#puddledockgames

Howdy gamedev! (I’ve been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption lately)

We made some good progress last week, defining how the mines will work in the game, and trying to add more gameplay elements in. 

In the game you can find followers that will hover around you and probably provide some kind of bonus or do something cool...once we figure it out. You can only have 1 active follower at a time, so I added in this nifty device that will let you choose which of your followers you want with you.

Yesterday I added some spooky cobwebs into the mines. I probably should have added them before Halloween, but I didn’t think of it :(

The cobwebs will slow down the player when they pass through them. They also slow down enemies, but there’s a bug right now where enemies won’t even go into the webs 90% of the time because they view them as impassable objects...and I don’t want the enemies to be that smart, for now.

This week my brother is getting married (woop woop!) and we have family coming into town for the wedding, so gamedev may be a bit sporadic for us. I’m focusing on adding different obstacles and traps into the mines to make them more difficult to navigate. Not sure how much I’ll get in this week, but hopefully I’ll have something to show off by this time next week.

Sam and I decided we would wait until after Thanksgiving to record a video showing off the state of the game since we’ll be preoccupied this week, and then we are heading up to Virginia for the week of Thanksgiving to visit family and go hiking in the Shenandoah mountains! Which means I have a bit more time to cram some more features into the game and fix some lingering bugs.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

I’m writing this update on Friday, and setting it to post on Monday. I’ve never done this before so we’ll see if it actually works.

As I mentioned last week, Sam and I are on our honeymoon cruise for the week, so you won’t see many (if any) updates on our social media this week. Once we come back with rested brains, we’ll be ready to hit the ground running and have lots to show off.

Until then, here’s a sneak peek at some art I’ve thrown into the prototype in preparation to start showing gameplay soon. It’s all still considered placeholder at this point. But I figure it’s better than solid color rectangles and circles moving around the screen.

Potential player character - when Sam first saw this guy she said he looked like toast. So we may end up naming him Toast lol

Enemy the first

Some sort of crafting machine

Last week was nothing but prototype work. It was mainly more systems work, but more for gameplay elements and less for things like dialog systems and whatnot. Still no art has been done for it yet, I’m sad to say. Depending how things go this week, I may take some time in the second half of the week to do some basic placeholder art.

The reason I’ve been pushing so hard on just getting systems in is because Sam and I leave on our honeymoon cruise this Saturday. So my focus for all of August has been to get as much of the foundation made as possible so when we get back I can really sit down and focus on design. It’s been a bit of a struggle to be honest. We’ve both been going at full steam for the past several months wrapping up games and starting new ones. Our brains are very much ready to just check out and relax. 

My hope is switching off for a week will allow the creativity to come rushing back and I’ll be able to generate new and interesting ideas to implement in this new game.

So not much of an update this week, and more than likely there won’t be an update next week since we’ll be on the cruise. If I do get some art done this week maybe I’ll just post some teaser images just so I don’t lose my weekly posting streak.

I promise we’ll have some cool stuff to show off soon. Thanks for reading! 

- Matthew

Not too much to update from last week actually. I spent most of the week just adding sound effects into lvlDown...which were sorely needed. I’m always amazed how much better a game plays and feels once sound effects are added. Unfortunately it’s never a quick process for me to figure out what the right sounds are. It’s a lot of adding in sound files, playing the game, taking out the sound, adding a  new one, repeat.

I also took some time on Friday to add in a few new particle effects to help the game feel juicier. Prior to this, when enemies or world objects were destroyed, they would just disappear and spawn some collectibles. Having the particle effect not only makes it more dynamic, but it’s also like a little reward/celebration for the player. I really like it! I also made objects shake when the player is hitting them. Gotta have that juice!

You can check out all these updates in all their glory over on the game’s itch.io page: https://puddledockgames.itch.io/lvldown

Unfortunately HTML seems to have some quirks with how it handles audio, so there may be some issues that I haven’t caught yet. Just let me know if you run into anything!

In other news: I did spend some time doing some tech tests for a potential new project. I want to make something a bit bigger, and so I worked on created a chunking system to split a large game world into individual chunks that can be saved and loaded on the fly. So I have that working now, and running at a good FPS, which means my game design plans might be feasible. I even have everything saving out to JSON already since I learned how to do that with lvlDown. 

I’m still not sure what the game is yet, but with lvlDown I wasn’t sure for a while, but just kept adding stuff until I figured it out, and I think it worked pretty well. So I may just end up doing that again. I kinda like that fluid process. There’s a good chance I’ll spend some more time this week trying to implement some other systems I want in the game--nothing really gameplay related, mainly just back-end tech. So we’ll see where that all goes.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Another week, another update!

We’re officially updating the Puddledock Games website so it looks fancy and shiny and can make it easier for us to show off what’s new and up and coming. Sam literally spent all weekend on it, and she’s knocking it out of the park. I really can’t wait to launch it. The goal is to hopefully wrap it up tonight.

The plan right now is to keep the blog on Tumblr and we’ll have a blog feed on the site so it can be viewed there. So the only change is that puddledockgames.com will take you to the website instead of directly to this blog.

In game news: I’ve just released lvlDown update 0.3 on itch.io. Last week’s focus was on adding more variety to the game, mainly by way of new enemies. Now there’s three new baddies for you to deal with as you venture deeper into the world:

Sleyem - a poison specialist (and Sam’s personal favorite):

Thumper - a fire specialist:

Eyecer - an ice specialist:

In addition to the new enemies, you’ll also have to navigate around new Lava tiles.

These changes serve to make the game much more difficult, even adding another level to the world. Everything that has been added has been focused around the central theme of the game: planning your movement carefully. We’re really trying to keep this in mind when Sam and I brainstorm new ideas, always asking ourselves how new additions impact the player’s movement decisions, and what we can do to make those decisions feel important and fair.

I also added a super hard to find secret in the game. The goal is to add one each major update, mostly to be mean. Mwuhahahah!!! There’s a hint about what it is on game’s devlog.

You can check out the full update notes over on the game page here: https://puddledockgames.itch.io/lvldown/devlog/41111/update-03

And you can always join the Puddledock Discord to get in on the conversation to help mold the game. We’re always tuning and balancing as we go, so any community feedback toward this effort is much appreciated.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

I’ve just released the 0.2 update for lvlDown over on itch.io! It wound up being a pretty massive update, especially considering I only worked on it for less than a week.

The focus for the past week was on gameplay. I added in potions, which drastically affect the rest of the game. There’s fire, ice, poison, and health potions. Enemies can now have these effects applied to them as well, and so if you get attacked by an enemy that has the fire effect, you will take extra damage. But if you take a fire potion, then you are immune to the bonus damage. Likewise, if you take a potion and an enemy doesn’t have the same effect, they will take extra damage. 

I also added bombs and traps, which also leverage the new potions as the type of bomb or trap you place is based on your active effect.

The coolest change in my opinion is the health potion update. Previously health potions worked the same as they do in every other game: you drink a health potion and you gain HP. Now, the health potion is a “health steal” effect, meaning after you take it, the HP you get is based on damage caused to enemies. So if you damage an enemy for 2 points, you will get 2 points of HP added to your health as well. 

I like this change a lot because it means you have to earn your health and can’t just run into a swarm of enemies and chug a bunch of health potions at the last second. It also means if you have the Follower in your party that grants you bonus damage with your hammer, you will recover even more HP when using the health potion. Knowing when and where to take your potions is just as important as planning your next step.

Bombs, traps, and potions are all step based too. So after you use any of them, you only have a limited number of steps to take in game before they go away (or detonate!).

So yeah, overall the game became much more difficult, and these changes really play to the “think before you move” theme of the game. I’m really happy with the way the game has evolved over the past week. It’s becoming much closer to the style of gameplay I envisioned from the beginning. 

I’m curious to hear feedback and suggestions from others, so feel free to hop into the Puddledock Discord to let me know what you think.

I’m extremely excited for this update because Slamoids! is officially ready to be wishlisted on Steam! The store page was approved on Saturday which means everyone can now see the game in all it’s glory. Every wishlist helps with the game’s visibility, so please head on over to Steam and add it to your wishlist. 

The game will sell for $0.99, just like Star-Pit Starship. BUT!!!! for the first week it will be discounted by 15%! 

Here’s what the game is about:

Slamoids! is an intense, re-playable, single player arcade score-chaser. Dodge and shoot slamoids as they hurtle across the screen, while also avoiding the ever growing and shrinking red ring that surrounds you. Slamoids! is a perfect coffee break game for when you only have a few minutes to spare

And here’s the awesome trailer that Sam put together:

Slamoids! releases on August 8th, so get hyped! I’ll be spreading the word as much as possible leading up to the release. Feel free to join me :D

In other news...lvlDown has been out for a week now. I was able to get a lot of gameplay updates completed in that time, and will be releasing an update tomorrow (Tuesday 7/10) over on itch.io.

If you haven’t started playing lvlDown yet, this update will be a great time to jump in. Gameplay is much deeper now with a lot more challenge and opportunity for making your way to the deepest level in the world. 

I’ll have a full breakdown of all the changes tomorrow once the game is up and ready, so stay tuned!

As always, thanks for reading this far!

Love,

Sam and I were brainstorming names ideas for the HTML5 game last week and we finally hit on something that we both really like. Ready for it?

We’re calling it: lvlDown

It’s a play on “level up” and works on a couple different levels. It’s “Down” because the player is working their way downward through the levels to get to the big baddie at the end. And we decided to shorten “level” to “lvl” because the levels themselves are small in size, and we wanted to emphasize that. What do you think?

We’ve already started drafting some logo ideas, and I’m really liking the direction we’re going with it. I’ll share that as soon as we have something final.

And now for the usual rundown of things I got done last week:

projectiles: the player and enemies can now shoot projectiles. This addition makes the game much tougher since now enemies can still attack you even if they are in a position where they can’t get immediately adjacent to you. To keep things fair, I made it so I can limit how far the projectile can travel across the level. 

end boss: to be fair the end boss right now is just the same zombie sprite as the regular enemies, but with way more hp and attack damage. Still, this was an important step for getting the core game loop completed. It’s now possible to win or lose the game, which means technically I now have a minimum viable product (minus the art). When I first started spawning the boss in the bottom level, I forgot to limit the spawn to only 1 boss, so this is what it looked like the first time:

menu cleanup: I already had the screen flow for the main menu and pause menu in the game, but it was a mess. So I got that all cleaned up and updated to reflect the controls and settings needed for this game.

save/load: over the weekend I started getting save/load implemented. I have it mostly working now--though there’s still a few things I need to save out. Unfortunately I discovered HTML5 has a limitation on saving files, so what I may do is keep the HTML5 version of the game shorter so it’s reasonable to play in one session, and then offer a downloadable version of the game that is bigger and supports saving. If we really wanted/needed to get saves working on HTML5 I’d have to set up a server to store it all on, but I’ve never done that before and not really sure how it all works. So something to keep in mind, but definitely won’t happen right away.

Those are the major highlights. I got a lot of UI tweaking done and just general gameplay improvements/bug fixing as well. I want to knock out the rest of save/load today, and do some quick gameplay tuning so the game is actually fun to play as is. The big push for this week will be the art.