Solitaire Siege Screens and ramblings

Hello everyone,

  Well I’m back on time again this week with the blog update and I hope to keep it this way from now on =)

  Well the maintenance work the hosting company I’m with went off okay, so that’s good news as I didn’t fancy doing the website again (but it could do with a clean up, guess I should start to learn Dream Weaver).

  Right then, lets get down to business and talk about our new game “Solitaire Siege” for the iPhone as I promised last week.

  Basically I guess the easiest way of describing the game is as an enhanced version of the card game Golf / Pyramid.  The idea of the game is to clear a set number of cards from the table.  This is done by dealing a card for the play (from the remaining cards) and if the facing up cards are either 1 value above or below your card, then you can remove that card from the table (turning the card behind that face up) and the player then uses this new card to find another match.  So you are basically trying to make combos / chains of cards to clear the table.  If there’s no more moves then the player deals another card from the remaining deck of cards and the game continues until all the cards are removed (in which case you win the game), or you run out of cards from the deck (in which case you lose).  It’s a very simple game to play, but really fun and engrossing for some reason.

  Well our version enhances this basic game play and makes it more player friendly as the original game was really hard to win and a lot of the time came down to pure luck.  One of the ways we do this is to give the player a health bar, so that even if you don’t remove all the cards, as long as you don’t do too bad you can move on to the next level.  So in this way we can easy the player into the game and slowly increase the difficult of the game.

  As well as having the normal cards, we also have various weapon cards that the player can use to help them clear the level, as for myself, one of the really annoying things about the original version of the game was been stuck with only a couple of cards to pick from and constantly having to keep drawing cards until you got lucky.  Well with our version, if you have picked up one of the weapon cards, you can use that against the card(s) to get things moving again.  The cards range from a simple Sniper Card (which removes a single card from the table, up to full scale “Air Strikes” and “Rocket Launcher” attacks on the cards, which can take out multiple cards at once.  We also have lots of other different attacks, which can be used in a more strategic way to help the player, but I’ll cover them in more detail in another post.

  We have also played around with the table layout for the cards, so each level has a different pattern to it (as well as the cards been randomly placed of course each time you play) and some levels also have tasks / missions in then that require to complete a task to gain access to the other part of the table, which can prove to be pretty interesting when your playing the game and causes the player to consider which way they are going to play the level.  The major thing about our version of the game is that it adds a lot more strategic elements to the game now as the player has more options to choose from and it adds so much more depth to the game, yet still keeps it nice and simple to play.

  I’ve attached a couple of screens for the game for you to get an idea of the game.  They are mock ups done in PhotoShop, but they are all in game art assets and the actual game looks a bit better because it has a few particle effects in there at the moment and for the work been done this week on the game you can continue reading..

Forest Level:

 Desert Level:

 Snow Level:

 Underground Base:

Weekending 03/4/09

Solitaire Siege:

  I’ve been pretty busy on Solitaire Siege this week.  I’ve been jumping around doing a few different things.  I’ve done a huge amount of sound effects for the game (lot’s of war sounds (Jet plane noises, loads of gun noises, bugle calls and way too much other stuff to remember)) which was fun to do, but I don’t think the neighbours where too happy with me =)

  I’ve also cleaned up the card gf/x’s, but there’s still some more work to be done on that.  I think the actual little soldiers look fine on the playing cards and there’s about as much detail as you can put into a space that size (about 36 by 56 pixels).  I re-modelled the Queen model again, well actually I cut up an old model I did a few years ago, but it works well for the game.  I still need to clean up some of the weapon cards (the Flame Thrower card springs to mind), but overall, I think the playing cards are okay and they stand out enough.

  I’ve also modelled a Stealth bomber for the Air Strike attack and the bombs it drops (Isaac has already implemented this and it looks good and it will be even better once the sound is all in (I’ve got a great jet plane effect for this and the whizzing bomb through the air sound effect for the bombs)).

  I also did some basic in game menu screens for the Ambush mode to the game (I know I’ve not talked about that yet, but I need to keep some things secret for you to find out in the game when you play it), but after playing the game for a while I think I need to make the different menus stand out a lot more so it’s instantly recognizable to the player what’s going on and I’ve got a nice simple idea for that which should work well.

  I’m also going to have to change the main menu title screen (you know the green one I showed you last week?) as it doesn’t really match the overall feel for the game, so I’ll have to have a think about that and see what I can come up with.

  Isaac has been really busy this week as well, adding more features to the game and then hunting out all the bugs these new features have caused, but that’s apparently have the fun of coding.  There’s a slight problem with the music for the game (not the actual tunes as they are really smart and match the cartoon army feel perfectly), but the game engine we are using doesn’t support the MP3 format yet, but will do in the next upgrade (so I’ve been told), which should be out in a couple of weeks time.

  Speaking of tunes, Tommy sent me a couple of tunes he has been working on for the game, and they are really good.  I’ve been listening to them while I’ve been playing the latest build of the game and I must have played it for about 3 hours solid today in a constant stretch and I didn’t get bored or annoyed by the tunes which makes a change for me as I normally turn the music off after 10 minutes of play.  I’ve just e-mailed Tommy asking if it’s okay if I can post a couple of short clips of the tunes for you to listen to and if he say’s its okay, then I’ll upload some examples for you to listen too.

  I’m still waiting to here from Apple Development for my license so I can start testing on the real hardware instead of the simulator and PC.  It’s not a big deal, but it’s getting close to the time where I need to start looking at optimizing everything so the load times are as quick as possible and I can really start to play test the game on the real target machine (plus I can play it when ever and where ever then).

  Right, I think I’ve covered everything this week and don’t worry the other projects are still on the go, it’s just that we want to get this game out so we can finally (fingers crossed) start to earn some money back to help to pay for all the money we have already spent doing these game (which is good fun, but is really starting to hurt our bank accounts and visa’s).

It’s late now and I need to get some sleep as I’m starting to fall a sleep at the keyboard here, so have a great week and I hope to see you again soon and if you could pass the word around about this game, that would be great as we really need all the help we can get to stand out with the App Store been so crowded with new games coming out every day.

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

This entry was posted on 04/04/2009 at 12:06 am and is filed under Solitaire Siege, Current Game Development, 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.