Slamoids!
Today’s the day! Slamoids! is officially live....like right now!!!! Woo hoo!!!
You can purchase it on Steam here
I remember prototyping this game back in March. Sam had to travel to Boston for work for a couple days, so I decided to start a small new project since Star-Pit Starship was wrapped up and I needed something to keep me occupied. The idea for dodging incoming objects while your area of movement continually restricted and expanded came to me right away, and within an hour I had a playable concept.
This is what the game looked like back on day 1:
At this time we were calling the game “Circle Grower” because the concept of a slamoid hadn’t been invented yet. Also I’m lousy at code names for games :P
Sam and I both found the gameplay to be quite addicting, even with the crappy placeholder art. So we decided this would be the next Puddledock release.
This is why I love working on small games. It’s super fast to see if they are fun or not, and it allowed me to spend more time just making crazy art and honing my pixel art skills. I use the terms “skills” and “art” loosely here.
Working on these small games also gives us more practice at finishing things, which is super important and often overlooked as a necessary skill when gamedev is discussed. Coming up with ideas and working on them is one thing, but being able to say a feature is complete, polish as best you can, and get it onto a storefront is a whole other aspect of gamedev that is only learned over multiple games and with sheer persistence.
One thing we learned from Star-Pit Starship that we tried to employ in Slamoids was making sure it was super fast to get back into playing the game after a round ended. We knew rounds had the potential to end very quickly in Slamoids, so we wanted to make sure the player was just a button press away from being right back in the thick of the action.
I also wanted to make sure the scores were less crazy. In Star-Pit you can build a super powerful ship and just wrack up a seemingly insurmountable score (until someone else does the same thing). But it only comes after a bit of a grind. In Slamoids there are no powerups or bonuses. Your score is purely based on your skills at dodging and destroying the higher point value slamoids. Which means when you look at the leaderboards the scores tend to be pretty close. My hope is that it will drive more competition and give that urge to last just those few seconds longer in a round to squeeze out some final few points and put yourself a rank higher on the leaderboard.
We’ll see how it goes. And rest assured, we’ll take the lessons from this game and roll them right into the next just as we did with Star-Pit.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And please consider picking up Slamoids! and maybe even telling a friend.
- Matthew