Creating a Game – A cautionary tale. pt1

Hi

Have just entered the October competition with my game Tower Block Builder and now I will have to finish this project I thought would take about five weeks. That was about 6 months ago and I am still not finished so I though I would blog about some of my problems and pains ( at one point I abandon the whole idea).

But I want to inspire and help people create games and so I will also detail some solutions and help I found and explain the shear joy of people playing the game you have created.

So to recap. I have created a game in HTML5 using pure Javascript with a little help from JQuery and Box2D. I have always liked the ‘real world physics’ of Angry Birds and wanted to develop a game with similar ‘physics’. While testing and playing with Box2D I came upon the idea of a simple game I called Tower Block Builder. This was to be a simple stacking game and (I thought) would be a quick test game to get to know the code of Box2D.

At this point I am happy with the game engine and graphics and have created 5 of the 20 levels. Easy huh? No. When I started creating levels I realised how the game could be played in different ways. For instance – when staking blocks you could lean on the walls and build more and so score higher. This meant the scores needed for 2 and 3 spanner awards neede to be adjusted. My advice is always get someone to test the game and play it from scratch without any advice from yourself.

This means, although I only have to create 15 more levels, I have to take into account the pass scores and different ways of playing. Hence, I may not make the end of October.

Will give more advice next blog.

Coderfap