In a Post Slamoids! World
Slamoids is out and doing well! Sales have definitely been coming in quicker than Star-Pit Starship. I didn’t do a launch discount with Star-Pit so that could be part of the reason why Slamoids is performing better during launch week...but at the end of the day I don’t really know.
Just the fact that we have 2 games on Steam now makes me super happy. Our goal from the beginning was to make several small games and build up the Puddledock library as quickly as possible without skimping on quality, and so far I think we’ve done just that.
The game is discounted to 85 cents until August 15th, so hop on over to Steam and pick up your copy if you haven’t already ;)
In lvlDown news: there’s no new build this week (again). I did make some updates to the game over the weekend, but nothing too drastic. Mostly I worked on getting achievement art squared away for Steam, and added the demo gating that I mentioned last week. Once I turn the build into a demo on itch.io, you’ll only be able to play the first two levels of the game, and it will prevent you from going to level 3 or beyond. I don’t think I’ll put that into effect for a little bit though. You can play the full game on itch.io here.
I did add a custom mouse cursor for the game. The standard Windows mouse cursor just felt out of place. What do you think? (sorry for the potato quality GIF)
And here’s a sneak peek at the achievement art (cheevos as I call them in code because it’s easier to type). Mostly they’re just icons from the game, but there’s a few unique ones in there. And what could the ? ones mean!?!?!
In other news: I spent the majority of last week working on the new prototype. Normally with prototypes my goal is to get basic gameplay working in a matter of a few days so we can see if the game is fun, but with the plan of making this a much larger game, there’s quite a bit of setup to do before we can even see what the game is.
One thing that I did though was integrate a dialog system made by Friendly Cosmonaut into the build. I’ve tried writing my own dialog systems in the past and they always turn out super janky. And since Cosmonaut always does high quality work, it was a no-brainer to just go with her system from the get-go. It’s super robust, and I was able to write some wrapper scripts and objects to make it even easier to use in my game. If GameMaker is your thing, be sure to check out her YouTube channel.
I want to start showing off the game and doing dev videos soon. Right now it’s literally rectangles and circles moving around the game world. So I may take a day soon to get some half-decent placeholder art just to get the basic ideas across.
That’s pretty much it for now. If you’ve read this far, be sure to tweet the word “cheevos” at me so I know. Until next time!
- Matthew