Additions have come about as I test play and wonder if the game is too easy or too hard. It has certainly been both since my last journal post. Currently I find that it takes me about a half hour to play through a game from start to finish which I think is about the right level of difficulty. At first the lime green eggs stood out very plainly against a black background. I added in a sky background so that the eggs wouldn't stand out so badly which led to adding grass to the ground tiles to camouflage the eggs a little better. The whole thing with camouflaging something behind the grass sprite that I had was something that has been in my mind for years now and I finally could see the results and I was pleased. The graphics are little more than programmer art but it works and I think it works well.
I do wonder a little though if I have some kind of blinders on. I love what I have and I find the game fun to play when I get started but I wonder about a few little things. I added in some various flowers to provide a decorative and distractive element to the game as well as an excuse to provide the snark with powers to help find the eggs. I had found that without any aid it was very difficult to locate all the eggs particularly when it was down to just the last couple. I figured on going with these flowers as they weren't too bad to draw and I figured they'd go nicely with the grass. I now have one flower that gives a sort of egg locator power, I've got one flower that increases jumping ability (which is actually quite useful), and one that increases speed (not as useful as I had though). At that point I ran out of power up ideas and I had 5 flower sprites and I wanted to make sure I use them all. So I figured I'd make them power down sort of things so now one slows down your movement and the other makes you sleep for awhile. They all do what they're supposed to and it's cool that they do what I wanted to but I can't really see why the player would eat any flowers other than the one that gives the egg locator power.
Anyways, some days it feels like I'm running out of steam and some days I get into doing work and I don't want to stop. It's a little harder to get motivated about adding in the title screen and UI stuff. I'm also wondering if I should have a settings screen to enable and disable just about every feature in the game but then I realize that's more UI and I get even less excited about doing that. Still, I want to get this thing to a state where I can feel like I have a finished product not just a mostly finished game.
Oh yeah, and if you can't tell by the title of this journal entry, I've decided to call this game Egg Hunt. Simple, to the point, self descriptive, and I think it draws you in a bit.
Anyways, I've updated my website with the latest build here (it's still a little rough around the edges).
Some general instructions can be found here.
And development notes are here.
Any feedback on the game so far would be appreciated.
