Design 256 levels or die!

Octobear does not tolerate missed deadlines. The half-bear, half-octopus abomination looms over our mobile game development team. His giant teeth and squiggly fuzzy tentacles of horror ready to end anyone who does not meet the deadline. If you were to translate his snarly growl it would say, "WHERE ARE MY 256 LEVELS!?". Read more if you dare.

 

No 'paws' button!? Un-bear-able!

The Battle Gems team is in critical crunch mode. We expected the game to be released within 3-months of the start with plenty of time polishing it and adding the random silly stuff that makes our games so weird and fun. So naturally, *looks at calendar* we missed our deadline weeks ago. We have been working non-stop to finish the game. Each week we set overambitious goals and go all out. Our team's goal for this week was to design and build all 256 levels of the game's main storyline/map. But that, of course, requires ALL PARTS of the game to be working. Which, with all of the bugs and complications of being an "omni game", we knew it would not be ready. This is the truth behind game development, and pretty much any other type of project. Thank goodness we did not pick a more complicated game like an MMO to be our first omni-game! But the problem remains, we need to design 256 levels and we do not have a working game engine to put them in. So... when the going gets tough, the tough get creative! Turns out there is this stuff called... paper! (I had only read about paper on iPads and Nooks -- never thought it was real!) Play testing on paper is a little hard though... none of the buttons seem to work.

 

 

Many players noticed that Battle Gems takes the core game play from our *coughs* previous PvP puzzle game and then adds in a whole bunch of new features. There are four basic types of gems: Attack, Magic, Pet & Potion. Connecting three or more gems will launch an attack of that type. There are Crit Gems which do additional damage for every side of the gem you touch. Some monsters have special abilities that can mess with your character or the playing board. For example, there is an Ice Monster which can freeze your pet and all of the pet pieces on the board. There are interesting play pieces like slime, cages, and chaos which REALLY change the game play. Each level you complete will unlock a reward. Many of the rewards are more powerful attacks, spells, and skills. The game is designed to be "coffee break style" which means it is simple enough to pick up and play at any time. We really wanted to make a game like Othello "A minute to learn, a life time to master." But I think this is more like "5 seconds to learn and really weird and interesting new things happen as you progress!" Weird things... you know. Like the legendary BrutalCorn of legend! (First peak at Oishii's first BattleGems monster -- yup, Oishii is BACK!)