Roll on Through, The Future

This game really showed me how much I have progressed in game making. The game was created for the Trijam Challenge which is a 3 hour challenge in order to create your game, it includes everything, artwork, music, coding etc. This was a huge progression in my programming abilities compared to my other submission for the Trijam, Dark Terrors, which I released close to 3 years ago. That previous game had very basic functionalities compared to this one, it also had no music or sound effects like this game. The theme for the challenge was Bounce, I decided to implement that by having the boxes bounce off the walls while you try to roll the ball through without getting touched. The game has 10 levels all together and the fact I was able to build that many levels with so little time is a huge feat. 

This game has also helped spur on another idea that can expand on this concept, while this project is currently in it's infancy it has been built off of the ground work from this game. Even though this game is technically complete it has definitely allowed me to get feedback on what I can change and adjust for the next game built on these mechanics. From the votes on this game I can tell that the overall mechanics and idea is solid which is what I'm going to keep and move on with. The level design was something to be desired however and I received feedback on the fact that when you spawn in certain levels you die almost immediately due to the fact that you are still holding down the movement key when you spawn in the next level. 

The artwork was rushed I'll admit as doing pixel art is something that I am still working on approving. I wanted the game to be bright and pastel like so that it stood out. I had to play around with some colours so that they didn't hurt your eyes when you looked at it and ultimately I settled on a colourful pastel look. The shapes where something that I could whip up quickly and adjust on the fly, leaving more time for programming and adding music and sound effects.

The music I created in Bosca Ceoil and the sound effects was just me making noises in Audacity and musical notes in Bosca. While I do have a little bit of a musical background from my school days over 13 years ago, I'll admit I'm a little rusty on music theory. What I was able to hammer out took roughly an hour out of the 3 hours to build the game. Everything else was roughly an hour each, to build the levels was 30-45 minutes, and the sprites were roughly 15 including the tilemaps. The rest of the time was spent on programming and ensuring the movements were nailed down.

Overall I am very happy with this game and it has become the second most successful game I've created on here yet. I may come back to this game in the future to adjust the levels and maybe the artwork, but for now I consider this game complete.