"Us." - an anthology on relations

Hi everyone!

This is going to be a devlog on my current project: "Us.". The idea is to start and finish a small game every week for January, and release them as a compilation. I wanted these games to have a common theme, and I choose (human) relations. Why relations? Well, besides inspiration from personal experiences, I wanted to do something like a game I really enjoyed: Connections. In essence, it does the exact same I want to do with these week long games: it’s a game with meaning through “mechanics, dynamics, interactions, and all the things that make games 'games'”, and the meaning it wants to convey has to do with human relations.

Am I not being a bit uncreative with my theme then? Well, I thought so at first too… but thinking about it more, I realized that human relations is a really rich topic, and there’s tons of stuff I could cover that weren’t covered in Connections, or I could cover similar topics but in greater detail. Really though, in the end… it’s a topic I really care about, and that’s the most important motivation I could ask for.

Will be posting my progress here, hope you enjoy it!

Sounds like a cool project. Maybe you'll even learn something new about yourself in the process as well.

Sounds like a cool project. Maybe you'll even learn something new about yourself in the process as well.

Thanks, let's hope so!

So today I spent time working on the basic mechanics of the first game, "Groups". Mechanically, it's a top down game about launching yourself from group to group, with space-like gravity. It's my first time ever using the Physics plugin in Construct 2 (or my first time making a physics game ever really), so it's been fun to learn it and start messing around.

The only problem is that since I've never made a physics game, I have absolutely no natural intuition for the ideal values of density, forces, impulses, etc. I spent a good deal of time just balancing values to make the game feel right, and ended up programming a quick interface so I could change values in-game and didn't have to get into the code each time I wanted to tweak a value. It worked quite well though, and I think got something that feels ok!

So after today, the game is finally playable! The stats have to be fine-tunned, but I think I'm done with mechanics. Now it's time to start working on graphics to make the game pretty.

Spent yesterday mostly on visuals and audio effects. None of it is particularly good, but at least it's clear (and it's better than programmer art haha). Still need to add some final touches, but after that it's time to fine-tune the game and prepare it for release today!

It's intriguing, I'm looking forward to play that thingie.

The first game is finally up! It's not great (far from it actually), but it's a good start for these weekly games. You can try it over at the Scirra Arcade: https://www.scirra.com/arcade/other-games/us-14222

It doesn't seem to be loading up for me. Just a black screen.

It doesn't seem to be loading up for me. Just a black screen.

Thanks for the heads up! It's strange though, I tested the ZIP file I uploaded and it worked fine, and then I tried re-uploading it but I still get a black screen. Have removed it for the time being, for now I'll upload the game to itch.io: https://alcex.itch.io/us

I also wrote a postmortem on this first game over at my blog! It's long and mostly negative, but I'm glad I learnt a lot on my first try. Let's hope to improve with this week's game!

I really like the idea of that game and I see a lot of potential in it. Also, I found the game really calming to me.

I'm looking forward to your next weekly stuff!

I really like the idea of that game and I see a lot of potential in it. Also, I found the game really calming to me.

I'm looking forward to your next weekly stuff!

Thanks!

Have been kinda busy this week and haven't been able to work much, so I went an idea that feels pretty simple but I hope I'll execute well, called closeness. Here's a gameplay gif:

So yeah, it was a busy week and I only finished it now... but here's last week's game, tell me what you think!

https://alcex.itch.io/us

Finished writing a postmortem on closeness! It's interesting though, I ended up concluding that it being simple was a good and bad thing. Why you ask? You can read about it here.

I liked it. It's simple yet hard at the same time. Almost like friendship.

Hey everyone,

I'm sorry to say that I failed at my 3rd weekly game for "Us." :/ To be honest, I still had some slim hopes of finishing it today or tomorrow, but in the end I decided it would be best to leave it. What happened? Well, two things mainly:

• I had a couple of other important obligations for the week, and I ambitiously thought that I would have time to fulfill these and make a game.
• The game idea I chose to do (compatibility) turned out to be much more complex than I anticipated.

I did start on the game, but really, if I didn't stop it now it would have eaten into the time of this week's game, which wasn't ideal either. I doesn't mean I have given up on the idea though! I think it's a pretty good concept, so I'll get around to in in February. Now though it's time for the 4th game... directions.