Halloween, Bejewelled Twist and celebrating burning Terrorists to death.

Hello folks,

  I’m posting a day early this week because I don’t think I’ll be able to post tomorrow.

Well it’s been a pretty busy week this week and I’ve been working solely on Lucky 7 this week.  Well I did spend a night helping someone with a possible graphical theme for their project and if it works, I’ll post links to it.

  Isaac has almost finished the new special attach (which we are currently calling the Ghost Block Attack) and will send me a build when to test it.  Basically, the game is a match 3 style of puzzle game (but different to any other game I have see) with a large character based theme to the game with a lot of unique features which would really make the game stand out.

  I was also really looking forward to the new Bejewelled game (Bejewelled Twist) to come out due to the fact that I really liked the original games and the huge build up that PopCap has been building up.

  Now I have only played the demo version of the game and I know that a lot of PopCap games do seem to get much better after the first hour (Book Worm Adventures is a LOT better after about 90 minutes), but I was starting to get board of the game after about half a hour of playing and it didn’t really improve after that.  The actual game mechanic just wasn’t original and the rotating game mechanic just seemed to pull me out of the game, I think this was due to it feeling more complex, having to work out the rotation pattern instead of just swapping blocks.  It felt like it was an extra step in my mind moving four blocks around instead of swapping just the two and that forced me to think a bit more, where as with the original game I could almost turn my brain off and relax.  There is a Zen mode which doesn’t have the bombs, but even then it didn’t feel as relaxing as the original.

  The presentation was also nice in that it supports really high screen resolutions and it really makes the graphics look really sharp and allows for plenty of detail.  I wasn’t very impressed by the cheap 3D in between effects, but I guess, it does it job.  I also liked the little touch of having a roulette spin mini game if you failed to defuse a bomb in time (think of the chance of getting an extra last life on a pinball machine).

  I guess the above sounds really negative, but it’s not really that bad, but I know I wouldn’t buy it from playing the demo, especially when they are charging 50% more then normal games and if I had the choice, I would go for Bejewelled 2 or wait for Lucky 7 (wink, wink).

Weekending 31/10/08

Lucky Seven:

  After playing the new Bejewelled Twist game, I’ve decided to increase the screen size of the game from 640 * 480 to 800 * 600, so what this will mean to the player is that the graphics will look a bit more sharper and have slightly more detail.  What it means for me is that I will have to redo all the graphics again for the game to match the new screen resolution, which shouldn’t be as bad as it sounds as there’s a lot of pre-rendered graphic assets that I can just re-render out again and clean up.

  I’ve knocked up a quick Halloween poster from one of the monster / character heads from Lucky 7 (really quick and dirty wall paper), but it will give you a hint for the graphics style for the game.

  To be fair, been English, we don’t really do Halloween, the British are more interested in November the 5^th (Guy Fawkes night (Bonfire night)) where we celebrate burning an old school terrorist to death on top of a bonfire for a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament (he wanted to kill the royal family at the time).  See there’s always been terrorism, but I guess its part of the English sense of humour, that we actually celebrate burning someone to death, (that and fart jokes) and just to rub it in, bonfire night was really the only time we got to see fireworks as a kid, which was more then what Mr Fawkers got to see.

 Well, I guess that’s it for now, but this post has almost been educational, but don’t worry, it will be back to normal next week.

Have a good week and a Happy Halloween,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

This entry was posted on 30/10/2008 at 09:08 pm and is filed under Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.