Swipes of Fury I

Playtesting at GDC 2014

I went to GDC expo this year. There was lots of interesting emerging tech. The new Unreal Engine is going to be available with a monthly payment. I tried out the Virtuex Omni. It has a lot of potential once they work out the kinks. I could probably have a whole post on just what I saw at GDC but thats not what this blog is about! So instead here's a video of the mobile game I'm currently working on. Swipes of Fury (name pending).

Game State

The state of the game isn't too bad right now as you can see but it still requires some additional VFX and audio to really help the game feel complete. The GUI looks ok in this video but once its thrown on my Dad's Galaxy S4 with an HD screen the GUI becomes so small its basically unreadable. It has about eight total levels right now but I'm going to aim for 50+ since the level building tool I made for it is pretty easy to use.

Feedback

Feedback was overall positive. People loved swiping and getting that cool wave effect BUT the biggest issue was that the players didn't know when they fell off the track and where the start of the swipe was.

Resolving Feedback issues

In order to resolve the biggest issue stated above I've decided to throw away my awful looking arrows and write my own 2D line renderer optimized for this games use. Unity's is no good in this case for two reasons. The first is the obvious overhead in the ways its used. It requires all the points ahead of time and to remove point you need to feed it a whole new list of points. The second is in the way it deals with sharp angles. It tends to focus all the corner points in at a single point creating a steep ugly looking angle. I'll be posting a more detailed post about this later. Below are the things I'll be working on.

1. Optimized 2D line Renderer
2. FX and Audio Messenger System
3. General VFX
4. Level Design
5. Audio Design
6. Rating System
7. Get iOS to like me