Protect@ is a hyper casual arcade game. Your mission is to protect the screen center from the falling squares. In every stage you have to fullfill a goal, like staying alive for a give amount of time or making x points. With every stage you complete the goals are harder to reach.
The primitive game play is kind of a sequel to Catch² where the square are falling straight from the top.
Trying to post daily updates here.
Day 2
Added a scene manager and a staging system, aka levels. But as there is not much to change in level design, I opted for goals that need to be achieved to progress to the next stage. With every new stage there will be slightly harder to reach goals.
Currently there are only 5 stages who's goals are expected to change. But of course you may try to beat my personal best of 69 points at stage four. ;)
Day 4
Today new SFX were added. The old ones were just plain awfull. And speaking of sound, the game now has some nice background music from Zen Man. Besides sound a little screenshake makes the game play a bit more appealing.
And a very special addition was made: cheat codes! If you figured it out, you can play the game without dying. But I won't say a word how to activate the god mode. ;)
Day 5
Another day, another update. I realized that the cheat code doesn't seem to work when you play the game in the web browser. Although with Godot it's not a big deal to make it downloadable, I'm hesitant. The game is too silly that anyone would install it on their computer. At least I wouldn't. ;)
But the game was not only stripped, no! I got rid of the pixelated look. Because why would you need a pixel art style when there is no art? ;) Together with the change in resolution I opted for a different aspect ratio (16:9) to make it a bit more mobile friendly. But still, the sound on mobile is so awful, it's no fun. Turn it off. The game has a switch for that.
Last addition was a local highscore system. The game just saves your top score and stage in a file. If you beat that, it get's overwritten. At least that should work on HTML.
Have a look at it or play it for yourself! :)
The gameplay is simple yet addictive, I can see it's potential.
Right now it's repetitive but it can be solved easily with different ennemy patterns (slow, fast, bouncing and coming back, coming in a spiral path etc.), and maybe some variation of the player "character" behaviours (moving, larger shield, smaller shield etc.).
About the art style, IMO pixel art and "flat" styles should not be mixed (UI vs "characters").
Also a "neon" style fits well this kind of arcade game, and can be very juicy. Maybe you should consider it if you if you haven't already done so. It's super easy to do, basically make the background dark and add bloom.
Thank you very, very much for the input! :D
Actually, there is some variation between the stages. The squares are spawning ever so slightly faster every few seconds. And depending on the stage the initial spawn time varies. But if it's not really noticeable then I should definitely tweak that. In the last stage you also get a doubled paddle/ shield. And I already thought about making the paddle smaller or bigger. I was also thinking about different enemy types or bonus/ malucious squares that would trigger different shield types, explosion of all squares on the screen and what not. Different attack patterns though didn't come to my mind, yet. Great idea!
And lo and behold, today I played with glow effects of paddle and squares that illuminate a darker background! :) Haven't touched those effects ever before and still struggle a lot with them. But I agree that the visuals can be much, much more improved. Besides level design that's my weakest point. So I even more appreciate your suggestions, which are really very helpful!
Thinking about it, I totally agree on not mixing styles. Font will be exchanged. And considering the rest: October just has started. ;)
Thanks again and having a look at your other games: I'm definetly learning from a master of the art here! ;)
Day 6
As suggested the style got cleaned up today and it's a bit more uniform.
Also there was a silly bug in the spawning code that got fixed.:It could happen that very few or even no enemies at all would spawn in a level. The origin of this bug was a routine that checked if a square is still on screen. If it wasn't, it got deleted. And with the change in aspect ratio I changed the spawning regions so it could be that a square spawned off screen...
The lesson to be learned here: If you include code from another project (the spawning was taken from Catch²), make sure to check if the logic still applies. In this case it was of course not the case. All squares fall to the center of the screen and either get destroyed by the paddle or when hitting the circle. So they could never be outside of the screen (if not spawned there) and therefore never need to be deleted.
Day 7
Happy birthday Protect@!
You're now one week old and doing great! Today I added a variation of the attacking enemies. They now might come in spirals which was really tricky to accomplish for me. First I wanted to compute the spiral pattern by myself and failed miserably. Then I had an insight: I only need to let the squares circle around the center and give them an ever so slight nudge towards the center. And the circling was also done without any calculations. I just added a pivot point in the screen center as a parent of the squares. Rotating that point also rotates the squares. Hooray! But it was a struggle and I'm pretty exausted now...
My lesson of the day: Don't rush, don't overdo, take brakes. That said: Over and out for today. ;)
Day 8
This is a big change! Two special squares were added: a health regen and a spawn timer reset. Those are desperately needed for the also new endurance mode, where you can play the game endless. Well, technically only for one hour but noone would do that, I guess. ;)
The endurance mode calls for a change of the highscore, too. It should only count in that mode where the staging mode could be some kind of tutorial. But that is for another day...
A little change in the sprialing pattern was made, as those squares substantially slowed down when they were near the center. Now the speed stays the same.
PS: Now also available as a download for Linux and Android. Why not when it's just a click away?
PPS: Could not withstand to change the highscores. :) They are now only available in endurance mode. This could potentially break the game at the end if you've already played it and your browser has a save file stored...
Day 9
Completed the highscores for endurance mode and also changed the stage mode to a kind of tutorial. I'm really bad at "level design" (if you can even call it level design in this case). So there are now just seven stages that progressively introduce different speeds, attack patterns and what not. After you've finished the tutorial you'll be thrown in the endurance mode where you can try to beat your own personal highscore.
Tomorrow, I'll take a day off. For the rest of the month I guess I'll be working on the visuals. I really like to have a glow effect but I'm still unable to produce anything controllable. Either there is no glow or it just overshines everything and the carefully chosen colors (haha) get washed out. Another idea is to bring this game to the Android store — of course with ads. Every shitty game needs ads. ;)
Day 11
Nothing to show today, but I'm working on a refined, online highscore system. It consists of a database and a PHP backend which will receive your highscore and display the world's (ha ha) top ten. I already have a working system but it's far from secure in the sense that anyone who figures out the URL could send a fake highscore. I don't know enough about security and encryption to make it near perfect secure, but at least prohibiting the casual packet sniffer should be doable. I'm thinking about a simple AES encryption.
Day 12
This week I have the feeling that not very much will be achieved... Lots of day job work is holding me back.
But at least I put up a database and hacked together a PHP script to load and save the highscores. Although there is no encryption yet and no real display. I hope to get this part of the game finished by the end of the week. We'll see...
Day 14
The spare time I had yesterday I was trying to get the highscores to work. And failed. Culprit was my wish to get an AES encrpytion of the transfered data to work. As this did not work out as expected, today I opted to at least get the highscores working some how. That is now the case but anyone who sniffes the URL can easily upload a highscore without playing the game... Please don't try and abuse this. ;)
But that put aside, the highscores are working! They are far from pretty and need still a lot of a polish but at least we can compete now! :)
Edit:
Uh... The highscores did work in Godot, do work in the linux export but they don't work in the web export... I see a cross-origin resource sharing error in the web console. Should be fixable, I guess. But I'm too tired right now. Next update then... ;)
Day 15
Again a day with not much to show. I think I finaly fixed the CORS issue after just stumbling upon How to win at CORS via Hackernews. What a coincidence that it was on the frontpage! That lengthy article (that I only skimmed, foolish me!) stated that you can just add "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" in the header. Seems to work now!
I also worked a bit on my still shitty and very much empty and incomplete homepage. I fear that such a thing is really needed in the long run, not just for devtober. I'm trying to write some articles just about what I learned in Godot, coding and whatnot related to gamedev. Sorry for not posting a link but it's too early for that. ;)
Day 17
Finally back to the game. I've added the dreaded AdMob Plugin. I just don't know what I'm doing and just following tutorials. Especially the process of publishing something in the Google Play Store is a real pain in the back and I understand even less. But it seems to be working! The app got accepted a few days ago and when this more or less final version is online with some annoying ads I'm happy as I can be. ;) Meanwhile you can still play the game here without any ads and it will of course stay this way. ;)
Day 19
Now that the game itself is in a state I'm quite happy with, the boring stuff slows me down. Which is to put it a decent state to publish it on Android. But nonetheless, it is now available in the Google Play Store, ads included! ;) The store entry still needs some decent entries and the icon is off. Those are the most prominent deficits.
And I'm thinking about changing the layout of the game once again. Making it playable in portrait rather than landscape mode, would open up the possibility to include an annyoing, ever present banner ad. I'll probably will do that.
I also tweaked a bit the game from before the jam, Catch². I think what I've learned so far about the Android Play Store will help publish this game there, too.
