BOOO!!

It’s ok… catch your breath. I know I scared you.

Alright, so that wasn’t really scary. What IS scary is the fact that we haven’t posted in over a week. We have been working on the game, though, I promise! Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff has been behind-the-scenes changes so we won’t have too many pictures for you, but I’ll try to make this interesting all the same.

The main thing that was sucking our time has been this website. We’re hoping to to do some things in the weeks to come to get some more traffic, so we wanted to make sure we had a presentable facade for our game. No one will stay and read your blog if it doesn’t look nice, so we decided we needed to focus on that for a bit. We changed the homepage to have an introduction of our game with a gameplay demo, and have pushed our blog onto it’s own page. If you’re reading this then that means you figured it out. GOOD WORK! Go get a cookie! We’ve also made a few aesthetic changes and even added a pretty cool sign-up and commenting feature to make it easy for you to sign in with Facebook/Google/ whatever you like. If Twitter ever restores our account (which they suspended for NO REASON!) then you’ll be able to use that, too.

As far as the game goes, we’ve unfortunately had a lot of other things going on in our lives that have prevented us from working on it too much this past week. I had a crazy Halloween Party this weekend so I spent a good amount of time setting up for that (and recovering on Sunday) , and Ryan was without power all weekend due to the snow storm which was a total waste of the free schedule he had. Luckily, I’ve discovered that you have a lot more time when you just stop sleeping, so I did manage to deliver on the promises I made in my last post.

Can You Handle It?

I’ve revamped the “Ready” screen and added an actual button to continue on to the game. We thought that having it just be a “click to start” screen made it prone to accidental clicking that would progress the game when the user didn’t intend to. As you can see, I’ve added some training specific text for when you complete that mode, too. “Time To Roll With The Big Dogs” yep, that pretty much says it all. We’ve also incorporated locks on the main menu the first time you play the game to show that you have to go through Training to unlock Survival and Endurance.

The thing I’ve spent the most time on is the “Game Over” screen. Up until now, it’s just been a screen that showed you your high score and said “Touch Screen To Return To Main Menu.” Again we wanted to add a button here to prevent accidental clicking, but we though we should do a little something more. When I started, it was supposed to be really simple: 3 screens, swipe or click left right to see what’s on each one. Unfortunately, I spent some time looking at how other programs perform this function (including the Android home screen) and realized that it looks better when the screen actually moves along with your finger and then snaps to whatever position is closest when you let go. I decided I had to have it, which really complicated my coding process, but in the end it was absolutely worth it because it is pretty cool  ABSOLUTELY THE COOLEST THING EVER! Anything for you.

The three screens we’re going to show during “Game Over” are stats, high score, and achievements. Here’s a look at what the Stats screen looks like:

My Horrible Stats

It’s so preeeeettttyyyyyy. Right. So here we’re keeping track of the total time you played, the quickest you responded to a single game, the most points you earned in a single round, the longest you went without messing up, and the highest multiplier achieved. Kind of sweet if you ask me.

Well that’s all I’ve got for now. I promise to post more frequently and I DEFINITELY promise to do more work. Tonight, I’m working on adding in a cross-hair  during debug mode so that when we make our next gameplay video (hopefully soon) you’ll actually be able to tell where we’re clicking. Hope you have a great Halloween!

BONUS:

Here’s a picture of a different project Ryan and I worked on in college that I used at this weekends Halloween party:

I know, impressive

This is our computer controlled bar. It has a searchable database for you to select drinks from which it then pours right in front of your unworthy eyes. Yes, it is real. Yes, it is cool to have at parties. Yes, it is FREAKING AWESOME!