• I never thought about using a mesh for the trail effect. Thanks for inspiration! :)
• Is there any chance to share the source code of this shader? It's probably trivial for you, but I don't have much experience with OpenGL programming and that would be a great resource to learn from (surely not only for me) :D
• Does that mean that there will be a usable level editor in the final release? Would be great to see levels made by community :)
• This font is absolutely AMAZING :D Also after looking through the game files I found a font called Orbitron. A quick search told me that it has a free license. I will surely use that one in my games then. Thanks :)

Disclaimer: Even though there is only a Windows and Mac version available, I played it on Linux trough Wine and it worked perfectly :D

I absolutely love the main gameplay mechanic. Nothing changed there.

During the last levels of Region 2 the whole gameplay started to be a bit repetitive. But then enemies were introduced :D There is nothing as satisfying as a triple kill without touching the ground.
In further sections the challenge was enough to keep me playing :)

There is just one problem. After beating the boss (dashing trough his head) the main character just runs to the right and blocks on the nearest rock. Input doesn't work. It looks like there is a bug somewhere :)

I have a few technical questions though:

• How did you make the trail behind the main hero. Is it a particle effect?
• I love the "shaking font" effect at the end of the level (The letter indicating achieved rank) Is it a custom shader effect using fonts? :O
• What software are you using to design levels? I'm asking because I couldn't find a decent LibGDX editor myself.
• And what's the name of that sleek font, which is used everywhere? Is it a free one?

I really can't wait for the full release. I'm probably gonna be the first one to buy it :D
Damn, I played the demo for 1.5 hours and I'm still hungry for more :D. That sums it up I believe :)

Originally published on indieDB (20th Feb 2017).

Devlog #1, how it evolved during first 4 months.

A computer virus trained in playing digital football is on a mission to deliver white ball of data in order to defeat handsome AI. Pass the ball, plan your future movements and outsmart your opponent :D Interested in learning how a small game like this evolves?

First there is an inspiration

I'm a gamer. I play games. FIFA games especially. But I never really wondered what is so fun about it. Until, out of boredom, I did. Turns out I just freaking love passing the ball and avoiding enemies in football games. This one mechanic is so addicting that I could spend a whole night without eating, sleeping or caring about the world just to run around with some dudes with sweated T-shirts after a ball. This is it, I said. This will be my game :D.

That's what I'm talking about :D

Then the god created prototypes

This was time to get my hands dirty. After a month of sitting in front of a computer, staring at some mystical code and forgoing any social interaction, something playable was born. Granted, it looked like shit, but at least I proved to myself that this can be a viable game. Now the real fun was supposed to begin :D

That's how the game looked after 30 days :D.

We've got a prototype. Now how to make it look well?

This is a tough question. So tough in fact, that it took me more than a month of experimentation and inspiration from the internet to come up with something reminiscent of the current state of the game that you can admire from gifs :D.
I added dynamic lights, trails behind players, and some particles behind entities.

Then I decided to change the color scheme. This little improvement made the game look much better:

While the visuals are far from perfect, it's a good place to start :)

The easy part is done, now the content...

Designing games is hard. Really hard. So far I managed to fill only a few pages from my "game design notebook" (gosh, what a name :D) with some concept drawings.

Great, what next? :D

• Definitely more content has to be created. New mechanics and ways to play are coming. In fact you saw some of them on the screenshots from the notepad :). Variety is going to be a strong selling point about DigiBall :D.
• I'm also constantly working on visuals. Tinkering a little bit with OpenGL shaders. There is a lot to learn about it... :D
• Later a short demo of DigiBall will probably appear somewhere on the internet. That will take a while though :).

Feel free to leave any fresh ideas and follow me on twitter: @artecgam
'Til the next time, Have fun! :D

I have just played it and have a few thoughts.

First impression: the graphical style is just awesome :). Chromatic aberration works really well here. It reminds me of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

After playing a few levels: I like the way you teach the player new mechanics. It feels really natural. It gave me this satisfaction of learning something new, this "a-ha" moment :). All of this with only slight amounts of text :D. Also the way you kill the "wave" enemies feels great. Almost like slicing a fruit in Fruit Ninja :D

Almost at the end of the demo: Further levels bring a little bit of frustration. I had to restart them a few times before I got the hang of it. But when I finally finished them I felt REALLY good :D. I think it's because this game is all about player's skill level (kind of like in Dark Souls). I really like the fact that the succes or failure depends only on me and not some statistics / fancy weapons etc.

Now there are a few negative things I would like to point out.

The biggest thing I didn't like was the fact that the rope shortens itself on it's own. It was often frustrating and hard to accurately predict (at least in the beginning). I would prefer to be in full control of shortening the rope (by holding the "W" key for instance). Maybe even extending the rope by holding a key isn't a bad idea... :). Anyway I wonder was it a conscious decision to make the rope shorten itself?

There were a few moments where I have just finished an encouner with enemies (a batch) and I was really low on health. Obviously the next encounter ended in me dying almost instantly from one shot. Did you think about adding a way to regenerate health (either by itself, by picking a "health pack" or after killing an enemy)?

In the "Variance" level there were not enough points to hook your line. It made it unreasonably hard to juggle around enemies. Other levels didn't have this kind of spike in difficulty.

Also the giant in the final level suddenly changes direction of movement. It looks like he is teleporting. This makes the fight harder then it's supposed to be. It would be good to add an animation that would smoothly transition from moving to the right to moving to the left.

In summary this game feels really good to play and it looks quite well :) Keep up the good work :D. Oh and sorry for my "not perfect" English. It's my second language and I'm still learning :D.