For long I had this idea in my head of starting with a monthly game making thread.
The idea of this thread is that if you are up to it challenge yourself to make a game from start to finish with jME in a months time.
This includes, DESIGN, DEVELOP, SHARE in this forum so that you can get feedback and then, TEST, and RELEASE to production. Which platform you use is up to you(PC, itch.io, steam, android play store, etc.) as long as you get it out there for people to play.
Now you may ask yourself what is this guy crazy, well maybe, but I know it can be done.
Which game you choose to make is also up to you as long as it is a complete game with a little bit of depth in it.
Obviously it won’t be something big like some of the project going on in jME but rather a smallish game such as an arcade, casual or puzzle game or what ever you want to make.
I will try to commit to this year and see how it goes.
So if you feel up to it join me and lets make a game or more…
Well I thought of announcing a theme every month or at least a genre but I thought people will then not be interested and would feel they are boxed in to doing something they do not have an interest in.
For me because the month of January is so short and only a few days are left I was thinking of going for a endless type of puzzle or casual game.
Maybe something like a matching game or block building game.
I’m not sure how this will conflict with the W.I.P thread, like maybe this thread will be the W.I.P thread of this challenge and the other W.I.P thread is for everything else?
Otherwise, this is good, but I’ll keep this as an announcement thread because January is close to being over, and let the real game making start in February.
So for those who wants to join me this month/2 weeks, the optional theme/genre is puzzle.
As an idea I will be making a match 3 puzzle game.
At first I wanted to make it in 3D like for example candy crush saga or Jewel Match3 but I decided to make mine in 3D.
Making a match game in 3D does open up a lot of obstacle but I will go for it.
I will limit the player to a 3x3x3 grid.
Greetings,
Here is a playable version of my latest game for the January Game Dev Challenge.
It would be great if anyone can play my game and give me some feedback before I deploy it on the android play store.
Find the game here:
First of all I like the idea of this contest. It is always great to see finished games.
Now let’s come to your game. I’ve played it on my Huawei mate 10 lite with android 8.0. I didn’t notice any glitches so far. The game idea is great and it looks very polished. But there are some minor points I like to tell you. I think for you it’s more important to get some feedback on improvements.
I think your loading screen doesn’t fit to the look of the game. And on my phone it is either to short or there is too much text on it because I can’t even read the text.
I don’t think all of the symbols in the main menu are very intuitive. And they look to heavy compared to the text. Maybe you could just use the outline. Why does the sound symbol create a sound when you tap on it? I thought you would disable the sound if you tap on it. I mean the result is the disabled sound symbol. Same goes for enabling the sound. What does the leader board symbol stand for? I can only see a debug message there. Is it right? And what should I share? My score? The game?
There is no reasonable way to get back to the main menu. Neither from the debug screen nor from the in game screen. If I hit the back button, I get the option to restart, resume and exit. This menu doesn’t look as polished as the game.
You should state in the tutorial that you can only match colors in a horizontal row Or add the possibility to match cubes standing on each other. In my opinion that would be a nice addition because without it you can loose a whole level of blocks and you can never get access to the level again.
The difficulty of the game increases very slowly in the beginning. I needed 30 moves until it got challenging and then I failed in the next 30. Maybe you could increase the level up rate in the beginning. I mean three different blocks are great for a tutorial but not very challenging over 15 moves.
I would change the background color in every new level to give a better feedback for upleveling. Because some time you don’t notice the message. On the other hand this could be against your design goals.
All in all I like to play your game. I think it is a cool base idea for a game. I see lot’s of room for extending the game idea. But this is out of scope for this thread. I only missed a monkey face somewhere.
Deployment to google play actually went very well and I did not have any hiccups.
Please if you can have a try at my game I would appreciate it a lot.
Thanks fellow jME developers.
NEXT: I will spend today thinking about the theme for February.
Well done, a pretty addicting concept. Got to 163. Aside from the fonts I’d say it’s pretty well polished and the animations are great, but the responsiveness is problematic. It feels like inputs get ignored half the time so you have to tap so many times to get it to register.
I’d try increasing the color selection button detection area and not have color selection blocked when an animation is running since that’s just plain annoying.
I tested on my LG G3 with Android 5.0. I think it may not be a bug by itself, but a feature that appears as a bug.
What I’m saying is that you probably intentionally block input selection when animations are playing so it doesn’t mess them up with cube spam (I would think, at least), but it’s not great having to wait a moment every time you place a cube.
Perhaps just speeding up or instantly finishing the previous animation if the next cube is placed would feel better.
About the fonts, these ones I suppose:
They are a bit too much like Arial for my taste.
Perhaps something more in the ballpark of Segoe UI Light would look better, like so for example:
Besides, as I’ve recently read as long as you only embed rendered bitmap fonts that doesn’t count as a breach of license since you aren’t embedding the vector ttf files. Apparently the look of a font itself is actually not copyrightable.
