Gamocracy Dev Diary: Week Four

Greetings, citizens of our beautiful gamocracy!

The Bearded Ladies are back to full capacity after last week’s unacceptable sickness. (This european gamocracy should really have better universal healthcare ;) ).

So this here is a little of what we have been up to this week:

“Programmer admits error”

The week began with me admitting to a mistake. This is the first and last time this will happen ;).

The mistake(bug) in question broke old maps if new tiles/entities were added to the worlds in a certain order. This was discovered a few weeks ago but I pushed it aside claiming that we weren’t really going to make any real maps for a few weeks anyway.

Sadly those few weeks have gone and the art department (Kalle) was showing its fangs. So I had to spend the first part of the week rewriting large parts of the map and editor code which was a drag; but, like always, this allows you to add a few new features as well (iterative development ftw!).

After this “boring” part it really got much better. We nailed down some core design decisions (which we will show next week) and I got to play around with the winning entry from the last challenge: “The Magnet Hand”. I implemented the core features of the Magnet Hand and have working on level designs to complement it. I think it will work out great and we have some nice plans for it. One thing we most likely will drop however is the “swinging” part of the hand. We feel that the bouncy head already has the mechanics for most challenges where this would be used and restricting the magnet hand to vertical movement will complement the head better.

“Art Department is right… again!”

Apart from finding bugs, I spent most of this week creating art assets for the first world in the game. At the moment it includes rooftops, streets and a subway tunnel. All the sprites can be combined in lots of ways to build different variations of the buildings. That way I can easily add a new type of window or wall-detail to a building later on. The levels feel a bit empty as I still need to make the background art and more “stuff” to put on the streets to make the city really come alive.

Making new art is fun… if it wasn’t for that .txt file where every single sprite (276 at the moment) needs to be manually labeled with coordinates and other data. I can’t recall that in the job description!

Taking of my whining-hat for a brief moment, I’m really looking forward to improving the H7 animations (and tweaking the design a bit) and starting working on the art for the jungle world.

Don’t forget to keep the submissions coming in – you can enter and check out everyone’s entries over at your local official PlayStation forum: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Scandinavian languages. You can also get involved by casting your votes over at the Bearded Ladies facebook page.