Over the course of the last few projects I have worked on, I have struggled to find a balance between giving an in depth look at my accomplishments, and having time to actually show this off on my website. For this project I am working on now, I will be making posts that basically just summarize what I show off at the UMBC Game Developers Club, as well as occasionally talking more in depth about certain systems of the game.
Shatter Ball is my first solo project. I started this project in the summer with the intent of making an interesting mobile puzzle adventure game. A lot of the mechanics I was working on were similar to that of a mini golf game. You dragged from the main character in a direction, and it showed the trajectory that the character would move in. I also had created the first version of the camera system that allows you to change the angle of the camera using the gyroscope of the phone. I felt that the original vision of the game may have been overambitious, especially since this is a solo project. This helped me decide to convert the game into a mobile mini golf game instead, which only took about 1 - 2 days of work.
After converting the game to mini golf, my project consisted of a single golf course, where you could hit the ball to the hole, display the amount of hits taken, and restart. After finishing my conversion, I began to make many changes that make Shatter Ball what it is:
You can hit the ball before it stops moving. (Nobody likes waiting)
You can jump the ball by tapping on it. (Should introduce some cool platforming elements)
You can hit the ball in midair 1 time. (Makes jumping more useful)
Time slows while aiming. (Extremely useful for hitting the ball while it is moving at high speeds)
Replaced stroke and par system with a time system. (Time based goals just make more sense with the new mechanics, and incentives moving at high speeds)
Replaced the hole with a large object as the goal. (The hole would require you to slow down at the end which is lame)
A lot of people I have shown this off to describe it as Mini Golf crossed with SUPERHOT, which is exactly what I am going for.
Here is a short video showing off most of what has been implemented so far. This is mostly just to show off the concept of the game so some of the features seen are not fully implemented, polished, or bugfree.