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.

The Bloody Glade Hits 80% Pre-Alpha Milestone.

What I'd ordinarily consider a reasonable bedtime (for a work night) came and went about an hour ago. However, I've been thoroughly absorbed in trying to complete a few tasks in my current pet project, The Bloody Glade.

Levelling up... you have to press the button at the top right to select new spells.

I still have 3 spells to polish off, various bugs to fix, a few extra enemies to finish off (need to make them more interesting), and a bunch of miscellaneous tidbits to deal with. But I looked at the plan I had laid out for myself and it seems to progressing well. According to my previous schedule it looks like I am 80% of the way to what I had planned for the initial "somewhat finished" alpha version.

The Earth Shatter spell spews rocks and dust from the ground around the player. This is the lowest level variant. As you level up the spell it becomes more potent and visually dramatic.

Scope creep has unfortunately kicked in, though I'm trying my best to resist it. I'm keeping to my "cool stuff can be added with updates, get the initial game out there" philosophy and trying to complete it as per my initial design. With that as the goal it looks as if I'm almost there. But, of course, when you think it's 90% complete, it tends to only be about 50% complete in reality, so don't judge me if I'm wrong here (and I probably am).

The glorious early stages were characterized by fresh ideas and cool new features rolling in hard and fast. The late stages tend involve dealing with an endless list of bug fixes and hours and hours and hours of work that doesn't yield obvious tangible results to a casual onlooker.

Anyway, I built the latest version and grabbed a few screenshots of each of the three current playable characters in action. I dumped a few screenshots above (because reading without pictures to break up the text is boring). From here on there are only screenshots...

The wizard's level 1 fireball spell. It also looks far progressively more impressive as you level it up. 

Hard to tell from the image, but there is a spike trap near the wizard with metal spikes that periodically thrust up and do damage to anybody foolish enough to be in close proximity. I want to add two more trap types, though doing so will add about two extra more nights of development (which, given that I only get a few nights a week to work on this, equates to about an extra week). Should be worth it though.

The wizard's fireball spell has been levelled up and now does explosive splash-damage.

 Various stats are displayed when you complete a level. I want a social aspect that allows you to compare how you did, what items you collected, which spells you used etc to other players (the 'other players' button accesses this functionality). I'm probably going to delay this for now though.

Selecting a new spell when you level up.

The abomination character is so bad-ass that skeletons pretend to be asleep as he approaches just so that he doesn't hurt them (not really though, I actually just insta-killed them with a debug cheat key).

The enchantress has an area-of-effect lightning storm spell.

If you look carefully you can see the purple-robed fella to the right dropping a ring. The inventory system is deliberately very simplistic (I want to provide non-casual aesthetics to a more casual audience).

An ice storm spell inspired by fond memories of Warcraft 2 (which happens to be one of the old-school soundtracks I've often listened to while developing this all).

The wasteland scenario -- I am very fond of the ground texture.

The little critter to the left just stole a health potion (he gives a hearty little giggle and taunts you as he does so). A friend who play-tested for me protested that it wasn't clear that you were about to be robbed -- that I should make it more obvious. "Bah! Nonsense!" was my response. I like it just the way it is. You'll know better next time.

Bloody Glade Update

The Bloody Glade is a side-scrolling hack-'n-slash / light RPG targeting mobile devices (primarily iPad and iPhones right now). I started work on it at the start of the year and have devoted a lot of time to it.

It's larger in scope than some of my previous personal projects, but I tried to keep the scope of the game at least manageable. I was inspired to create it when playing through the original Golden Axe (I have it as part of a retro Sega game pack for PS3). I spent a lot of time in the dingy arcade section in a shop down the road from my childhood home playing it when I was about 9 years old, so it brought back fond memories.

I could complete Golden Axe in about 20 minutes, and I liked the idea of a fairly short session where you could actually get through a game, even if it is fairly mindless and straight-forward button-mashing (though I've tried to add a bit more strategy into The Bloody Glade).

A few nights back I spent a lot of time creating a new world map (I wasn't satisfied with what I had before). I wanted to give the player the option to choose between various routes to give some incentive to replay the game once completed. Getting the map to have the feel I wanted was quite frustrating and time-consuming, but I'm happy with the end-result.

At the moment I am planning on making 3 playable characters: the wizard, the enchantress and the abomination. I have around 8 enemy character types so far. Getting enough content in is a concern (the moment a game starts visually resembling the larger, professional games people are used to, they start to expect more overall), but I'll deal with that later.

The spells I've implemented so far are a fireball, an ice orb, hailstorm (reminiscent of the ice blizzard in Warcraft 2), earth shatter (pretty much an earthquake) and lightning storm (which at the moment is a bit over-the-top, but fun). I have another one where a dragon swoops down partially implemented, though it looks pretty cheesy at the moment (a friend laughed when he saw it, that bastard).

The game has a few RPG elements, including a very basic inventory system and leveling
system. These have been deliberately keep very simple though, since I want to target a broader, more casual audience than the typical RPG player, and avoid overly complex game mechanics. At the moment, most of the game mechanics revolve around:

• selecting which characters to attack
• choosing when to consume health and mana potions
• deciding when to cast spells (some of which require quick-time events to be cast successfully) and who to target
• choosing which spells to learn when leveling up
• choosing a route to follow in the world map

I have a few plans for adding to this a bit (I want it simple, but not too simple, I don't want it to feel like a brainless exercise in simply tapping on bad guys). So far it actually feels fun so I'm feeling optimistic.

Below are a few of the items that have a chance of being spawned by slain enemies. Each item gives you a perk / buff. When you die there is a resurrection penalty (i.e. you can continue the game, but at a cost). One of the potential penalties is removing items you have collected.

The Bloody Glade Screenshots

I currently have three game projects on the go: No Crashy Spaceship (an infinite runner survival racing game with a Tron-like theme), Warsmith Zuul (a real-time strategy game) and, my most recent project, The Bloody Glade (a hack-n-slash action RPG slightly inspired by the original Golden Axe).

No Crashy Spaceship is almost finished, and I like to have more than one project on the go at a time (so that if I lose steam or become frustrated on one, I can switch to another temporarily). I was playing the original Golden Axe a few months ago (a childhood favourite), and I had the urge to put together a hack-n-slash game for the iPhone / iPad.

It's going pretty well so far so I thought I'd post some screenshots to show its progress.

One or two of the images are from a mock-up prototype, but most of them are plain screenshots. It's still a work-in-progress so some of it is still rough around the edges (the world map especially), but I'm still pleased with where it's at so far.