@Axel, you know, you owe me some high quality feedback… get playing!!!
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I like your puzzles. especially surprise elements when next levels reveals.
and your graphic remind me one . [details=russian psychedelic cartoons]
[/details]
About the game It was just strange for me that you can sacrifice one of the character. also on my old 13’’ laptop the game canvas is a bit bigger than browser window
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Played up to level 12, got stuck there, like the game a lot, can see this being very popular with the room mates, might be nice to had the enter key to play again, just for speed, and the text looks ugly when it appears across the board, the graphics are cute, their surprised look as they fall into the abyss made me smile. One thing I did notice, the position of the trees on some levels actually gave you the solution as how to solve it, this might be down to getting used to how the game played, or you might want to add more confusion to the levels.
regards
DaveJ
3 Likes
@nicloay thank you so much for playing and for sharing that screenshot. I believe that re-sizing is rather complicated, isn’t it? Did you try full-screening the game? How old is your laptop? (i’m asking to get an idea of how serious this problem could be)
Here, I suspect you meant to say that you *can’t sacrifice one of the characters, right?
Actually if one of the character will die but another one will eat donut at the same turn the level will be passed (in case if it’s a latest star or latest donut).
I have macbook 2011 it has 1280x800 screen size. According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp it is about 15% of the users (my size and lower, not sure if they count mobile screens as well). Here is a statistic across unity apps http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/display.html
@Davej Thank you so much for playing (I know I just said the same thing to nicloay but really, I always feel very grateful when people take their time to test out stuff I’ve made!!).
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I’ll definitely add the enter key idea. I really need to do some menu stuff as that’s all quite basic at the moment.
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I find it difficult to know which levels people are going to find difficult! And different people seem to have trouble with different parts of the game (from what I have seen, they tend to repeat the same mistake very early on (thereby making the puzzle unsolvable) and then spend a long time trying to solve it. That’s why I let the player choose from the entire first world, instead of making them complete the levels one by one.
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It’s true that the trees make it very easy: in fact that they are the key element of all of the levels as they are the only way of changing the algorithm. So although you found those levels very easy… you should be aware that you are only one world into the deep dark depths of the bikiniverse!!! No but seriously, my flatmates (who are not computer game people) managed to do about 10 levels in 10 minutes, generally taking between 1 and 4 attempts, so I was pretty happy. I’ll let you know when the rest is up (I have more than 100 levels already made in an old version, the majority of which are available here, in case you feel like playing a little more)
3 Likes
That’s not supposed to happen. The donut is not collectable if either Alex or Isabel falls into space. I’ll investigate (and perhaps add an animation to make it clear that the donut disappears if anyone falls into space).
Re: Screen size… I used the defold default screen size, and so it’s a shame to have that problem. I’ll see what I can do about making it smaller and more manageable. I really appreciate your detailed feedback.
bikiniverse making the girls happy!!!
Goal #03 - Successful done !!
1 Like
Here’s the latest version of the game
(it’s actually the same link as before) but so much has changed! music, animations, different level select, different levels…
I’ve submitted to the competition and I’m going to take a little break, then come back and work on some new stuff:
- even better animations, storyline, more levels, and secrets
- and neater coding!!!
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This reminds me of Link Twin. It’s a game made by a local Romanian studio. It has the same “both characters move” mechanic.
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Congratulations on submitting your game to the competition!
That is true. I am a little upset: when I first started developing my game two years ago it was entirely original. I guess they beat me to it. But their game looks good too.
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So,
my project has taken a little bit of a beating! I spent a lot of time learning lua and defold in order to get it into the competition, and it didn’t win, and i had convinced myself that I was going to win, so that was a downer. And then I found out that my concept has already been created, and this was especially annoying because the originality was a key thing for me on a personal level, apart from the fact that I don’t want my game to be known as a link-twin clone (…and it looks like link-twin is going to get at least a little bit famous, because they have a publisher and some kind of endorsement from Samsung). They even made it character-based when it would have been much easier to do a block-sliding game!!! damn!!!
So this month I’m moving to a new flat, and I’m going to have a think about what I want to do to finish this project, although I am less motivated now.
Don’t worry. What you experience is quite normal in game development because there are so many great minds with cool ideas that it’s very hard to find totally new concepts. For example, this link-twin is probably not the first released game of it’s type either, because i remember playing such a game about 5 years ago on a flash-games site like kongregate.
In fact many, many indie-games i played in the last few years have been inspired by those small flash-games without anyone noticing. For example, you were able to play the core mechanics of Angry Birds in a browser-game at least one year before it’s release. All they did was streamlining those mechanics, add cute, mass-compatible graphics and adapt it to a platform better suited to the mechanics.
And that’s not a bad thing. In my opinion game development often is more about evolution rather than revolution. Even the most renowned developers like Blizzard have never created anything truly new. Warcraft was an evolution of Dune II, Diablo was a pimped Rogue/Hack-Clone (initially it was even turnbased), WoW had multiple ancestors like Everquest and Overwatch is very similar to Team Fortress (BTW: The Overwatch-producer took this comparison as a compliment, and not as blaming for being a clone).
Blizzard has mastered the art to just pick a game or genre and evolve/streamline/polish the heck out of it.
This of cause doesn’t mean we should not try to find totally new concepts. But i think it helps to see the positive things when you encounter a game similar to yours:
- Very important: It’s a proof of concept that your idea has potential! You are not the only one who thinks that the world needs your game.
- You can play and analyze the other game to determine features you could apply to your game to make it better. And on the other hand what your game could implement the other game may be missing.
So i suggest to not see your game as a clone just because you share some mechanics, but rather as a quest/challenge to find the one key-selling-point that distinguishes your game from the other. It can be anything: New mechanics, artstyle, story, easier controls or a new platform (currently AR and VR are quite popular).
If you just add only one thing that’s different (maybe you already have) you will probably find people who are at least equally or even more interested in your game than the others. And if you don’t find the secret ingredient, it’s not a shame to just start the next game. I have thrown away countless prototypes and half-finished games, but i guess i learned something from every single one.
And as you experienced by yourself you always have the possibilty to reactivate old projects if you stumble upon the missing ingredient months or even years later. You can even simply finish and release your game as it is now and add any new ideas you find later to a sequel.
See it this way: Your first game is very solid and already has some fans. For comparison: My first 5 or so games have all been unfinished crap no one ever played. So you have all the right to pat yourself on your shoulder. 
10 Likes
This is a really great answer @Daggett ! I totally agree with you. Discovering a game similar to the one you’re working on does probably mean that your idea is good and worth pursuing. It can really act as motivation to make your game even better. Don’t give up @88.josh!
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I am back in the bikiniverse!
How can I animate a local variable?
1 Like
You can use go.animate() to animate script properties defined with go.property(). It should be possible to animate numbers, vector3 and vector4, but I’m not 100% sure.
I did a test. You can only animate numbers. You will not get an error when you try to animate a V3 or V4, but nothing happens. This is tracked in issue DEF-1311 and discussed on the forum in this thread.
2 Likes