Since this game contains a level editor, it’s pretty important for me to have the gameplay ironed out solid before I beta the game and have players creating levels. So I’ve been adjusting little things about how the bombs work and whatnot so that I don’t have to change much after the game is “in the wild”.

We’re coming to the end of the fourth week of dev on this project, and so far I’ve been really pleased with how things have been coming together. Not everything is perfect, and there’s a way to go before it’ll be ready for the final release, but I’m pretty hopeful that I’ll have a for-pay beta going next week (like Minecraft / Wolfire do.) The main things that will be done after that is bug fixing, graphics, and the single player campaign. As well as integration with Game Center or whatever.

Nan has noted that some of the levels I design are outrageously difficult, so I’ve enlisted her to design some easier levels. Difficult levels are challenging, but sometimes they just aren’t much fun at all. Getting the right balance between “challenging” and “infuriating” isn’t always easy. But I guess that’s where having say, 100 levels or so in the game is smart. If I only have 10 or so, the curve is going to be really steep. It’s okay for the last 10 levels of a 100 level game to be near impossible, but not for the 10th level of a 10 level game.

One of the things I really miss about python / PHP when doing C / C++ work is the lack of handy standard library goodies. I just spent the last few minutes rounding up a md5_digest and a base64_encode, base64_decode function for my codebase so I can start doing some web requests. I’m also going to have to re-hack my web code to work better, since CURL has too many dependencies, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else available, so I’ve got my own silly web request maker. Along with that I’ve got things like urlencoding, and whatnot, that I get to implement. A bit slow going.

-Phil

This entry was posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at 6:45 pm and is filed under dynamite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.