First off, some housekeeping. The Painter’s Apprentice is going to be at Artcade 3000 in Brooklyn, NYC, June 5-7. Stop by and play a demo of our game along with a whole bunch of other amazing games. Come say hello on June 5 from 8-10pm for the Designer Opening if you want to ask us questions about the game.
We’re still looking for some awesome artists to feature in our bonus levels for The Painter’s Apprentice. If you’re interested in being featured, please contact jasmine [at] luminositymobile [dot] com for more information.
Now, onto business.
We got our submission video for the Boston FIG Digital Showcase done this week. See below for your viewing pleasure.
On our weekly stream this past Saturday we played The Painter’s Apprentice live on our Twitch channel. We went into the stream focused on showing off the game and finding bugs, which we found, but we also ended up with a lot of realizations about the overall experience we’re trying to create. If you missed the stream it’s on our YouTube page, but here’s the highlights:
- The double jump feels strange. To get more height you hit the jump button twice early and in quick succession to get height instead of at the highest point of the jump. This is counter intuitive to anyone who’s played a platformer before and should probably be finessed a little. The game should feel good to play.
- We discussed adding a pan feature so players can see where they should go, but decided it’s better to make the player figure out where to go for the most part. There will be places in the level where you could make a blind jump, but if you look around a little you’ll find a more obvious way to go. This will require some levels to be redesigned with this principal in mind. This retains a level of exploration and difficulty in the games.
- Not a bug, but the music is sounding great!
- We have some UI problems with the menus scaling/stretching and covering up the great home screen background we have.
- We want to add some more buttons to several of the UI menus like a retry from checkpoint or retry from beginning.
- We don’t want the store to seems so intimidating, so we’re going to rename it to fit the theme better, like Art Supplies or Painting Supplies. The idea being that the store will have some optional real money elements, but real money will not be required. Plus, we don’t want to scare people away.
- There is a 3 star system currently in the game. One star for completing the level, one star for completing the level in 60 seconds, and one star for completing the level without taking damage. The level exit doesn’t appear until you defeat all the enemies. We talked a lot about using the star system to unlock levels, which brought up a lot of discussion about the goal of the game. We decided on keeping the main levels unlocked because we don’t to locked the experience behind a “wall.” The Painter’s Apprentice does not require hardcore skill. That being said, there will be bonus levels featuring guest artists that require a high number of stars. This should appeal to players who are more into completion or challenge. As we say in the biz, gotta catch ’em all. In all seriousness though, we want The Painter’s Apprentice to be accessible to different types of players.
So, as you can see, we still have quite a bit of work to do, but it’s so exciting to do a big play like that and see the game get better.
Otherwise here’s some pictures of everything we’ve been working on this week!
‘Til next time!