KzzzZZZzzT! Update #4 - Menus and a Save Feature

I decided not to continue doing level design this week and instead began work on placing the main menu, pause menu and adding a save feature. I haven't made any prettily designed interfaces, though. I'll work on making better design for the interfaces in a future update.

For now, here are some screenshots:

 
BONUS:

As some extra work, I decided to add gems into the game. Gems in the game work in a similar fashion to the gems from Crash Bandicoot. If you've never played Crash Bandicoot before, you had to break all boxes in a level in order to get a gem. In KzzzZZZzzT!, it's a little different. You don't have to break all the boxes, but you need to collect all the floating mini-collectibles (i.e. the crystals) in a level in order to grab the level's gem.

 

KzzzZZZzzT! Update #3 - Area 3: Frantic Factory

This week I've been working on the third of the five areas I plan for the game: The Factory Area. So far, I've only finished building the first level which includes new obstacles like:

Silly Looking Pistons

Conveyor Belts

Giant Turtle Turrets

And More Conveyor Belts. . .

I've also begun work on the game's level select screen. It's still at an unfinished state but you have to admit, the Rotating Level Select Wheel seen below is pretty neat.

That's all for this week. I plan to work more on the main game menus next week first before going back to do more level design because I think working towards making the game more playable even at its early state is very important.

KZT Has A GameJolt Page!

As promised, you can now follow KzzzZZZzzT! on its official GameJolt page!

http://gamejolt.com/games/kzzzzzzzzt/166162

Just make sure you have a GameJolt account, press that big green juicy Follow button and you'll be notified there each week. You can also access a huge library of other people's unique games as well!

KzzzZZZzzt! Update #2 - Introducing the First Prototype Gameplay Video!

It's finally here! After months of work, I've finally produced enough material to make a gameplay video featuring the game's early state. I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished so far, but there is still a lot more work to do and I'm going to need a bit more support. Here's how you can help:

I've gotten my sights on GameJolt.com being my first and main indie game site of choice to upload the game to. If you haven't heard, GameJolt also allows gamers to follow unfinished game projects and receive updates by the game's developer. I plan to make a GameJolt page for my game within a few days so you can follow the updates there. In fact, I even recommend you follow me on GameJolt rather than BlogSpot if you've been doing that. I can't make a game page immediately, though, because I need to make header and thumbnail art, first. I want to put a little more effort into those.

I don't need fans to cheer me on and compliment the stuff I create, necessarily. I just want people to follow something I'm making if they're genuinely interested in it so it doesn't fade into obscurity, even among my target audience. If you are interested, then you can let me know by following this game's GameJolt page when it's ready.

Thank you for reading, until next time!

KzzzZZZzzt! Dev Update #1 - Animations are Ani-mazing!

In the earlier days of this game's production, I didn't think animation would be something I would give two flying chicken nuggets about. Pretty much most movement by the game objects were stiff and linear. Until I started experimenting a bit and trying some different things with it and I started to see just how much potential it has to improve the game experience.

"Why is this important?" you might ask "I play video game's for the gameplay, not for pretty looking animations!!". That's a valid attitude to have but I believe that good animations play an important role not only on video games but on other forms of media as well such as CGI effects on movies and also cartoon animations, of course. Animations that look robotic or laggy can reduce the suspension of disbelief on any piece of entertainment by reminding the audience that what they're watching is an artificial work and not a look into a different reality.

For example, instead of a vertical wall barrier (seen at left of this paragraph) opening up and closing in a linear way, I changed it to slowly decrease in speed as it rose up. When it is closing, I made it seem like gravity is making it increase in speed as it fell and it would bounce when it hit the bottom before stopping. This makes it a little more fluid, thereby making it's game world a bit closer to its own reality.

(It's hard to see the animation properly because the gif framerate is so low, sorry about that.)

I made another gif to feature the animations better. In the one below. You can see how collected jewels are smoothly animated to move towards the top left HUD section. This makes for a really fluid and less robotic animation, almost magical you might say. Originally, the jewels would just move towards their target at constant speed.

You can also see how landing on a floating platform makes it realistically wobble up and down as if it really is trying to adjust to a new load. Originally, those platforms would remain static when landed on making it look stiff and unreal.

Notice how the platform at the end reacts to the player landing on it

In case you're curious, I was able to add these animations to these objects with the help of a free Unity scripting helper I stumbled upon called iTween. iTween is an easy-to-use animation system that has a lot of interesting features and parameters that can be entered to manipulate object movements to achieve results that would be extremely time-consuming to manually code on your own. It does take a bit of research and practice to learn how to use it though. You can check out the iTween website here. Again, it's free!

In this post, I only talked about movement animations and not sprite animations. Those are two completely different things. So far, I've made some pretty decent sprite animations, enough to give some game objects life, but nothing too impressive.

Before I end this post, I would like to show a couple more gif's I made showing some more early game footage. Enjoy!

A normal day of a character in a platformer

Those pipes look like fun

Additional notes:

• I've already begun adding sound effects to some of the game's events but I still plan to add some more before showing them on this blog for a more complete presentation. I could possibly show the first video teaser next week.



• So far, I would say 6 levels out of the planned 20 levels have complete level design. I would consider this good progress. Many assets required for these levels are already created so finishing the rest of the levels is going to take less and less time with the more game assets I make.
  
• The backgrounds are still too simplistic, I plan to work on them some more but I'm still going to focus on other aspects of the game first so this is something I won't be talking about until I become interested on decorating the backgrounds a bit more.
  
• Expect more updates within the week. :)
   

I'm Making A Crash-Bandicoot-Inspired 2D Platformer

I have been working on this idea I've had for a 2D platformer for over a year now and I have internally refused to make anything about the game public out of worry that it wasn't ready yet. Until today.

What the heck IS this game anyway?

The game's title is "KzzzZZZzzt!" (but you can also call it "KZT's Krazy Adventure").

It is a 2D platformer which is inspired heavily  by the Crash Bandicoot franchise. Each level is littered with jewels to collect and boxes to break. Collecting jewels are not for getting extra lives as you are allowed an infinite amount of deaths. Instead, the jewels, when they are all collected, are used to unlock a second ending of the game, just like in the original Crash game.

Jump and dodge your way through 15 levels, 5 boss fights, and 4 extra hidden levels. The game is divided into 5 game worlds: Testing Facility, Sewers, Factory, Laboratory, and Outer Space. I've included a variety of unique obstacles to complement the variety of game worlds.

Here are a few development screenshots showing the game's current state. Many game objects have already been designed but I have not begin work on background art yet.

Remember, all of these are development screenshots, they do not represent the final game.

 

I'm designing the game to be challenging to most players. It's going to be slightly more difficult than your average indie platformer. But it still can be enjoyed by all gamers of any platformer skill level.

The Game's Story
 I haven't thought about what the game's story is going be that much to be honest, but I do have a bit of a base idea:

The main villian is an evil scientist named Dr. Krazy. Dr. Krazy once discovered some red jewels wielding great electrical power buried beneath a small island in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. He named these jewels the 'Krazy Jewels' after his own name. Then after years of building his secret island base along with his nephew Dr. Wacko, he decides to test out the jewels on a prototype of a robot bent on world domination. The robot was named 'KZT' and was programmed to be used as a weapon of mass destruction. Unfortunately, the test failed and the robot escaped.

Thus starts the adventure of our main protagonist 'KZT'. Anything after that are just vague ideas at the moment. An engaging story is something most gamers want nowadays so I'll surely try to do I best I can in this department.

I'll get with another blog post next week to update anyone who wants to follow this game on the progress that's been made. Thanks for reading. See you next time!