*This series of blog posts explains problems that arose during development with their solutions, as well as found solutions and decisions made. It shows the game being built from the ground up. Check out part one and part two. *This part continues directly where the last part ended.
There where also a few scrapped modes- ‘Arise’, involving the stack to rise (not unlike Panel de Pon), and ‘Descend’, with blocks dropping out of the sky (not unlike Meteos), where the goal would be to prevent the stack getting too high. The main reason they where scrapped was a limit of time, since I decided to turn in Hexaria as a project for my school. Also, the idea of a free mode (not unlike ‘Simple’ in Meteos) where you set all available rules yourself would still be a good idea. Lastly, a puzzle mode was planned where mathed gems were not removed from play, but you simply had to match each gem at least once in as least moves possible. I do agree the current number of modes are quite low and do not differ much from each other, so this is an excellent problem to take on in a future update, before the release on the internet.
This time I really wanted ambient sounds. Incompetech, where I usually get music for in my games, did not really had what I was looking for, so in search for a different site, I found the Free Music Archive, with lots of music that is often in Creative Commons. That, and some work from artists and photographers who put their work out with an open licence (on Wikimedia Commons, for example), really make the game look and sound more beautiful than I could ever achieve by myself. I think it is really important for artists to allow a more open use of their work, which is why I like to present my own software through an open license as well. I’m already planning to open source this game once I’ve added more game modes, and will put it on GitHub for everyone to tinker with.
Let me talk about colorblindness. About 8% of males is colorblind. A pretty huge part of your player base, no? Therefore, in a game that conveys information through color alone, you want to build a prevention against that so all colorblind people can still play it as intended. It also dims the backgrounds a bit, so the contrast between gameplay and background is better. First was the idea to select the color of all blocks yourself, although the solution used were huge icons on the blocks. The Game Accessibility Guidelines contain lots of good ideas to make your game more suitable for everyone, so I recommend everyone to apply at least the Basic Guidelines guidelines to your game.
As a little experiment, I checked how difficult it is to include multiple translations in your game. I made a system that allows me to easily copy a table column into a script, and it includes it in the game! The only included languages as of now are Dutch and English, but these could easily be accompanied by other languages if wished. The game automatically detects which language the OS runs and adjusts itself to that.
The game uses the GameJolt API yet again! As of now, it only supports guest highscores (which are also displayed inside the game for the first time in one of my games). Plans are, for the release version, to include trophies as well, and that I use the data storage to figure out how players play the game- what their favorite game modes are, a collaborative effort in Zen mode to score as much points as possible- in the past this gathered quite some interesting data, so I’m willing to step it up this time to uncover even more interesting data.
All with all, this has been a project that I put a lot of time into, something I really wanted to do after making quite a few jam games last year. I’m hoping I’ll get better at finishing projects, so that I can finish more games in a single year. I also feel my programming skills increasing bit by bit, and I learn more about making games immersive and fun. After originally writing these three parts, I handed in Hexaria at my Informatics teacher. The story, however, is not yet over, as I continued improving the game for release to the world. Next time, I’ll talk about building the extra game modes, as well as other stuff I added to make the game better. Stay tuned! You can get Hexaria on GameJolt or itch.io.
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