[FINISHED] Akiro the squid <3

Thank you QFSW!

I've set up the Unity remote 4 app, so now I'm testing the game on my device. I still believe that this is the biggest problem with my game; getting it to feel right on several sizes. Here's how it looks using the iphone 5 dimensions, although it looks even smaller due to being in the editor. I set the camera size to 2, so now the player can much more easily react to enemies from the sides. (up from camera size 1, which was honestly frustrating when it comes to the enemies).



This size looks very playable, and I'm guessing that I will end up at something around 1.8 to 2.2 in camera size in the end.

 

That looks good, giving them a chance to see the enemies, but not making it that they can see everything at once

 

The smaller size is nice, makes it look more playable and will make people rage less

 

Fantastic!

I'm just about to go experiment with the colors. My idea has been to have very saturated colors, but I've been starting to think that maybe that's not the way to go. For now I think they are a bit too dark. I want a slightly lighter blue background, and probably the enemies need some recolor too. I think I should take even more inspiration from the old Nintendo palettes, because well... That's the feel I'm going for.

 

With that said, I just found a perfect way to spend my evening. I'm going to grab my sketchbook, and load up some ocean documentaries! Some of them just show wonderful scenery, and also capture some very cool ocean creatures on film. New enemy designs, here I come.

 

Sounds like fun

 

Tell us how it goes

 

AAAAH! ... I totally forgot to post my sketches.



As you can see on the notes, I gave some of the enemies a + and a -. Here's my thoughts:

Shark/Whale: Interesting. What if the music became a bit creepy right before a shark attacks? I'm not sure how that would work with gameplay, but I'll keep that in mind.
Anglerfish: Maybe there can be an event, or game mode where the screen is darker and Akiro has to rely on the light from the enemy?? That sounds intense. Out of these sketches, that's one of my favorites.
Bird that dives (Can't remember the name, haha): Some birds swoop down like darts to try and catch fish, and this might be interesting if they try to dart down and get Akiro.
Octopus: I... have no idea. I imagine the octopus like my current enemy called "big boy"... Which is actually like an octopus.
Dolphin: Some kind of sonar wave to try and track Akiro? I'm not sure how but... hmm.

And I also began wondering about nature events. Some kind of random timer that can cause earth quakes, streams or bubbles from the bottom that "grab" Akiro and paralyze him a bit.


As you probably can tell, I don't have as much time to work on Akiro as I want to. I'm in the middle of moving, and I'm searching for a new job, as well as self-studying Web-Development in hopes of getting efficient enough in it to begin working as a Web-Developer. I feel an obligation to finish Akiro, and I won't abandon it. Developing the game has been such a lovely experience for me, and I hope that when things settle I can start working a lot more on it again.

That wasn't too related to game development, but I felt like sharing it. I also want to say thank you to those who follow my dev-log. It truly means a lot, each and every comment and like. Whoever end up reading all the way down here; I wish you a fantastic weekend, and keep on trucking with whatever you may spend your days on!

 

Thanks man, hope you have a great weekend too!
Yeah I know what its like, when you have something you want to work on but just don't have the time, I guess as long as you know yourself that you will work on it when you can its all alright.

Tbh, I really like the idea of the nature events, it could lead to some interesting gameplay. What sells it for me is the fact that it will spice up every play session differently, so it wont be repetitive

Make sure to have some nature events that are in your favour, as well as ones against it, and neutral ones (Like, affecting both you and the enemies for eg)

Good luck with web development, have you done any before?

 

I've done some, but not much. I know basic HTML, CSS, very little JS and JQuery. I've been doing HTML tutorials and taking notes for ... literally 10 hours straight now, so I'm grasping HTML like never before. My plan is to go through everything like I do now, and after that make some websites as portfolio, and then I guess I'm ready.

It's fun, but also extremely exhausting. I should probably take more and longer breaks.

 

I just thought of an idea, your choice if it's good or not

You could work on trying to make a really slick, awesome website for Akiro?

 

I've been thinking just the same thing! I imagine a one-page Akiro website that has a video (trailer, promo video etc) in the middle and some info over and under. That's definitely going to be one of the projects.

 

Awesome! Would like to see it when its done

 

I can see this being the next flappy bird, its seriously addicting
I got 12 once, so proud
Its simple, yet it just works so well
Regarding my first comment, this is actually fun unlike flappy bird so disregard it

 

Aww yeah, thanks for that! I was hoping to go for something along the lines of Flappy Bird when it comes to.. replayability and feel. I just arrived at home, and I was planning to continue studying Web Development but damnit, time to work on Akiro. I feel like both the squid and I could need some relaxing creativity time now.

 

Switching between Akiro and Web dev every hour could be good, you get to do both and you don't get bored of either

 

Also it's incredibly unique but still good, which is really what indie games need because they can't meet the production values of AAA or anything

 

Heeheey, look what I found... (breaking into two posts, turned out to be rather long).

The first sketch of Akiro!
"Ipad game - one button - press
Character moves in circles.
Touch screen to change rotation.
High score, different characters?"

Spoiler: Akiro First Image

And the GDD!
I can't even remember I made this, until I picked it up now.
"Simple, jump straight into the game.
Different goal ideas: Reach as far from the middle as possible.
Same as above, but with time limit.
Rewards? 50 meter ribbon, char spins for 5 min; dizzy ribbon, and ribbons for: tap 100 times, ribbons show at menu screen, hipster ribbon (among first 500 dl's).

Feeling: Hectic, forgiving. Hard to master.
Music: Cheerful? Retro-ambient?
Music = not dependant on gameplay

character makes a trail glitter effect?
appstore? pixel art
Automatic circular motion
touch screen to flip "movement ring"
avoid obstacles!

Spoiler: GDD

 

Wow, awesome

 

"Connect the trail to destroy dots (SELFNOTE: This sounds pretty fun, but looks like I scrapped it)
Quantity: highest: 16 dots
overall score: 31

Flash: Pixel art or Vector with little animation
Xcode: anything (non 3d prob)
Finding the special dot = The explorer ribbon

Spoiler: Last block of GDD

I'm kind of speechless. I did not realise just how similar the game has been, from... from the start. And not just the movement, also the part "with little animation" I seem to have kept close to heart. To be honest I have no idea why.
I also found it fun that at the first image I circled around a (1) cause that was the game I wanted the most to start creating, and hey... Look now!

 

Testing Akiro on the Iphone 5 (I really wish I had my old Android with me now...)



I have to say that this screen size feels LOVELY. I'm just wondering how I can achieve this on all devices... And then it hit me. Pseudo code time:
physical-screen-width / some-number = Camera range
640px / 320 = 2 (Camera range)
... Wouldn't this potentially scale correctly? I have to investigate further, but it's not my main concern at the moment.

 

It feels like I'm spamming a whole lot, with little to no progression... ehh.
I drew some sketches, thought about which enemies I will include/remove and came to a 'conclusion' that:
Jellyfish and Piranha will be removed.
Turtle and missile bird will be added.

Here's a smaller movement sketch I made, with the enemy (and Akiro) silhouettes at the left. I SHOULD spend even more time... No, several hours figuring out movement patterns so everything feels fair, everything is smooth and none of the enemies feel slow, sluggish or repetitive. Therefore I drew this sketch to hopefully get a quick feel of the upcoming enemies.

 

I've wanted to try and color everything with the NES palette, so I ended up recreating it here:


And here's the result after recoloring everything (disabled jellyfish and piranha).
I think they look quite okay, and the Big Boy / Octopus looks scarier now!

 

It's about time I tried drawing this lil' guy as well. I'm not happy with how he turned out, but it's a start.



The top one: NES colors
Bottom: More along the previous color scheme

 

First turtle-test complete.

So the thing is, this enemy is going to behave a lot different. Akiro can't exactly... flee from him. He is stuck at the same Y position (until later) and follows Akiro on the X axis (left-right). When he gets close, and preferably with some timer so it looks a lot more smooth: he will pop into his shell and fly up and try to hit Akiro.

For a while there I was really wondering how I could make him stick to the camera, and then it hit me... Just place him under the camera as a child. Works wonders! ... for now.

 

I'm liking the sound of the turtle, keep up the good work!

 

Yeahh! Thanks a lot for the positive vibes!
I did try fixing his movement yesterday, but it did not work. Basically it's a bunch of bools trying to patch it together, haha.

 

I was thinking about the game, and how would see urchins be as an enemy?
They wouldn't move, but rather spawn as you adventure and stay in those fixed locations
They could have googly eyes, and as you go within a certain distance of them they expand their spikes
That way its kinda a landmine
Just food for thought

 

That's a fantastic idea! I can't believe it hasn't crossed my mind yet!
Oh my, it would fit perfect in the setup I'm planning now. Thank you, I'll make sure to try implement some.

 

Glad to see your back and working on your project again.

I like your ideas of redoing the enemies, these new ones seem alot better than the old ones. The old ones seemed to be something that humans would be afraid of (jellyfish, swordfish, ect.) but these make more sense as they are something that would scare a squid.

Anyways good luck with your project

 

Thanks a lot, Raven!

 

No problem, glad I could help

 

The last two days I've been burried deep down into web-development, and I'm fairly confident I can now create a quite good-looking landing page for Akiro. Except for one thing... I have no idea if Akiro is copyrighted. I'm currently researching it, and it seems that akiro.com is taken, but other ones are free.

 

Make sure you let us see the website when its done
What are using atm to host the web build? itch?

 

Yes, at the moment I'm using itch. I'm not sure if I'll leave a playable build on the website or not, but I'll at least have a video 'soon'. The more I think about... Maybe a playable build would be cool? The only downside I can see is that if people become interested, I'll experience a bit of pressure trying to finish the game. But maybe that's a good thing?

 

It took me a chunk of time, and it's not done yet, but... Akiro is now successfully swimming in a circle in my browser. Fun!
I'm planning on maybe having him swim around a header saying "AKIRO" or something on the landing page.

 

So I moved away from the "Akiro swim around logo" idea, and moved towards making a blog instead. I'm a big fan of writing, and I figured this could be a nice mix of working on Akiro, and working on my web dev skills at the same time. Here's the rough layout I have for now... Not too satisfied, but it's a decent start. Also, I just copied some text I've written in this dev log to test if I could get posts to work.



I'm not sure, but I think I will eventually add a Twitter widget, and hopefully some social icons. The latter is kind of essential.

 

He-hey, up and running!

Squidblog early 'alpha'

 

Today I'm taking a break and spending the day working on Akiro. I'm going back and forth scripting the turtle movement, designing / redesigning enemies and sketching to see if I can make the movement and general experience better.



Some algae-ish enemies that are static. Originally I started with static objects like those, and the reason I'm experimenting with them now again is because I think it'd be more balancing gameplay wise if not everything was moving.
I'll probably upload a new playable version tonight.

 

[X] Fix turtle collision
[ ] pool turtle
[X] place in spawn point

... Embarassing. It took me about an hour to find out how to make the turtle not collide with everything... Just now I found the physics panel under project settings. Awesome!

Quick edit:

I've been thinking about how I could fix the spawn for several hours now, until it hit me... Why not just make two extra spawn points and just copy the code I already have? ...
My spawn works like this:

pool enemies (store them ready for spawning, but a max number)
choose random index of 8 spawn points
wait for timer
spawn on one of them



All I had to do was create another array of spawns, and assign those to only the turtle. easy peasy!
Also, as a side note. After I'm done with this project, I'm going to focus more on tutorials and actually learning this. While this project has given me loads of experience, I can also see that I am very slow when it comes to adding or figuring things out. I have the ideas in my head, I just lack the experience to know how I can implement it.

 

Earlier I promised a new playable version, but to be honest it's not very playable at the moment. I could make the other enemies spawn again, and put colliders on the turtles but there's not much point in doing it. As you can see on the gif, their spawn isn't good yet. The left ones swim backwards, and they freeze the Y position when they are at the same position as the player. Soon there, though!

 

Turtles spawn. Check.
Turtles face the right direction. Check.
Turtles float the correct direction (this one took me a handful of minutes, haha). Check.

Next up: Spawning them as children of main camera. The reason for this is because when Akiro moves, the turtles stay at the height they were spawned. I want the "Lakitu" feel, whereas the turtles always stay at that height, until they get close and then they float up.
After that: add them to the pooling system. It shouldn't take too long to fix this. I think I only have to add a range checker, as the code is already there.

 

Aaaand the basic functions are down: they now attach themselves to the fixed height, and as they get close they try to hit Akiro.

 

I've done some small fixes on Akiro's landing page, and I also wrote my first blog entry. Feel free to check it out. I'm also updating it in the bar-thingy under me... I forgot the name of it, haha.

Here is the page

 

I'm so happy I finally fixed this, haha. Honestly I thought I was going to struggle with this for hours, but it took me no more than 30 minutes. What I've had on my to-do list for a long time now is making the spawn points responsive according to screen size, which is shown in the gif below.



Another thing I have on my to-do list is making the camera range responsive according to screen... (this way the game will be zoomed in if the camera is bigger, so Ipads and such don't have to see everything mini). If I can fix that today as well, then I have to say I've had a productive day.

EDIT: Instead of making a small post saying I fixed the area range, I figured I could just sneak it in here. The area range is the collider that deactivates the enemies when they get outside it. Now it changes according to the screen size, or at least it looks like it does it successfully. As I don't have an app store license yet, I can only test on my laptop and through Unity Remote, so I don't know exactly how responsive stuff actually is when it comes to screen size.

 

I spent the evening (well, two hours) watching a deep sea / coral reef documentary, and I've written down some great ideas for enemies. I think i will spend tomorrow fixing nothing but the enemies. One major reason for that is... I got a new design / mechanic planned out. I haven't tried it on paper, nor have I implemented it, but... My gut feeling tells me this _might_ be my new favorite enemy/character (for your information, my favorite now is the puffer. Mostly because I find silly characters fun). Basically the reaction I want to trigger with this new one is: "Agh, there he is again!" - maybe followed by: "get him!"... Anyways, enough half-asleep rambling... I'm just so excited.

 

Grabs popcorn and waits in excitement

 

Let your eyes gracefully fall upon this red ball fish thingy swimming eagerly around eating shrimp. What is his purpose in life? What is his goal? Will he ever get tired of eating?
Stay tuned for the next episode.

 

That was... Beautiful
I'm guessing hes a unique enemy who goes around eating shrimp but you can destroy/eat him instead of him eating you?

 

Also, is he targeting shrimp at random? I think targeting the nearest shrimp would be cool as he swims around eating all in his path, but it could mess up the balance, your choice really