little effects comes together and you get a screen full of activity.
I am a huge fan of keeping the screen busy but not too busy. There is a fine line.
I’m also loving handing some of my game assets over to static Photoshop created images. It gives me the ability to better match and marry the colour schemes.
I have a wealth of sprite / tile art on my machine so it’s always a thrill to sift through some work that is years old to find a cool new starting point. Sometimes the work just fits. Sometimes it needs a little tweak to fit the style that I’m after for the game.
I think I’m pretty close to completing Dragons now. (I had played around with different game titles but realised in the end I rather like the simplicity of calling a game Dragons.)
I have balanced the attack vs defence vs goals to a decent level – certainly enough to provide a casual challenge.
Level times are at around 1 – 1.5 minutes on average. Plenty long enough for a casual game.
What I hope to complete before I publish the game is some balance in the scoring system. Just now there isn’t much variety in the scoring and I’m a believer in spreading the scoring based on how much skill / effort was required on the part of the player to actually achieve the score.
All in all a good development and a thrill to be working with lots of colour again.
I intend to write about the development process in a little more detail soon as well as providing a few pointers on how I create my 2D sprites / tiles.
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[…] I should share. When I first considered how the game would look I settled on a full screen scene. I blogged how excited I was about this and that I could finally sit back and create full screen renderings in Photoshop. I’m using […]