Rollyblob has been released, and not everyone's happy.
I thought I should make today's blog a bit of a "How it came to be what it is" tale.

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Initial Spark
There's been dire misery over on the OUYAForums, that Razer simply bought OUYA, chewed it up, spat it out, and essentially murdered the poor thing.
A parody game of sorts was on my mind.

Monday : The basic idea..
You own a Clockwork Rat factory, but are running out of spare parts to make more rodents. You go out in search of other Clockwork Creatures, smash them to bits and use the spare parts to create more of your generic little Clockwork Rats.

First issue. Sounds very GUI driven, doesn't it.
We all know, by now, that I HATE doing GUIs.
I needed to find a way to make it a little less GUI'ish.

Tuesday : PipeRats2?
By Tuesday the game had evolved into a "click on the tiles" based concept.
The rat has to wander around the maze looking for those essential spare parts before taking them home.
You place Arrows on the maze to turn the rat around at certain locations, a bit like ChuChuRocket.
I started looking into how I could make a level generator for such a game.



Wednesday, Thursday, Friday : Level Generator, over and over and over..
After a couple of days trying to figure out how best to make the generator, as well as combining it with the intended puzzle mechanic, I instead decided to leave the generator as it was, and rebuild the game around what it was generating.

Saturday : Removal of "pointer"
About halfway through Saturday's code session, I decided to stop trying to add ChuChu-style flags with a pointer, and instead make the rat a dpad-controlled rodent.
He'd run until he hits something, then you'd pick a new direction.
This is the point when everything suddenly started feeling much more game-like, but with the issue that the levels being generated felt incredibly samey.
Also, at this point, the Rat became a Ball.. Because I couldn't think of any creature that would repeatedly run into walls!! Not even a Rat would do that!

Sunday : More Level Generating
You'll probably notice there's weird delays between levels. This is the level generator trying over and over and over to make sensible level layouts that are indeed possible.
As a result of it doing the task over and over, it inevitably leads to very similar looking levels.
Playtesting became less of a puzzle, and more a memory game. When had I seen this level before, and what was it's solution.
I wondered what I might add to make things more "difficult", which is when I had the idea of the flaming balls.
They went in quite easily, and made everything much more taxing.

Monday : Bundling
Finally happy with the game, I hurriedly added audio, a logo, the menu background, and finished everything off.
Compiled, bundled, uploaded and even sent off to TeamOUYA for review.
Monday was a busy day!!

Daily Doodle : Extra Food

Little Bobby's been extra hungry, lately.
Platdude hopes that means he's going to evolve, soon.

Misc..

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