Tinytouchtales

Weekly Update #22

Hello!
Welcome to our Weekly Update #22. This time with the announcement of our new Game!
Our Weeklys are completely out of sync with all the stuff happening outside of our game making bubble, but still we try to write an updated at least every two weeks.

One Tap RPG
This week we want to announce our new game One Tap RPG. One Tap RPG is a Pachniko-like arcade dungeon crawler, which features randomly generated dungeons.



It’s basically a mixture between Peggle and a hack & slash game, where your character is completely controlled by the physics of the game. It’s a highly luck based game and where you can compete on Game-Center or in a Daily-Challenge. The Daily-Challenge generates a fixed set of Monsters which are positioned randomly and a fixed Dungeon layout. Item positions are also fixed but the types are randomized. Each day has a unique global Highscore in which you can compete.



We have submitted One Tap RPG to Apple and are waiting for the review. If you like to get an email when the game is available you should sign up at www.onetaprpg.com and we’ll notify you!

Weekly Update #21

Hello! This is Weekly Update #21 with a small teaser on what we are working on right now.

KRAXLN update
It has been a little bit quite around KRAXLN in the last weeks. The reason for that is that Thomas and I decided that the project will be our part time activity and with a lot of cool stuff happening around Thomas craft, for example the Comic-Salon Erlangen and talks he gives, he has been quite busy in the last weeks. This does not mean we won’t work on KRAXLN anymore but it sure will slow down the process a little bit. Non the less we are trying to work in smaller pushes and bring the game to a more polished state.

New Game
The slowdown of the work on KRAXLN has led to new opportunities and we decided to go for another small project that we have been making the last few days. I won’t spoil to much, because it’s not very polished right now, but it has a lot of potential.
The new idea comes from the desire to make something in the realm of “fun physics” games, where the chaotic nature of physics is the core gameplay. Best game of this kind in our mind is Peggle. If you haven’t played Peggle before it’s a kind of upside down Flipper where the ball get’s dropped into the game from above, bouncing it’s way down to the bottom. Peggle is inspired by japanese Pachinko machines which have the same mechanic, but are real machines that don’t simulate the physics but use the real life ones to let the balls bounce in unpredictable ways.

I always enjoyed playing Peggle and wanted to try doing my own version of it. The main issue with games like Peggle is the Level design. It takes a tremendous effort to create interesting levels for such games, because it’s all about this last thing i couldn’t clear before i run out of balls. In our case we wanted to make something randomly generated that will work without the need of level design and can keep creating fresh levels. So we decided to use the core mechanic of Peggle and combine it with a Dungeon-RPG methaper to create a random dungeon that plays like a Peggle game but is more about watching the physics go crazy than making precision shots.



As you can see from the screenshots barrels and monsters are placed randomly. Monsters have their own movement patterns. The hero starts at the top of the screen and descends down to the end of the dungeon trying to kill as many monsters on it’s way down as possible. There are some additional things that we will talk about later. In order to keep the production of this project small we decided to use the fantastic Oryx-Lab sprites which you can buy for $35 and use them in your game. The game mix between random-physics and random dungeons works surprisingly well and we looking forward to finishing this little game.

Have a nice Sunday and see you next Week!

Weekly Update #20

Hello!
Welcome to a small Weekly Update #20. This week has been a little bit fractured due to multiplie things we were working on so here’s a short summary.

Last Minute Matchagon fix
We submitted the new Matchagon update on Sunday. On Monday though we found a nasty bug where the Daily Challenge would be stuck in an update loop, causing the game to always load the same daily set it originally got stuck in. We had to fix this bug and resubmit it to Apple. Hopefully the Update will be available later this week.

New KRAXLN Tilesets
Thomas was very productive and started to create the new tileset for KRAXLN. He made some nice improvements over the old version including some tricks to generate more visual verticality and having a more mountainy feel to the whole art.



Right now we are updating the in game graphics and still improving some of the smaller systems. For example we want to add an avalanche event, where you will first hear a siren and after five turns a large avalanche will happen that will kill you, if you can’t find shelter below a wall in those five turns.

New Prototype
Additionally we found some time this week to sketch out a new prototype which was sitting inside a note book for some time. The general idea is similar to the strategy prototype we are still kicking around. But instead of having a rock paper scissor mechanic, this time we try to integrate a simple math system where cards can have a number and a modifier (+, -, x).



Cards can attack each other and the attacking card uses its number and it’s modifier to change the value of the defending card. The attacking card will be removed after the turn, clearing the board step by step until no moves are left. The Player with the heighest score from all card wins.
The idea seems to work, but we need to write a more dedicated AI to really test the game flow and see if the idea is viable in a real 2 player match.

That’s it for this week, have a nice Sunday!

Weekly Update #19

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