The 5th really marked the start of work on my entry for One Game a Month this week. With my entry for August, Trousers being finished up in those 4 additional days gave me the time needed for a little polish and bug fixing.

This week is also the beginning of doing One Game a Month for my research and final year project with things becoming a bit more structured, including this blog from here on out.

The post before this one included the rules and guidelines I’ll be working with over the coming months (roughly 9) and this blog will mostly cover the beginning of my process for my september game, Hexels.

Hexels is a time limit based puzzle game, making use of the month’s theme: Hexagons.

On the 5th I gathered my thoughts and built a sheet of ideas but I arrived at the idea for Hexels thinking about resource management and turning the hexagons themselves into a resource.

The goal of the game simply came from a bit of nostalgia for the Bioshock hacking mini game and games of its ilk. My twist on the idea being that the player was trying to link lasers to a power source using a grid of hexagons. There would be a time limit to this: I’ve been playing with six seconds as the limit, one for every side of the shape.

By the 6th I had a solid but initial idea down, I grabbed a pencil and some paper and drew out how I think it might play, moving to adobe illustrator later to create this mock up. This was the first thing I started showing to a few friends for feedback.

In addition to this I printed out a bunch of paper hexagons and started thinking about how fast the player react either with a touch device or mouse, I’ll probably be relaxing my originally tight fisted idea of six seconds because of this stage as if you can’t react fast enough with little bits of paper, you probably won’t be able to as someone new to the game.

On the 7th I opened my tool of choice for this month and last: Stencyl and began to piece together a prototype that made use of a particle system for the lasers that flowed between individual hexagons. Though this approach worked in a sense, the results could sometimes be inconsistent with particles getting stuck at certain hexagons.

In addition to the prototype attempt with particles, I did find a working method to slot the hexagons that allowed the laser to move through the level into a hexagon grid.

On the 8th I began looking into building the game for android, I had never done anything with a tablet or mobile device before and the process to get a debug app through Stencyl onto my Nexus 7 was a bit troublesome, but I can say by the end of it. Successful!.

Goals for the next week:

• Have a working prototype by Wednesday including working touch controls for android device.

• Get people to play the prototype on PC and Android, get feedback.