Greebroll Journal 05 - An Actual Game
After hundreds of days at my computer repetitively making levels, seeing no light at the end of the tunnel just digging away at it I have finally reached the end. All of the Typo level have been completed with a huge seven-part Typo final level as well as all 40 Special levels (I won't reveal the Special levels away). I am up to the part where I go through and test each level to make sure they all work which takes up a tiny portion of time.
To any of those game devs out there, you might understand I feel this slight sense of vulnerability in that now I can't just go back and keep doing what I was doing for the past year, I am free to work on all the other parts of the game. I cannot now just put my hopes on the future without knowing what will come of my current tasks, I am the future in a sense that now it is up to me to shape the path of all of these levels, all this effort.
Now I guess I should probably mention with the latest updates to Greebroll, it appears that the next version to release will be a Steam Greenlight Beta which will not be free.
Now the main reason the next version will not likely be free is because instead of having just a tour mode, it now features the level packs menu all set up correctly. By that I mean as you go through the levels you go onwards and unlock the next few progressively.
Having the progression in place allows the game now to be actually playable to navigate from menu to menu and it increases the hours of gameplay by a very very large amount.
Here's how the pack progression works:
This is the Voxel Menu.
At the start all of the levels will have a black border.
A Black Border means they have not been attempted yet.
A Green Border means that they attempted a level but gave up on it and went to try a different level instead.
A Gold Border means that they have completed the level.
Now what about the red stamp?
Well halfway through the game you unlock a mode called 'Gross Trails' where it leaves permanent trails behind which is shone on lots of the images posted like this:
If you complete the level with Gross Trails turned on, it earns you that stamp as well as giving the golden border if it hasn't already been completed.
Most of the modes revolve around the Level packs as by completing the levels you will be able to unlock extra levels for survival/knockout mode.
With an intro to the game done and a goal in the game completed I was ready to do the credits before the other game modes.
I decided that I wanted the credits to be spinning and rotating unlike a black screen with white text scrolling as it would fit the theme of the game. So I knuckled down for two long days and came up with the ending credits so for the sake of explaining the details, I've got some development screenshots to show.
So here we have the workflow of the credits as they were being designed.
As you can see I have the workflow slightly claustrophobic and cluttered when I'm working with these rigid and intense sections of the game however when I'm designing the levels I have it all open.
Now with that shown, here is the Curves on the Credits animation to give you a fair idea of what is going on.
There you can see there was quite a fair amount of movement but it was mostly booleans, on and off switches which were running the animation. Most of the things in the scene e.g. renderers where constantly alternating so that's the main blue key-frame chunk of the curve sheet.
And how could I not forget, these are some of the screenshots to show you what it looks like.
I covered the names so that it would be revealed when somebody actually gets to the credits after the release. I had set the background shell object up with the fog and transparent texture so when it is in game and live, it fakes this strangely smooth glass material.
With that said, I think I should wrap this Journal up and head back onto this game as I hope to get it finished before the start of October.
Happy gaming, fellow gamers/indie devs.
