from the development team
It’s been just over a month and we thought it would be a good time to update you on what’s been going on ShapeVS wise, don’t worry a studio update will be happening soon as well to cover those basis. In this dev blog we are gonna cover the process we have made as well as talk about a couple of the games in ShapeVS that you can play.
“The red highlighted icons show games currently in development”
Over the past six to seven weeks we have been hard work getting games up and running, now we are operating with a single goal 70% and playable. What this essentially means is getting the game up to a point where its playable, the basic rules work and you can come back multiple times. With this core premise it lays the ground work for what the game will be, from here we develop the other systems that tie in to it.
This mainly comes from play testing and the such, an example would be that at the beginning of a match of Shape Fly players would begin to fall immediately, and through various test we finally landed on an “angel platform” style solution.
“Angel/revival platforms as seen in the Smash Bros. series”
Previously the three games we had around the community and media was Shape Fly, Shape Move and Shape Zone. All of which have had many community play sessions, moving on from these games as shown above we have three more, which as mentioned before, are at that 70% playable state. These games are:
Shape Match/Battle
Shape Match/Battle is a top down shoot em up which tasks players with eliminating each other through various maps and weapons. We have implemented three maps and five weapon types so far and have had a few play sessions. Early feedback has been good and we have had some great ideas of where to take the game.
Shape Rush
The most recent of the three in development, this game takes aspects from the Shape Rush mobile game and blends a bit of platforming and design notes from another one of our games, Galactic Run. The games main loop right now is playable and we will be going in to community testing soon.
and, Shape Blast
There is no secret about Smash Attack’s love of fighting games and the Smash Bros. series. We have taken aspects of the knockback mechanics from the game and mixed with some of the custom games we have come up with over the many years. Shape Blast will be hitting the community circuit soon!
For those wondering about the Shape Match/Battle thing, we have to quickly talk about the naming convention for the “Shape” games. The “Shape” part obviously ties in to the simple design nature of the games in regards to the graphics. The games simple vector shape style graphics is what ties it to its name.
Now for the other part, the “game” part of the name. The second part has always been a way to link in to the game. The “fly” in Shape Fly ties in to the flying/flappy bird aspect, the “move” in Shape Move is all about moving around and dodging the obstacles and lastly the “rush” in Shape Rush is all about the rush of the platforms coming towards the player.
Going back to the above games, we originally had the “match” in Shape Match was meant to mean deathmatch. As the game is a free-for-all deathmatch but as time went on we realised Shape Battle was a much better name and some people seem to agree!
“Some advice from our last session of #PitchYaGame and some feedback from a publisher about changing the Shape Match name to Shape Battle“
So with six of the twelve launch games making solid progress lets expand a bit on the team. Over the past six weeks we have confirmed a new team member for ShapeVS, local Tasmanian programmer Alex Lobley. Alex is joining the team as he moves over from the Gun/Mode project. As Gun/Mode continues to go through some changes he has lent his hand to Temp and the team and brings his eagerness to learn to the project.
With two main programmers, one artist, one audio engineer and a consultant we fill as if we are on the right path and making good time. The way the game has been structured, development wise, allows for us to get a game up and running pretty quickly. This is thanks in part to our design goal for what we are calling “simple control styles” which is one of the core design pillars for ShapeVS.
What the SCS essentially boils down to is “are the games playable for everyone?” and “can the game be played with minimal controls for accessibility?”
“Shape Match was one of the trickier ones to develop but it now works with one analogue stick and two buttons”
The SCS has three main focuses to tie in to the questions above, these three focuses make up our control schemes:
Top Down
Built for games like Shape Match/Battle, the top down games take the analogue controls and face buttons to create a variety of games from battle arena’s to racing games.
Platformer/Side Scroller
The most commonly seen game style so far, based on games like Super Mario, Space Invaders and Mega Man, the games that use this control scheme are built around tight movement and some times some combat.
Single Interaction
Used for games like Shape Fly, it’s pretty much as it sounds, one button or stick to play the game.
Using this basis we have been able to get games up and running pretty quickly, due to the controls being similar all it now takes is building the level, creating the manager that looks after the rules and then applying the necessary controls to the player. A good example would be that between first development in March to the first dev blog we got three games up and running for playtesting. With an extra programmer and the controls handled for the three control types we now have six games in an extra couple of months.
This is a huge boost for us as it allows us to focus on the most important aspect, game feel. How does it control?, how well does it react? and so on. This is why the community feedback sessions have been so important to us, it’s a straight shoot to the answers we need from the people who will play it the most, the consumer.
“Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit has an excellent video on the topic” Link: here
It’s been a bit of a lengthy dev blog, hopefully one day we will move to video blogs, but right now we are happy to be sharing the ShapeVS journey with you all. Look forward to some more updates and game breakdowns soon. For now always follow us on our socials to be kept up to date. Links to Facebook (click here) and Twitter (click here).