Journeyballs WIP

Hello

This is a WIP of a small game I'm developing for Android. Webplayer can be played here: Journeyballs webPlayer.
It's a 6 level demo, with difficulty level increasing quite rapidly due to its shortness.

Controls:
You just press LMB (or SPACE) to push forward. Aim is to reach the green exit, while hitting (and sticking) to all white balls for points.

As of now, it's just a 1-day game, inspired again by faultymoose's 30 Games in 30 Days self-challenge (check his 1-day games: they're awesome!).
For the 2D flavor I used the awesome 2D Toolkit, animations are made with HOTween, and the old-school sounds are created with the great sfxr.

I plan to add more elements (balls that change your direction or speed, obstacles, etc.) and a lot more levels, a smoother increase in difficulty, and then release it as my first Android game.

Any thoughts would be welcome, and here are a couple of screenshots:





[EDIT]
Some screenshots of the new polished look for Android/iOS release (soon )


Journeyballs main menu (background will vary depending on the last level played)


Journey selection screen


Level from the first tutorial journey


Sample level

And here is the current gameplay video (alpha 0.1.041)

 

Fun concept and cute graphics. I thought the gameplay might have been too simple, but was pleased to find that levels 5 and 6 upped the difficulty (Ugh level 6!!) and some of the additional features you mention could make it very challenging indeed! Nice work.

23122 was my final score

 

Hey NomadKing, thanks for playing again

I started easily because with my last WIP (Passive Aggressive Defender) I had people telling me it was too difficult. This time I plan to increase the difficulty slightly and introduce new gameplay elements with each level, to make it more interesting. I hope I will manage

Oh, and that's a great score, but I managed to beat you (with many retries): 23369

 

Wow, I love the concept, and the positive feedback you get after every stages feels so good! I also think you will need to introduce new interesting gameplay elements. Maybe have some devices that make the ball go in other directions or make the ball be thrown with a different effect (boomerang effect, etc).

 

Thanks Salim. Those elements you mentioned are some of the things I plan to implement, though I hadn't thought of the boomerang effect: will look into it

Right now I'm adding a From option to HOTween, and then I'll be back to creating some kind of editor for the game levels.

P.S. the first page of The Girl and the Robot looks so enticing! Sadly I couldn't go further because of a server error, but I'll try again later.

 

the game is very fun, and not so easy at level 6

PS: your buttons are ment to look that way? (round corners 100% visible and rectangle corners 10-20% visible)

 

I must admit, when I first saw the first image I didn't think I was going to think much of it... but how wrong I was. It was a really nice experience to play. Well done indeed.

Best Regards,
Matt.

 

@ar0nax: glad you had some fun About the buttons, you mean the top rectangles that appear with part of the score? If so, yup, it was my intention (but I think I will change them). If not, and you're referring to the "retry"/"next" buttons, it's an error that I don't have on my computer: could you please tell me more about the parts that are missing?

@fallingbrickwork: thanks Matt I found myself actually engaged in playing this, in spite of its simplicity, and building levels is very funny. Can't wait to do more of it.

 

i am referring to this bug (retry, next, and image on bg):

 

@ar0nax: oh damn, that shouldn't happen, those areas are perfectly transparent. Thanks a lot for showing it to me. 2D Toolkit must be making some mess, I'll check if there's any info about that. Also, I hope I'm not annoying you too much, but seeing that I see everything correctly, could you tell me what OS, browser, and possibly WebPlayer version are using?

 

If I squint and look really hard, I can also see the edges ar0nax was mentioning, my guess is he's running a higher contrast/brightness on his monitor so spotted them first. As to why they are there... well... hmmm...

Edit: On second thought, higher contrast wouldn't show in a screenshot! I guess ar0nax just has some untold mystical abilites

 

I tried that, by capturing a screenshot and hyper-contrasting it in Photoshop, but I still can't see the edges I read that they might be possibly caused by a setting of 2D Toolkit, but it simply changes the way a texture is saved. After that, I don't understand how the same texture can have different alpha depending on the computer... it's kind of scary. Anyway, tomorrow morning I'll try to re-upload it with those settings changed.

 

Really Enjoyed it, Keep it up, was really quite fun and love the art style.

 

Cute, smooth, simple, fun, addictive.

 

@clxyeah, @rextr09: thanks a lot, I'm so glad you found it interesting

@NomadKing, @ar0nax: I finally (!) could see the non-transparent areas when I published to my Android phone, and I can't find a way to show them correctly. Just wrote the guys at 2D Toolkit hoping they'll have a solution

 

The mystery takes another exciting turn...

 

i use mac with google chrome (and latest version of the unity webplayer), the monitor is Nec LED (ummm dunno the model, was on the computer from work), it might be a problem with that 2D toolkit, messing up with alpha from the textures perhaps.

 

The guys at 2D Toolkit were awesome, and in spite of the weekend we had a dense mail exchange until they found the issue

Actually, it's caused by the fog. For the background, I use a very saturated purple fog, which messes up with the alpha on Mac and Android machines. It looks like it's a Unity bug, so I'll have to go without the fog (anyway, I meant to change the background when moving to Android)

 

Gotta say, I think you have a gem here. This seems like it could make it to the top of the charts in the App store once you're done with it(that's me hoping you find a way to get it on the iOS App store). Whatever route you take with this, I'm sure it'll do extremely well and I wish you the best of luck. Can't wait to see more!

 

Well, I managed to get 23380(with a bunch of retries of course):

http://www.engaginggames.com/images/jb_hs.tiff

 

ohhhh... yes... the fog, i had some problems with that and UI Toolkit.... the fog was rendering over the GUI layer sometimes (most of the times actually) and all the PNGs got a bit white... but i forgot about that.

 

Fog bug? Well, it's 9am and now I've already learned my 1 new thing for today!

 

yes, the thing is the fog needs to render last (so it will cover all the objects in the scene)... but it seems it also renders on top of the GUI (at least in my case when using UI Toolkit) distorting the textures used in the GUI.

 

Yup, bad fog, baaad! And this appears to be a bug because on some machines it renders correctly, while on others it doesn't.

 

Wow, that is an awesome score. I had to go superfast in the first 5 levels, and then change technique in the last one to beat you (after tons of retries obviously): 23390! http://www.holoville.com/appo/Journeyballs_23390.jpg

 

I see your 23390....but 23392 will not be beat! http://www.engaginggames.com/images/jb_hs_23392.tiff

Anyone?...?...?...Didn't think so.

 

Damn! But I will try... or... maybe insert a cheat

 

shoop it

 

Ahaha, and here I go and learn a new word

 

hehehehehe... http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/077/SHOOP_DA_WHOOP.png

 

Ahahahahaah awesome! What was that???

 

Yay,..

My Ball is Happy!

..

..my Boss is not,...

 

google for "shoop da whoop" (click on knowyourmeme link)

and there's where i got the 'shoop' thing.

 

Nice game.

Just one suggestion if you want to keep your players trying for high scores and therefore playing your game longer, add a quick retry button to the game screen and give them an option or something to speed up retry/success/fail screen transitions.

Good luck.

 

@Welby: well, make your boss play then

@ScottyB: thanks a lot for the suggestion. That's definitely a thing I will implement, along with a panel for choosing levels

 

I TOTALLY love the game concept - I think the graphics could be made a bit more recognizable and special. If you can work on that I think you'll go places with this
Simply yet addictive game designs with graphics you remember are always a winner.

 

well,..I got a coWorker to play it.,.hehhe

one observation he noticed,..as I didn't give him any 'direction' was that he focused on just getting the ball into the green pipe, which he did rather easily, and thought the other things were just obstacles.

Perhaps make it clearer,..by giving more feedback when a ball is caught such as floating +score when caught, so the player is like,..Oh,..I am suposed to do that!

,..or even Locking the green pipe until all wayPoints are switched(caught). This way, there is no doubt that you are supposed to be trying to catch the ball along the way.

Good luck!

-Welby

 

@Kyena: thanks a lot for the feedback I'm rebuilding the game from scratch and I definitely plan to put some "soul" into it. Hope I'll manage

@Welby: fundamental observation, and thanks for the luck I plan to start the first levels with small tutorials, so there will be a popup telling you that sticking to those other balls gives you points. I don't want to totally prevent finishing a level until you got them all, because later levels will get very difficult, thus you might want to just reach the exit and ignore some score.

Also, on a more general note, I'm very pleased to say that Blake from Engaging Games (makers of Droppin' Bombs) proposed to make a port of Journeyballs to iOS, when I'll be finished with it. So it'll be released both on Android than iOS, and good luck to us

 

One word, Awesome !
I loved it

 

Yey! Thanks a lot shahroozal! Right now I'm putting a lot of effort into a polished/expanded version of it

By the way, BubbleBomb looks really nice. Didn't play it (couldn't find the webPlayer), but those crabs are hilarious

 

Thanks! I'm glad you took a look at it
Can't wait to play the next version of Journeyballs.

 

Ah! New highscore! 23398! Yey! Though you'll have to rely on me for that one, because for some reason my computer decided he can't print screens anymore, and all I get when I try to capture it is a black square

 

yeh, that happened to mine as well.
I have 32.000 obviously.....


Just thought, this might be a good moment to stop by and say, I'm a big fan of the work that you showed so far
Loving the game mechanics and ideas as well as the execution. Hope you're getting it released soon and keep on working in that tempo !

 

Hey Fabian, thanks a lot, and glad to hear from the other half of Engaging Games I'm working on it a lot, but as with you and Droppin' Bombs, the more you work on something, the more it grows in conception

Even if playing it makes me anxious, I'm a fan of Droppin' Bombs too, and I'm especially loving all the details you guys are putting into it, and the color usage. And I also love those tractors you got in your portfolio: they're awesome! You should make a game with them.

 

The Whale is awesome too

 

True! Maybe a multiplayer Whales VS Tractors game?

 

shhh, it's about your super stylized game in here
Hope you're focussing on getting the game out first in a good state. And worry about many details later. It already has that level of polish that would make a good release. You can always go in circles and overcomplicate
Gonna be interesting to see how this will plug over to the iOS devices. Hope blake shares some supersecret betabuild with me, soon
But I won't tell you that he did, so you can't blame him afterwards. *shhhh*

 

I'm building all needed managers and the basic engine, and I set up the main graphics style for the game and the menus (and it's even more stylized than the web prototype). And yup, I'm trying not to get lost in the details, but it's difficult

I hope that the iOS conversion will be simply a matter of pressing "build" on Blake's computer, though I suppose there will be some compatibility issues with the saving and scoring system, so Blake's superpowers will have to save the day. I'm waiting to have those parts ready to send them to him (hoped to have them done for the weekend, but since I bought EasySave 2 for the saving implementation, and its release date has been delayed, I got that part delayed too), so he will do a supersecretbetatest And you better not play it! Unless you're ready to give me feedback, obviously, for which I would be extremely grateful

*shhhhhh*
I was thinking of a racing game: Whales on Tractors (or Whales of Glory)
*shhhhhh*

 

Well, it looks like we've tied:

 

Hi Izitmee, it is a cool cute game. I play`d all 6 level and i hope soon comes more. Nice game!