Puzzle with light
I released my mobile game. In this article I will tell you about the development process, the problems I had to face and a real revolution in the music world. So it all started with me playing the game “okay?”. And at some point I came up with an idea for another similar game
Idea
There are a limited number of light bulbs that you need to light up the entire screen.
Engine selection
Well, there is an idea, now we can start implementing it. First, we had to choose an engine. This is a thing where you can combine sounds, graphics and code into a single whole.
The main choice was between Unity, GameMaker, and Scratch…
Naturally, I immediately rejected one of the options, since GameMaker is a paid engine. After a fierce debate with myself, I decided to stop at Unity, since I am still a newbie in the field of game creation and am not sure that I can handle something more complex.
Graphics
In fact, since our game is a hyper-casual, we didn't have to draw much. It was enough to draw a light bulb and a couple of interface buttons.
Victory
You may have noticed that I didn't say anything about how to check for victory in the game. Of course, you could check that every pixel on the screen is lit, but in reality it's enough to check whether all sides of all blocks are lit. For some reason, my solution was buggy for a long time, but in the end I wrote it and went to make levels.
So I'm doing it, making levels and this is what happens…
As it turned out, there is not necessarily an unlit side. Here you can see an unlit triangle limited on all sides by rays of light, and not by the sides of the blocks… And here I reached a dead end, because I did not know another way to quickly check the illumination of the screen. I thought about this problem for about a month, but in the end, through collective brainstorming, we found a solution.
Levels
It's time to create the main content for the game.
We had to make about a hundred levels for the first version of the game. It took us a huge amount of time, because each level had to be
Come up with
Draw on paper
Pass
Check that there is no simpler solution
Enter coordinates of points into the game
Check that it runs on different screen resolutions.
After all, there is such a wonderful phone as the Samsung Galaxy ZFold 5G, which has an aspect ratio of 3:1 and not all levels can be completed on it.
In general, the work is quite extensive, so we spent most of our time working on it.
Game appearance
At this point the game wasn't looking too good, so we decided to rework the lighting.
We tried different colored lights, gradient light, gradient background.
But at some point I walked past such lamps and I understood why our light does not look like real light.
It turns out that real light has a curious property: the further the point is from the source, the weaker it is. After I added this effect to the game, our light began to look much better.
By the way, the light source in this picture is a flashlight. We added it to diversify the gameplay.
Problems
By this point the game was not only playable, I would say ready for release (or so I thought). But then I sent it to my friends who were testers. They unanimously pronounced the verdict that the game was not ready. It turned out that it still had a lot of shortcomings. Here are the most interesting of them.
A situation could happen in the game, in which a level seems to be completed, although it is not. On the one hand, it is possible to count “almost” completed levels, but we did it differently.
Another thing that testers didn't like was that if they couldn't complete a level, they couldn't skip it.
By the way, not everyone liked the yellow color of the light.
In response to this, I added the ability to buy others for coins that can be obtained for completing levels.
And now, finally, all claims have been satisfied.
Sounds
And of course, what is a game without sounds?
I added sounds of button clicks, level completion, and item purchases to the game.
The game also needed some music. When I was writing it, I felt like a real Beethoven. But not because I am a genius composer, but because I did not hear music in this set of sounds. And what I ended up with, you can listen to in the game.
Production
Now I was faced with the most interesting attraction – the release in Google Play. First, they demanded that I spend 2 hours answering questions in the format: “Does your game contain content that infringes on the rights of North Korea?”
Then I created a page and my application was sent for moderation. A few days later I received a response. Try to guess whether my application was accepted? Okay, that was too easy. The reason for the rejection was advertising that collects user data, and this does not comply with Google's family policy. I fixed it and sent it again. What did they tell me this time? You probably won't believe me, but my application was accepted! Then I was sent to closed testing, which must involve at least 20 people for 14 days. To do this, I had to find 20 people who agreed to download my game and not delete it for 2 weeks.
To be fair, my app did have a few bugs, so testing it was worth it. First, I had a memory leak that could cause the phone to freeze. Second, my app didn't work on 15% of all devices. I decided that it wasn't my game that didn't launch on those phones, but that those phones couldn't launch it. In fact, those phones had old drivers for video cards, and as a developer, I couldn't fix that. In the meantime, closed testing was completed.
Summary
Well, the game is ready. I want to say thank you to everyone who participated in its development and testing.
I would be grateful if you play my game. Here is a download link in Google Play – https://vk.cc/czTnd3.
The plans for the second version include adding blocks from which light will be reflected, i.e. mirrors. This will add new possibilities for creating levels. Speaking of creating levels. In the next version of the game, we want to give players the opportunity to create their own levels and complete each other's levels.
Don't forget to play my game!
Thanks for reading!
