I’ve got a little bit of feedback about gameplay. Players wish, that traffic was not only cars going once and you are done. They want traffic to continue all the time. They want some purpose for the cars. Like going to the shopping center and back. Trucks delivering goods. Buses driving around.
I’m working on a big update for Traffic Brains 2. Already created parking lots, where cars can park temporarily and then continue their journey. Cars will never stop driving. Your job as a player is to make traffic as smooth as possible, by controlling traffic lights. Your performance will be measured by the Traffic Flow Quality meter.
So I’m looking at my traffic AI and I see a huge flaw. If I set the traffic light to never turn green, cars will sit there and just wait, even when there are alternative routes. This gave me an idea. What If you can block the road when you set traffic to never turn green. Then cars should find alternative paths. It would be an interesting game mechanic, where it is possible to divert traffic to alternative routes and avoid conjunctions.
So I implemented this mechanic. And I’m more than happy with the result. It gives a new fresh feel to the game. Now I need to implement new levels, where this mechanic can be exploited better.
I’m happy to announce, that Traffic Brains 2 is in final testing. I’m replaying levels many times and I always manage to find new issues and bugs. But I can see light at the tunnel end. When most bugs will be resolved, then the other tedious works awaits. Screenshots for all screen sizes and preview videos. It is not hard to make it for one screen size, but it is time-consuming to make it for many sizes.
I’m a one-man studio, so I avoided feature creep like plague 😀 I have so many ideas, how to improve gameplay, but. I feel if I will not release this game soon, I’ll run out of steam to make it. This game is in development for more than a year. After release, I’m planning to add new levels, with new game modes and improved game mechanics. I laid the foundation of traffic AI, on which I can improve.
I guess it is just my opinion, but this is the best looking game from the Short Story series 🙂 I’m looking forward to know what you think about it.
Do you know which of my created games is most popular? No, not those RPG games with a story. No, no, not those on which I’ve spent most of the time. It is Traffic brainz. Simple puzzle game, where you control traffic lights patterns. It has 10 levels. It has 3.2-stars rating, which is not very good. But the sheer popularity of it made me think about a new, improved version.
So I took my 3D Short Story engine and started porting my old game logic to the new engine. As always, I though I could do it like in 2 days… So one year later I have somewhat working firs level.
I’m happy with how it looks. There is still a lot to do. I have many ideas on how to improve on the old gameplay. So, lets get back to work!
Today is the day. Finally, I’ve decided, that is enough of tweaking. The game is ready for release. So I created new builds, disabled all debug features, and uploaded to the app store for review.
The game is not finished. Games are never finished. They are just abanondoned. But there is always something to improve. I will make updates. I have a list of improvements I want to make. Add more quests, more storyline. Update and improve graphics.
For me, it is a huge sense of accomplishment. It is another milestone in the long road to the ultimate game. With each game, my game engine is improved. This game brought basic 3D graphics to my game. So now I can improve other systems, which were stagnated because I didn’t want them to be created for the 2D game engine.
Here is app preview video, that I created for the app store.
I’m on my way to converting my 2D action-adventure game engine to 3D. It should have been easy. Convert 2D tiles to 3D cubes, change up a few textures. All characters as flat planes walking around. All game logic can remain the same, working in a 2D coordinate system. It will take a few weeks to work in my spare time. Yes?
Oh, how I was wrong… Maybe, just maybe if everything went super smoothly without any hiccups, I could do it. But I’ll tell you what. Everyone always underestimates. And here I’m working on my engine for one year. The simple task here, simple task there. On or another feature. It looks like converting from 2D to 3D is just adding one more dimension. But believe me, it adds so much complexity. So much more mathematics needed.
All I needed is to convert the 3D position from the world to the 2D point on the screen. So I can show enemies health bar under their head and some other effects, which are easier to implement in 2D. It should be simple. There should be many easy methods to do that. In other game engines, it is one line of code. Technically it is. In the GLUT library, there are methods just for that. I implemented them and… It doesn’t work 🙁
Work on this problem for 3 days. Sometimes a position is on the screen but at the wrong position, sometimes it is not visible at all. I’ve tried to work out a good “recipe” to get the correct position. Eventually, I did. It works like a charm. But I think to myself, I’m stupid or it is common to have problems with such simple things.
Anyway. Checkout those effects around monsters, which look the same as in 2D, except they are rendered on the 3D scene incorrect position. Neat.
I was working on my game engine, which is very creatively is named “Boring engine”, which is written in C++ and for graphics uses OpenGL. It is the foundation for all my games. On top of it, I’ve created the Short Story engine, which I’m using to create specific RPG games. Such as John and The Goat and Isolation. My idea is to make a simple game, while each next game has improved mechanics and much more features.
John and The Goat was the very first game. It was so basic, that you barely could say, that it is an RPG. A small step for the gaming industry, but it was a big step for me. I laid the foundation for my next short story-driven games. The next one was Isolation. It had a much bigger world and introduces the dungeons with many new enemies types, boss fights. After that, I updated John and The Goat. Recreated maps, added more quests. Added everything, that SS: Isolation had.
My game is crude. They are missing many game features and are lacking visually. I guess the next logical step would be to at least add proper animation for characters. But here comes a little problem. If I continue to develop my games as 2D “Zelda-like” RPG, the more I make, the harder it would be to update it to 3D, which I eventually want to make.
One day, I just started to play with that idea. How hard it would be to make my games 3D. Game logic can remain the same. Only I will render not flat tiles, but 3D cubes with the textures of the same tiles on the walls or the ground. So I took a shovel and started digging.
About after 3 months of casually working in my free time. I present you my new game Short Story: Trip. It is a very early stage. Even the main map is not finished. Many features from the old 2D version still not working. Many moons passed, while I updated the level editor to support 3D. But you can check out the video and decide for yourself. Is it looking better? More interesting?
Short Story: Isolation is released! So what now? Remember the game John and The Goat? Of course not. It was the first game in the Short Story games series. It was more like a limited technical demo of the RPG engine, that I’m working on. It was an early stage and there were very little features and many bugs. When I released that game, I started working on Isolation and at the same time added many new features and fixed a ton of bugs. Now, all that good stuff can be added the John and The Goat.
John and The Goat are missing much more complicated quests. There were zero bosses, only a bunch of thieves and rats. The biggest change will be dungeons as there was none of them.
I’m looking forward to releasing John and The Goat as a fresh new game. Stay tuned!
In-game development the most fun part is the beginning. You hack something together and see it working. Game development progress moves so fast. You think that game can be finished in no time. And after some time you enter middle stage of development. Everything slows down significantly. Everything starts to fall apart. Some code needs to fixes, some refactored to implement new features. Some graphics don’t look good enough. And there is feature creep. It looks like you will never finish it.
I think I’m past all those struggles. The game is almost finished. Left only the least fun part. Atleast for me. Game analytics… It is interesting to know how are you playing my game. Where are you stuck, where is to easy. But adding analytics to the game is a lot of work. It can take some time. So I’m implementing it mindfully. I will not track everything. I just listed a few core places, that want to understand what is is going on.
I really hope that you will leave the app review and some feedback for me. I’m working on this game for two years. Thank you, guys!
Time has come. I’m preparing screenshots and videos for the app store page. The game is 99% complete. Only small tweaks here and there left to complete. I’ve spent a whole day making screenshots and recording a gameplay video, finding game parts, which best represents the game.
I’ve created the App Preview trailer, which should be only 30 seconds long. Take a look.
Also took a bunch of screenshots. You know, it is really complicated to fight monsters and take epic screenshots at the same time. I had to do it on many different devices.
