Spooky Forest Screenshot

Just a quick screenshot of the spooky Zygotes forest.

Note the new character sprite & placeholder forest tileset (with climbable vines!). Most of the recent work is hard to show in a screenshot but the health/damage/lives systems are in place, though not quite finished. There's a lot of work left to do on the combat system & movement in general, just getting the feel right. Oh yeah, & then I guess we have to make it a game. Hmm. All in good time?

Jack Ham Zero Debriefing

Considering the fact that this is a game built on the foundation of failed levels from the second game that I ever made, I'd say Jack Ham Zero turned out pretty well.

HOT POTATOES:

Some good, challenging puzzles, a badass soundtrack, & that trademark sense of humor upon which the Potato Clock Games empire is built all conspire to make this game just barely worth playing. I think it's better than Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations, so I guess it's doing what a sequel is supposed to do. ATTABOY!

COLD POTATOES:

I mean, yeah, it's not actually good, but I can hardly hold that against the poor guy. If I'm forcing myself to be critical, though, I think the difficulty ramps up a little too fast, probably because the game started out as Maze of Tribulations "Brutal Mode." The early levels could stand to be a bit less. Brutal, I mean. I don't actually like the action sequences much (space shooter, sword-em-up, minecarts), they mostly just distract from the puzzling. So do things like lives, score, passwords (as opposed to auto-saved progress), limited restarts (because of limited lives), enemies all over the place that kill you if they barely touch you. I think this would have been a better game without all of those things.

CONCLUSION:

Look, people, there's going to be a third game in this series, like or not. I've got a pretty good idea now of what it's going to look like. Most of the problems identified above are easy fixes & that just leaves me to concentrate on the fun stuff: puzzles, jams & Jack Ham lore.

CockBlockaz Puzzle Select / Unlock System Design

The tutorial sequence is complete, I think, & I made a handful of new game-proper puzzles along the way. So, moving on, I dug out the sort-of-design doc for the CockBlockaz puzzle select system:

Sort of nestled in between doodles & notes on binary search trees. The idea is that you have this grid with the tutorial sequence in the middle; each of the other gridspaces represent individual puzzles. Completing a puzzle unlocks any adjacent still-locked puzzles, with the more difficult puzzles being at the outside edge.

I like it, aesthetically, & it imposes a nice constraint on how many puzzles I need to make. In order for this system to work, with the tutorial sequence in the middle, there obviously needs to be a middle square. So if I want the grid itself to be a perfect square, that means that the length of its side needs to be an odd number. A 5x5 grid would only hold 25 puzzles, that seems a bit skimpy. 9x9, forget about it, I don't want to be making CockBlockaz puzzles for the rest of my life. 7x7 seems like a good size & it gives me an exact number of puzzles to shoot for; 48 plus the tutorial sequence. I'm probably like halfway there at the moment.

Aesthetics aside, I think it's important for a puzzle game like this to give players a chance to quit a puzzle that they're stuck on & try another one. The obvious option is to just make all of the puzzles available from the start, which I think is a good design decision for a puzzle game, but I also think that unlocking levels like this provides a nice sense of progression while leaving the player with lots of available puzzles at any given time.

I haven't decided exactly how I want to implement this system at code-level, but the overall project is small enough that I feel Ok about just cracking a beer, banging out some code, & seeing what happens. Here we go!

CockBlockaz Tutorial Sequence

In the CockbBlockaz demo, the tutorial levels include text at the top of the window which basically amounts to "HEY DUMBASS, THIS IS WHAT I'M TRYING TO TEACH YOU." Which is fine, but I like the idea of a tutorial that teaches the rules of the game without any text or arrows or whatever. Just assume that the player will try hitting the arrow keys & let the learning experience build from there. I found these notes which I'm basically sticking to:

I guess you can ignore the search tree stuff & the dino-rooster man & the poem about Steven Segal. I ended up combining points 1 & 2 in the sequence & am working on #5 at the moment. I'm coming up with new puzzles as I go & am pretty happy with how things are coming together.

Zygotes Update: Platforming Engine

Just a few quick screenshots to show that the platforming engine for the new Zygotes minigame is more or less complete. Well, not more, definitely less. Pretty much done, I guess, is what I meant.

Introducing Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2

So next up is the blandly titled Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2. It's a sort of sokoban-ish puzzle game. It is inspired by / totally rips off a little demo game called Combiblock by this guy called Hrothgar which you can check out here, as of this writing. I've already got a demo version of CockBlockaz up on the Potato Clock Games website if you want to check it out.

The game works like this: you move a block around; when you touch other blocks they stick to you; & the goal is to exit the board after collecting all of the blocks. Pretty simple. There are a few other gameplay mechanics thrown in to complicate things but I think it's overall a respectably elegant puzzle game. The basic game engine is complete & I've got a few puzzles made already. So here's what's left to do:

1. Rework the tutorial sequence to teach the game mechanics without any text.
2. Design & implement a puzzle select / puzzle unlock system.
3. Design & implement a game save / load system.
4. Make some more puzzles.
5. Write a soundtrack.
6. Make a title screen, options menu, etc. All that little stuff.

My goal is to have this finished in a month & a half, which may be overoptimistic. Points 5 & 6 in the list above might push that date back, but we'll see.

Jack Ham Zero Official Release

Jack Ham Zero: Caverns of the Heart is complete & available for download from the Potato Clock Games website. Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack of the Heart is available as well.

I'll leave you with the game's intro text:

"Mayday, mayday, George Washington here with an urgent message from the past. Electro-gravitational time-space history waves are undulating across the cosmos. There is only one possible source: JACK HAM. Only you can stop him. Benjamin Franklin estimates the wave will crest on December 21, 2012. Franklin is kind of a douche but he just might be right. You must stop Jack Ham before it is too late! George Washington over and out."