This is a WIP of a small game I’m developing for Android. Webplayer can be played here: Journeyballs webPlayer.
It’s a 6 level demo, with difficulty level increasing quite rapidly due to its shortness.
Controls:
You just press LMB (or SPACE) to push forward. Aim is to reach the green exit, while hitting (and sticking) to all white balls for points.
As of now, it’s just a 1-day game, inspired again by faultymoose’s 30 Games in 30 Days self-challenge (check his 1-day games: they’re awesome!).
For the 2D flavor I used the awesome 2D Toolkit, animations are made with HOTween, and the old-school sounds are created with the great sfxr.
I plan to add more elements (balls that change your direction or speed, obstacles, etc.) and a lot more levels, a smoother increase in difficulty, and then release it as my first Android game.
Any thoughts would be welcome, and here are a couple of screenshots:
[EDIT] Some screenshots of the new polished look for Android/iOS release (soon :P)
Journeyballs main menu (background will vary depending on the last level played)
Journey selection screen
Level from the first tutorial journey
Sample level
And here is the current gameplay video (alpha 0.1.041)
Fun concept and cute graphics. I thought the gameplay might have been too simple, but was pleased to find that levels 5 and 6 upped the difficulty (Ugh level 6!!) and some of the additional features you mention could make it very challenging indeed! Nice work.
I started easily because with my last WIP (Passive Aggressive Defender) I had people telling me it was too difficult. This time I plan to increase the difficulty slightly and introduce new gameplay elements with each level, to make it more interesting. I hope I will manage
Oh, and that’s a great score, but I managed to beat you (with many retries): 23369
Wow, I love the concept, and the positive feedback you get after every stages feels so good! I also think you will need to introduce new interesting gameplay elements. Maybe have some devices that make the ball go in other directions or make the ball be thrown with a different effect (boomerang effect, etc).
Thanks Salim. Those elements you mentioned are some of the things I plan to implement, though I hadn’t thought of the boomerang effect: will look into it
Right now I’m adding a From option to HOTween, and then I’ll be back to creating some kind of editor for the game levels.
P.S. the first page of The Girl and the Robot looks so enticing! Sadly I couldn’t go further because of a server error, but I’ll try again later.
I must admit, when I first saw the first image I didn’t think I was going to think much of it… but how wrong I was. It was a really nice experience to play. Well done indeed.
@ar0nax: glad you had some fun About the buttons, you mean the top rectangles that appear with part of the score? If so, yup, it was my intention (but I think I will change them). If not, and you’re referring to the “retry”/“next” buttons, it’s an error that I don’t have on my computer: could you please tell me more about the parts that are missing?
@fallingbrickwork: thanks Matt I found myself actually engaged in playing this, in spite of its simplicity, and building levels is very funny. Can’t wait to do more of it.
@ar0nax: oh damn, that shouldn’t happen, those areas are perfectly transparent. Thanks a lot for showing it to me. 2D Toolkit must be making some mess, I’ll check if there’s any info about that. Also, I hope I’m not annoying you too much, but seeing that I see everything correctly, could you tell me what OS, browser, and possibly WebPlayer version are using?
If I squint and look really hard, I can also see the edges ar0nax was mentioning, my guess is he’s running a higher contrast/brightness on his monitor so spotted them first. As to why they are there… well… hmmm…
Edit: On second thought, higher contrast wouldn’t show in a screenshot! I guess ar0nax just has some untold mystical abilites
I tried that, by capturing a screenshot and hyper-contrasting it in Photoshop, but I still can’t see the edges I read that they might be possibly caused by a setting of 2D Toolkit, but it simply changes the way a texture is saved. After that, I don’t understand how the same texture can have different alpha depending on the computer… it’s kind of scary. Anyway, tomorrow morning I’ll try to re-upload it with those settings changed.
@clxyeah, @rextr09: thanks a lot, I’m so glad you found it interesting
@NomadKing, @ar0nax: I finally (!) could see the non-transparent areas when I published to my Android phone, and I can’t find a way to show them correctly. Just wrote the guys at 2D Toolkit hoping they’ll have a solution
i use mac with google chrome (and latest version of the unity webplayer), the monitor is Nec LED (ummm dunno the model, was on the computer from work), it might be a problem with that 2D toolkit, messing up with alpha from the textures perhaps.
The guys at 2D Toolkit were awesome, and in spite of the weekend we had a dense mail exchange until they found the issue
Actually, it’s caused by the fog. For the background, I use a very saturated purple fog, which messes up with the alpha on Mac and Android machines. It looks like it’s a Unity bug, so I’ll have to go without the fog (anyway, I meant to change the background when moving to Android)
Gotta say, I think you have a gem here. This seems like it could make it to the top of the charts in the App store once you’re done with it(that’s me hoping you find a way to get it on the iOS App store). Whatever route you take with this, I’m sure it’ll do extremely well and I wish you the best of luck. Can’t wait to see more!
