Mr Lemon

Wow, we've been pretty busy with a whole bunch of things lately!

It's not quite ready for the big reveal yet, so in the interim, here's an unmodified screenshot from a real tablet to show some of the cool new stuff:

Click through for original size

You can see one of the new characters, Mr Lemon, pulling a wheelie, and wearing the always popular cowboy hat!

As this is the first (tutorial) level, there's also a swipe hint to the player.

And lastly, a debugging helper in the bottom left, 59 fps on the slowest iPad!!

The Squeeze

I've been adding a lot of content to ScooterBoy over the past week, and it's been causing some problems.

In particular, the size of the archive had grown to over 100MB.

Increasingly, I've come to realize that speed of iteration is one of the biggest factors in determining overall project success.

The large archive size was causing slow sync times with the tablet, and even longer upload times on my rural broadband connection.

Something had to be done.

Enter WebP

WebP is a relatively new graphics format (2010), published by Google, both patent-free and open-source.

It's like a super-JPEG and a super-PNG all rolled in to one. Oh, and it fully supports alpha!

Here's one I prepared earlier: (click through for full size images)

Original PNG, 540KB

WebP version, 23KB

(WebP version as lossless PNG, for comparison only)

In this particular example, that's a whopping 95.7% saving in space!!

Obviously results will vary, but I'm consistently seeing 75% - 90% save spacing over the equivalent PNG/JPG, for a reasonable reduction in quality for tablet devices.

I'm also finding that the compression artifacts are of a type that is less annoying than PNG or JPEG. (Apart from some YUV color noise at very low bitrates - hopefully google will fix this in an update)

And it was super easy to integrate into my codebase.

Want even more info? Go grab the source over at developers.google.com


And my archive size? Now down to a very manageable 22MB.

Pinata!

Any game of appreciable size needs a mini-game, and this one is ours!

We're calling it the "Treasure Mushroom".  Use the multi-touch to knock the piñata, then collect the treasures that are hidden inside!

It's a great way to give the player a random reward without resorting to a gambling metaphor like a roulette wheel or slot machine.

What makes a good mini-game?

I'm a big believer in the so called "Rational Game Design" approach.  In particular, the variety matrix. It suggests you can break down your game into a number of axes, such as time-pressure, activity, space modifier, etc.

It then provides a recipe for combining those axes into novel variations.  This aids the game designer's evaluation process and helps find the combinations which work the best.

Under this framework, the mini-game is part of "exotic gameplay".  It changes the pace of the game by  giving the player a new challenge, or a much needed break.

The mini-game must also be very easy to learn, and never punish the player, only reward.

Lastly, your mini-game must remain thematically similar to your main game.  In "ScooterBoy", both the main-game and the mini-game have 'collecting' as a central theme.

What's your favourite/least-favourite mini games? Why not let me know in the comments below?

Easy Mode Unlocked

One of the hardest thing to do when making a game, is to balance the difficulty.

Of course, at the start, you want your game to be as accessible as possible.  Then, over time, as the player progresses, you smoothly ramp up the difficulty to keep the player engaged.

Today I wanted to focus on the beginning of that : Just how easy is easy?

Easy for Me

The natural instinct of the indie developer is to make the first level really easy for themselves.  It turns out that's not a fair test.  You've been playing the game for a while now and you know all the controls and every obstacle.  You need to look elsewhere, to someone who's never played the game before.

Easy for You

The next step is to focus test.  Find everyone you know, especially your friends, who don't play games that much.  And then make it easy for them.  As you go through this process you'll find your game becomes more and more accessible and the learning curve becomes more and more navigable.

Easy for Everyone

But can we do even better than that?

If you watch young kids playing games on a tablet, you'll know how engaging they can be.  And frustrating too, with the constant restarts, and the accidental taps on adverts and in-game consumables.

Zen Arcade

In keeping with this spirit, this morning I added a special "Zen Arcade" mode to my next game:

There's no enemies or time pressure.  There's no way to lose.  It's just a calming, peaceful experience that anyone can play and enjoy.

I even made the pause button a little smaller to avoid accidental clicks, and removed the options to use the power ups.

What tips and tricks do you use to increase accessibility of your game?  Why not let me know in the comments below!

Level Design

Today it's all about levels!

(click through for larger version)

Logo!

Wihoo! Our new project has a logo!

 (By now you can probably guess the name!)

Background Test

Here's a screengrab of the backgrounds from one of the first levels in the new game.  You can see some of the UI starting to take shape as well!

And a video capture too - click through for 720p!