​So that is pretty much it in terms of what I wanted to do for these last few weeks. Besides a few small tweaks, and Facebook implementation, I think that about wraps it up! I hope you've enjoyed the Juicy Development Blog, even with the poor grammatical errors and strange punctuation.

Thank you for joining me on this awesome and exciting journey of Game Development. You may not hear from this blog again until after the release (which should be around April sometime, so keep an eye out for that!). Oh, and if you want to hear more for the development side, find out info, or just to support a solo indie dev, then make sure to like Juicy Beetle Games on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Until then,

Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone, and welcome to this weeks Juicy Dev Blog! So, you're probably wondering why there is no 'Week 38 - Developer Blog' right? Well, I did originally have one that I was going to post, but, I was afraid that it wouldn't have been enough content to be deemed a "Blog" since last week was just A LOT of fiddling around with the Trap Algorithms, and wasn't really ready at the time. However, what I lacked for last week, I will make up this week. And what an exciting week this one will be! It's jam-packed full of awesome new content, power-ups, and more! Anyway, enough babbling, lets get this show on the road!

So, last week I had been working hard on refining the trap algorithm, which ended up being scrapped and created again. I decided to invest more time into the design of it, and articulate tension points throughout game-play. What I mean by that was really think about how to intensify the game during certain points, and then alleviate that tension over specific intervals. Yes, this did take a lot of work to refine, and at this point, I'm basically numbed from it. But hopefully this will be present when playing the game.
I also added a few more power-ups for the player to collect. The first power-up is a 'destroy-all traps' power-up, which felt necessary to add since eventually the traps get overwhelming when left unchecked. Another power-up which has a massive part to play, especially with the 'tension' points, is the 'Mystery Event' power-up. This power-up destroys all traps in the arena, and begins a new event which is randomized. Each event is vastly different, and functions in a way which keeps the player on their toes. By the end of the event, the player is rewarded with a number of power-ups for them to collect before going back to normal. This is to give the game 'variance'... So, I'm just going to go off in a tangent for a second, but after watching a TON of videos about adding randomization efficiently, I stumbled upon a GDC talk about 'rules of the game' which was basically a number of game designers talking about certain rules they followed when designing games (which I would highly recommend checking out!). Anyway, One speaker, who was the lead designer behind 'Jetpack Joyride' and 'Fruit Ninja' (Luke Muscat) spoke about 'variance' and how important it was in games similar to this. It blew my mind realizing I had miss this crucial design goal. So after watching that, I made sure to add as much variance as I could with these power-ups and traps. Hopefully it implicitly visible, but we shall see. Anyway, below is a short video showcasing the 'Mystery Event' power-up. Enjoy!

And here is a short video of the 'Nuke' power-up. This power-up was actually really fun to make, and was super satisfying when picked up. After the traps are destroyed, a pile of coins are spawned in the locations where the traps were. Super fun!

What's that? We aren't done yet!??! You bet we aren't! I had also finalized all of the 'skills' functionality which was such a relief to finish up! One of the skills I had to re-do, since it allowed the player to be immune by electricity, and since one of the 'trap Events' was to avoid electricity, it basically became OP. So, I had to remove it... sad face. Anyway, a new one has taken it's place, and I tell you, it's awesome!
I've also re-designed the 'Pause' banner slightly to show the player their levels as well as what skills they currently have assigned. 
​

On top of all that, I had also added a few more minor tweaks to the Inventory section, and cleaned up some overall bugs.

Phew, that's a-loda content. Hopefully I have made up for last week :). 

I'm really happy on the progress I have made with this, and I'm hoping to re-release this through open beta in the next few weeks. I'm planning to launch the game around Easter sometime. At least that will give me enough time to flesh out any other bugs, and market the shit out of the game. For next week, I'm hoping to have the rest of the sound effects working correctly, and then, test this on other devices. 

Until next time!

​Thanks for reading!