Alawishus Pixel is in playtest and getting some great feedback. It'll be a much better game because of it. When I first thought of the idea for the game, I decided to grab a pencil and paper instead of the keyboard and mouse. Even though I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, having thoughts and ideas on paper made all the difference for me. At least from the start it was clear to me the gameplay could stand as an allegory to the
Sisyphus story.
Alawishus
After a couple of failed attempts I settled on a draft of the look of Alawishus. I originally wanted him 16 pixels high. Since the tiles in the game were also 16 pixels high, the plan was to let him and the block fit into those tile high small spaces. After drawing the pixel art I decided it wasn't enough detail for a character that the player will be staring at for 40 levels, so I upped the height to one and half tiles high and the width to one tile wide. It worked well since keeping the block one tile high allowed puzzle opportunities for the block to go where Alawishus couldn't.
It's time for Alawishus Pixel to go into playtest for a while. I hope I can get some good feedback from the fine folks over there. In the meantime, I'll be checking out the other games in playtest and peer review and I'm looking forward to giving some feedback to the fine folks over there;) Soon, I'll post some concept art and maybe a version of the Tile Ripper utility I wrote which takes an image and returns another image with all the unique "tiles" found. Till then...
Some more things to do:
-Trial Mode
-Saving is implemented, but not fully tested.
-Redo some bitmap fonts so they look better.
-Some small sections of music and FX need to be finished.
-"De-brown" the graphics in the first several levels.
-Redraw the exit doors for the later levels.
On another note, I squashed an annoying bug that's been bothering me for a while. Not long ago I noticed the game would drop a bunch of frames right after a load. My initial though was "obviously, the garbage collector." Profiling revealed no problem at all in the GC. Nothing but a stray string here and there was being allocated after loading all the assets. I decided to ignore it for as long as could and instead just focus on the game.
Frog The Door's first commercial game is almost done. A few things to finish up before release:
-Scripting (tutorials and story)
-Finish up Music/FX
-Prolog/Epilog
-Polish (including rumble, timing and graphical tweeks, some minor bugs)
And on the community side:
-Evil/Not so Evil checklist and Indie games best practices.
-Playtest
