Hey folks,
My name is Ben Wilson (zerofiftyone), and for the past few months I've been working on making SMITHEREENS. It's a project that spun out of a really quick prototype I made in a weekend which, when I showed a few friends, I realised had some potential if it were fleshed out bit more.
The game is inspired by Hexagon by Terry Cavanagh, and to a lesser extent Super Meat Boy. For a while, I was really drawn to games of that style which had the fast paced "die and retry" gameplay loop. They're games that are extremely difficult and challenging, but have this way of encouraging the player to keep trying regardless. As I thought about it some more, I realised that what these games have in common is that they minimise the penalty for failure. When you die in Super Meat Boy, you're able to try again and be back in the game in less than a second. There are no lives, and (aside from a few Iron Man achievements) no penalties for not getting it right the first time. Hexagon takes the same approach, as do others in its category.
I wanted to try and make a game in that style; fiendishly difficult, but always fair and respectful of the player's time. This game is my attempt at that. It's called SMITHEREENS.
A lot of what you'll see on this page will be early development footage; and you'll probably see bits and pieces that are broken or missing entirely. Nonetheless I'm going to try to keep this place updated as well as time allows.
If you want to keep up to date on development, follow this page, or visit my development blog at zerofiftyone.net.
