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.

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.

Shroomsters

I've been working on a casual game, targeted at iPhone and Android, called Shroomsters. I was initially inspired by an old game I loved as a kid, Wonder Boy 3: the Dragon's Trap (I re-played it again recently). However, as development progressed, it morphed into something quite different. At some stage I thought it would be interesting if we reversed the situation from Mario Brothers, and have mushrooms as the good guys against evil Italion plumbers. So the main protagonists are mushrooms, though the evil plumbers concept never materialized.

When I was in primary school and high school, I was spent a lot of time day-dreaming and drawing, though after school I focused on other things and neglected drawing / illustration altogether. For this project I decided to do the art myself, and so I picked up illustration again (this time in Photoshop, occasionally scanning in hand-drawn art and re-creating it on PC). Although the art style is very simplistic, but I'm quite happy with the style of the end result.

Similarly, musicianship is something that I was passionate about that I have neglected in recent years, so I decided to make the music myself. I deliberately went for an old-school chiptunes feel, inspired by the music of the old 8-bit and 16-bit platform games, and arcade games of that era. Examples of games whose music I particularly liked are Sonic the Hedgehog, Wonderboy 3 and Ghosts 'n Ghouls.

The game features four campaigns, each with its own theme. These are differentiated by their visual backdrops, audio tracks and play styles (for example, some favour puzzle-type play, others favour the good old-fashioned left-to-right platformer style). Additionally, each campaign features a different (though sometimes overlapping) set of enemy monsters. The campaigns are called 'Mushroom Dawn', 'Ice Crags', 'Enchanted Garden' and 'Apocalypse City'.

The game was developed using the Unity engine. All programming was done in C#.