Hi, I'm XdebugX of XdebugX Games. I'm going to be making a game for the libGDX jam. Title is tentatively for now called "Trouble With Tribbles". Thinking of making a space themed breakdown type game with cute little furry tribbles. Not sure about the game idea yet. You can see my already released games for,
Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Xd...
IOS - https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/jeremiah-mcl...
Website - http://www.xdebugxgames.com
Ok, so I'm a programmer and have no art skills at all. But I have some pre-existing art from a game I made a few years ago. The rules say you can use pre-made art, just not a premade game or prototype. So the game will be different from the game I made before but the art will be the same. This is the game I made before: Fuzzballs
The fuzzballs look enough like furry Tribble that they could pass for a Tribble. I'm thinking to make the game play kind of like a "Breakdown" type game where blocks rise from the bottom and you click groups of similar color blocks of 3 or more to remove them. The goal is to keep them from piling up to the top of the screen. Maybe change the mechanic of them rising from the bottom, to a mechanic where they "breed" and multiply on there own.
So far I have randomly generated backgrounds. For these I'm using some graphics from my game, Talking Nexus Droid. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com....
Here's a short video of the background, with a few asteroids floating by and some random comets.
And here's a link for my gitHub source so far: https://github.com/XdebugX/troubleWithTribbles
Today I've made a basic main menu for the game. On the main menu you can start a new game or continue your saved game. If you try to continue a saved game and you don't have a saved game yet, it will tell you so. If you try to start a new game and you already have a saved game it will tell you that you will overwrite your saved game by doing so, and ask you if your sure. This will only apply to the local saved games, in the Android version I will probably use Google Play Game Services and instead of it telling you that you will overwrite your saved game, it will open the list of your save game slots in GPGS. Here's a short video of the basic main menu:
I've changed the main menu screen to not show the option for "Continue Game" if there is no saved game, instead of showing an error message.
First bit of gameplay is done. The game screen now shows the Tribbles added to the board. A row of Tribbles "spawns" at the bottom and as the row completes, they move up onto the board. There is a spawn animation for each of the tribbles on the spawn row, and randomly the tribbles on the board will do a blink animation.
If you click 2 or more tribbles, (match), they fly off the screen in random direction. Then the board should then collapse down, but this is not done yet. Oh, and I have a few different sound effect for when they fly off, it plays a random one.
First bit of gameplay video here:
I'm made some more progress on the main game-play. Now the tribbles will collapse down to fill in the gaps. I've also made them randomly spawn a new tribble beside themselves once in a while. They will first do the wiggle animation, then a new tribble pops out beside them. I've also done some of the scoring system and the level system.
So far one of the best things about doing this game jam is reading the other developers dev logs. They really provide motivation and get me into the mood to do some coding.
I've decided to make two game play modes. "Endless" and "Clear the level", endless will be just like what I've got so far. Clear the level will be different in that you start with a set number of tribbles and there is no spawn row, only the tribbles will breed faster. You must clear all the tribbles on the board to go to the next level.
I've partnered with Petar Iliev and he's going to do some new graphics for the game. He has already made a transporter effect, so I'm using that for when you get a match, instead of the tribbles flying away. Luckily there's a Klingon ship nearby that you can transport them to!
Here's a video of the new transporter effect:
I've finished the "Clear the Level" game mode. Added some music, thanks to Kevin MacLeod of
http://www.incompetech.com He's got some great royalty free music for games. Also added a credits screen. I had some problems but finally got the html5 project to compile. It works on the Chrome browser, but I get a typed array error on Firefox and IE. It's not finished, but a playable demo here: Trouble with Tribbles playable on Chrome only so far.
The last few days I've just done some gameplay balancing and general polishing of the game. The game starts going really fast at about level 100, it's hard to keep up with. I've changed the music to a different royalty free song by Kevin MacLeod, Pamgaea, www.incompetech.com . I've added an options screen where you can turn on or off the sound and music, this saves to a local file. It's a separate file than the game save file. Here's a progress video:
I've also update the WIP html5 demo, you can play it here:
Lots of graphics improvements in this update. Petar has made an intro screen, new background, shiny new buttons and a score counter for the game screen. Progress video here:
Play the html5 version here: http://www.xdebugxgames.com/twt/ (only works in Chrome for some reason).
The jam is almost finished and so is my game. I've added the game over condition and a game over screen. Added a few cheesy effects to the menus and done some general polishing. I've uploaded my entry if you'd like to play it: http://xdebugx.itch.io/trouble-with-tribbles If you like spaghetti you can get the source here: https://github.com/XdebugX/troubleWithTribbles
Latest gameplay video:
I may do a little more polishing tomorrow before the deadline for the jam and update the entry then.
Thanks to roboVM I've made an IOS release of Trouble with Tribbles. You can get it on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trouble-with-tribbles-match-3/id1080232711?mt=8 The Android version is available here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xdebugxgames.trouble.with.tribbles.android Since the jam is over, I've updated the game here on Itch.io to include the updates, bugfixes and improvements that I've made to the Android and IOS version.
