The Bloody Glade 99.9% Complete

I just realized that it has been about 9 months since I posted about the progress of The Bloody Glade. At the time I estimated it to be 80% complete. For the most part that was accurate -- as with most projects during the later phase it became difficult to maintain pace and focus, so I took a break from it to focus on other projects and allow my enthusiasm for the project to be naturally rejuvenated.

I find that pushing myself too hard with a single project for too long eventually starts to rapidly diminish how much I like the game and to hinder progress. Taking a break and coming back to it later gives some perspective and a fresh eye.

I recently took to fixing those bugs and issues that I had been avoiding, and added a bit more polish, tweaked the gameplay and stats a bit, and removed a few game mechanics. One of the main mechanics I disabled was quick-time events for spell-casting. Previously you'd need to perform rapid tap or swipe motions in order to successfully cast a spell. In theory it sounds good, but in practice it felt like it interfered with the flow and pace of the game. So I decided to streamline and simplify it. I find the new, simpler version more fun.

A big problem I faced was performance on mobile devices. I found that creating enemy characters on the fly, as each stage progressed, was creating lag spikes and momentary freezes. It was nothing dramatic, but enough to provide an inferior gameplay experience to what I was experiencing on PC. I eventually found a simple solution -- simply pre-spawn all characters at the start of each level and enable / disable them as needed.

I've finished creating the promotional content and have thoroughly tested it on iPad and iPhone. There was an obscure crash that was happening during the final boss battle but, I think I've fixed it now. Another round of testing should verify this (hence me not making the 100% complete claim, and saying 99.9% instead).

That makes two games pretty much ready for release: McGrimm's Time Trap (yes, I still haven't released it) and The Bloody Glade. I'm still deciding which to focus on releasing first.

McGrimm's Time Trap

Last December I was on a plane returning from Cape Town to Durban and I spent the time contemplating game design ideas. The concept I came up with was a simple action-based evasion game where, instead of having computer-controlled opponents, it stores and repeats player-generated gameplay. Basically, you become your own opponent.

This evolved into a time-travel based concept where the player is cursed to repeat the same scenario over and over again (like in the movie Groundhog Day). Except, in my game, your previous incarnations would still be present. Occupying the same space as your previous selves would disrupt the space-time continuum, and so you must evade previous versions of yourself.

On the technical side there was a bit of work involved in order to store and replay the player's actions in a way that would not be too memory-intensive, but at a high enough resolution so as to be accurate. Fortunately it ended up working well without much hassle (basically I just store snapshots of the player character's state periodically and then, when replaying, use interpolation and extrapolation for generating state information between snapshots). The core gameplay was done over the course of the next few days.

Of course, adding polish and getting something that is bug-free and fluid enough to release ends up adding significantly more time to any project, and I (like many developers) tend to lose interest and thus neglect most of my projects after the initial creative proof-of-concept phase.

But I've been trying to be more disciplined and follow through on my projects, so I recently spent some time getting the game ready for release on iOS. It's pretty much done, I just need to push through that last cumbersome step of actually deploying it.

I struggled to think of a good name. I ended up going with "McGrimm's Time Trap". I  don't dislike the name, but don't think it's amazing either. It sounds pretty generic, but I can't think of anything better.