First art

Finally some visual stimulation, created by yours truly. I'm not sure if it turned out well, but I think it didn't turn out terrible, and because of that, I am satisfied. This is my first time making art for a game. This is my first time making art for anything. I chose pixelart. I find pixelart to be fitting for this type of game and also it is probably the easiest was to create decent visuals. So far I've done the gampelay stuff. The menu art is still on the way. Here is a peek at the new look:

Slow motion

This is the newest and likely the final gameplay element of Blue Core. It is the classic slow motion effect. The player is given a few seconds of slow motion in each level. The slow motion becomes active when the player is holding the spacebar. There is an indicator that displays in a simple way how much of the effect is still available for the player to use.
As always, a demonstration:

That Homeless Guy!

Hey guys! I would appreciate it if you checked out a game that my friend is making with his fellow developers. The team is a group of students, so naturally, they are not very well off, so they need some help from the community. Check it out, it looks really promising.

New feature - split!

Split is a new feature that I have implemented. This one is a bit more unique than the previous ones. In the levels that have the split feature, an animated sprite will appear on either the upper, left, right or bottom side of the circle. When you cross this 'thing' with the paddle a mirror image of the paddle will be created in the same spot but going in the opposite direction. You can collect particles with the mirror paddle. The mirror paddle will disappear if you hit into it with the original paddle on the other side of the circle.

A demonstration is in order:

Just one more thing to add and then I can start implementing art or designing levels. Haven't decided yet which I will do first. If you have any ideas that you want to share about what else should be in this game, let me know in the comments or send me an email to svargaforge@gmail.com.

Another new feature

It took me way too long to make this one since it was really simple to make. This is a classic. Sometimes your paddle will be halved in it's size. We've all seen it before, nothing revolutionary, but it's almost a must for a game such as Blue Core.

Here is a video of the new feature in action. Just like all the others, this one also comes with a shitty placeholder animation.

I'm back

I am back in development after a couple of months of trying not to fail the first year of college. School work is slowly coming to it's minimum but we're not quite there yet, so I didn't have a whole lot of time to jump into the complicated game mechanics code, but I did take a little time to make a logo animation, program it into a splash screen and embed it into the game. Took me quite some time to be honest. I am not an artist by a long shot, so that was a new kind of challenge for me. Also since this is my first serious game, I have never made a splash screen before. It was a lot of fun to say the least.

But making a splash screen was not on the schedule and I wasn't supposed to go make flashy colourful stuff before I even finish the game, but let's just say I got a little carried away and wanted to make something that is a bit more fun before I dive back into the hardcore stuff. With that being said, my next goal is to get some new game features going, like instances that resize your paddle, instances that make the particles bounce of the paddle and so on....

I'm not going to show off the splash screen because frankly it is not very important. You can see it once the game is out, which seems to me might not be as far away as it was a while ago.

The reason for that is, that during this time of not working on the game, I was thinking that maybe I should not put too much detail into it. Just make the game simple, and free, for everybody to enjoy. So I'm dropping the story, which would have taken me loads of time to implement. I will still post the story here for those of you who will want to know what's really going on in the game.

Another new feature

For the last two days I have been working on a new feature. This one is an event during gameplay, where you have to avoid particles, for a certain amount of time, instead of picking them up. But before I started coding the new stuff, I had to rethink how to present these events a bit. Until now, events started by particles of a different colour being launched from the centre, and when the player picked them up, the event started. That was not such a brilliant idea, because the player has no choice whether to pick the particle up or not anyway. So instead, I have decided to just give the player a warning of an upcoming event. For now I just made a simple animation that flashes a red colour over the screen, as if there was an alarm going off, but that should change once the art will begin to be made. If you're interested in what the new feature looks like, here's a video:

For any ideas or comments, contact me at svargaforge@gmail.com or post your thoughts in the comments below. Don't forget to follow me on twitter for more frequent and not necessarily relevant updates.