
Hey everyone ! Here is the post mortem of my game Linked Colours.
As always, you can click here to play and rate it.
WHAT WENT RIGHT
Idea and development
As last time, I had the idea pretty quickly and stick to it. Thankfully I didn’t encountered big design issues and if I doubted that I would be able to create many levels, random generation came to my rescue, so I didn’t even needed to create levels manually other than the two tutorials.
In addition to Daneel, the framework for CraftStudio I created and which is the base of all of my projects, I was able to borrow quite some code from other projects of mine, so that I could focus on gameplay instead of reinventing the wheel once again. Having so much code already ready is what made me enter the Jam and not the Compo as the previous times in the first place.
But having an extra day prove very useful as even with a simple idea and lots of ready-code I hadn’t much at the end of the second day in term of gameplay (but visuals where almost final).
Visuals
Let’s say it with some pomposity: linked colours is the best-looking game I have ever created in my entire life, so far ! Look at this beauty ! I am not even an artist, or am I now !?
Well, not quite, but it’s what I am most happy about, the game looks really great, especially compared to my previous games (improvements, yeah !).
Random generation
At the end of the first day, I wanted to add a level editor so that anyone could have created levels. I have one almost working for another game but I ditched the idea even before beginning the second day, where I worked mostly on visuals. Instead I spend some time working on random generation, and it did go surprisingly well.
The generation is pretty simple : on a 5 by 5 grid, it picks a square, then picks a color, then finds another square nearby and sets a color the previous one can connect to. It repeats that until there is no more colorless squares on the grid. Then it picks the squares that are not connected to any one and change their color so that they can connect to a nearby square. Then it finds squares with 3 or more connections (3 is rare, 4 in really unlikely to happen, 5 or more never happens) and sets them as squares with a required number of connections.
And that’s it, and it produce pretty nice levels, with actual mixed difficulty. I just wished I had time to tweak it a little and have some variations in the grid.
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