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!
