December 24 (12 hours or so from now) you can get your hands on the Squishy Bugs beta. I’m presently testing the beta making sure all of the features are in place and that everything is working. It has been a long time in the making. 1 year ago tomorrow I released the very first version of the game. It wasn’t pretty and I probably “shot myself in the foot” by releasing the game in such an early unfinished state. If I can find some screenshots I’ll edit this post and put them below this paragraph.
Shoot forward ~365 days, now I have no problem calling the game done. You’ll get to play the beta, I’ll continue testing for a few days after the beta release, then I’ll release version 1.0 on my birthday! I turn 29 on December 29.
That image above is the “big feature” of this next update. You can now share your high scores to Twitter and Facebook directly from within the game. I wouldn’t call coding that feature “game development” but I think it’s a necessary addition to the game. There was a lot of programming external to the actual game that was required in making Squishy Bugs.
The biggest Squishy Bugs related project being the WaggSoft api and accompanying Squishy Bugs high score list. Developing those server side features was a lot of work but the bright side is those features will be used in my future games. I don’t need to code them again. They’re done, which will speed up development of my next game(s).
So please, if you have an Android device, give Squishy Bugs a try. It’s free. It’s ad-supported. I make pennies from it per month so I’m not getting rich off this. Tell your friends. When the beta and version 1 are released please make use of the Twitter and/or Facebook sharing feature at least once.
If you have any questions you can reach me on my personal Twitter or the WaggSoft Twitter. If you’re press, (kyle at) shoot me an email (n3wt0n.com) or check out the Squishy Bugs presskit(). There are also the WaggSoft Forums.
Happy holidays to you all! Thanks for playing.
-Kyle D. Newton
The end is near! There’s some quote out there that sums it up and I wish I could link to it but my Google-Fu is not with me tonight. Paraphrasing:
The goal is not to add features but to remove as many as
possible while still retaining the essence of the game.
Something like that. I cut a few features that were already implemented, and axed a couple that I was planning to add but really didn’t contribute to the game. And I added a few features that I felt did contribute to the game.
What was cut? The “group drop” power ups. That includes the “color dropper” and the “icon dropper”. What do those do, you ask? Exactly. They were confusing while playing, even to me.
Color Dropper
When you activated this power up, any time the ball hit a tile all of the similarly colored tiles adjacent to it would fall as a group.
Read more…
Took a little “vacation for the mind” this weekend. Didn’t work on Squishy Bugs, and for the most part stayed away from the real-work-that-pays-the-bills type work. I blame Google Play and the $0.25 sale that has been going on every day for the last 5 days. Dungeon Village by Kairosoft is the shining star in the bunch that I’ve really enjoyed. There was also a little effort in saving the universe in Mass Effect 2, and some Assassin’s Creed.
Getting back to the state of Squishy Bugs, it’s nearing completion. Just doing things like making the font bigger here, shrinking it there. Filling up empty space or making room where the font is too big or small. Making sure the font lines up… lots of little details.
Aside from the “social” aspect (Facebook and Twitter sharing) I’m calling the game feature complete. From here on it’s just an effort to make the game shiny (and add the social sharing buttons when the polishing is done).
One “big” thing to note, the high scores need to be reset. To get technical, it was too hard to link meta data to player’s high scores. Things like the elapsed time, or number of tiles squished, to name a couple. Perhaps not a huge requirement for a game like Squishy Bugs but I’m writing the server-side api (an optional feature of Squishy Bugs) to be forward-compatible with games that are not yet written. Basically, any/all games I create in the future. So it’s best to get that fixed up now before Squishy Bugs 1.0 is out the door.
EDIT: There’s also that Squishy Bugs tutorial I need to get around to finishing…
Squishy Bugs alpha 7 has been submitted to the Google Play store.
Features
- Now possible to score in the millions of points.
- Every powerup now contributes to the score multiplier.
- Added some variety to the tile icons in the “Day” theme.
- Powerups now spawn more frequently. The chance to appear gradually increases the longer a powerup hasn’t appeared.
- Added various informative text so the player has a better idea of why the screen appears to have paused at times.
Fixes
- Fixed issue with music starting over again when navigating menus.
- Fixed issue where some assets were being loaded too many times, consuming excess memory.
I looked into the handy presskit() installer by Rami at Vlambeer. Very cool. I got a press page set up for WaggSoft and a project page for Squishy Bugs. The WaggSoft site, as a whole, needs a lot of work. I’ll be fixing it up more and more as Squishy Bugs gets closer to version 1.0.
Also, if you missed it, Squishy Bugs now has a high scores page. For now, everyone’s scores are displayed there. Any score with the name “SquishyBugs” associated with it belongs to someone who wasn’t logged into their account when the score was submitted. In the future, the global high scores page will only display paid users’ scores on it. That’ll be a one time $0.99 fee which will get me closer to being able to make game development a full time job.
So get to playing. Make sure you have created a free account in game, and have logged in. See if you can beat the #1 spot!
