Buggers Update: It may not happen today.

This is the last day for my February project, but the game may not be released today. The game can be made ready today, and that’s still possible, but before that happens, I need to get a web-component setup. This component is not part of the game, but it will hopefully help with promoting Pixelbyte’s upcoming games. Once I get it working, I will put a link to it in the game and we’ll be good to go. I don’t expect this to take too long, and it might possibly all get done today, but it could also take 2 or three more days.  I’m just not sure. I do know that this does need to be done, and it will only need to be done once, so my next 5 “1 month challenge” games will not suffer this delay. My original plan was to release 6 games for 5 platforms in 6 months. I still plan to do 6 games, but I may reserve one or two of those games for the desktop.  I’m still not sure about that, but some genres just don’t do well with virtual joysticks and buttons. To be honest, I don’t like virtual joysticks/buttons for any kind of mobile action game. They just frustrate me, and that’s because of the lack of tactile feedback that a keyboard, mouse, or joystick gives you.  When you push on a real joystick, you can feel when you reach the limit. Not so with a virtual joystick.  I feel like a hypocrite though because I have a virtual joystick in Buggers.  I don’t like it, but if I want to release to the mobile/pad ecosystems, I have to do it.

Here is what has been accomplished this week:

• Squashed many more bugs in the Tiled loader scripts. They actually are working quite nicely now.
• Implemented a new enemy using my behavior library. This is the first real thing I’ve done with behaviors and my library. As a result, I learned good stuff and many enhancements/additions were made to the library. [I spent way too much time on this]

  

• Many improvements were made to Pixelbyte’s core libraries.
• Polished and fixed many UI elements
• Added multiplayer support (only for PC/Mac/Linux and it will probably not be in the first release)
• Updated the in-game instructions screen
• Added some cool features that allow for level development and testing using a build of the game.
• Added sound effects for the player’s food vacuum. This was an interesting and fun exercise in that the sound needed to be broken up into 3 parts: vacuum start, vacuum on, and vacuum stop.
• Implemented a scoring system that gives a player points for all bugs killed. Each piece of food put into a basket gives the player points plus a bonus multiplier that is applied to every bug killed. For example, if the player baskets a single piece of food, the bonus multiplier increases to 2x.  Every bug killed by the player then give 2x the normal points, unless a bug steals the food from the basket.
• Added an in-game poll which allows players that complete the game to vote on a couple of questions about the game.

  

Stay tuned.

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