Match Em from Bongoboo Games!

Mike (my brother) and Immy Oakley (my sister-in-law) have just released their first i-Phone game!
I`ve had a sneak preview and can say it's a very playable game and well worth parting your hard-earned 69p for.

More details can be found at the following website; http://bongoboogames.wordpress.com/

And, finally, here's a video showing it in action;

Untitled from bongoboo games on Vimeo.

Work slowly continues

Whilst everyone has been outside enjoying the unusually warm October, we've been busily working on some level design ideas for Gloop Troops 2. At the moment we're playing around the idea of multi-screen levels. We wanted to expand a bit more on the levels of Gloop Troops but are unsure on what the best implementation for GT2 will be.

The ideas currently floating around are:

• Allow levels to be made up of multiple screens, with the player freely able to travel between them.
• Have multiple screens make up a level, but you only access the next screen once you've completed the current screen.
• Keep with the original design and only have single screen levels.

Each idea seems to have some interesting pros and cons. The first idea makes the game feel much more open and gives some interesting level design space as now each level is 3 or 4 screens in length. We could either have a selection of pickups that you need to collect in order to finish the level, or have a single pickup that you need to find in order to complete the level. The multiple screens and freedom of movement makes the game feel quite different to it's tighter arcade parent. You no longer feel as constrained in your movement and stunning enemies to run past them feels too powerful.

The second idea feels more like the original Gloop Troops, you have to deal with a screen before you can advance to the next screen. The disadvantage to this method is the screens don't feel part of a cohesive level  :-(

The third option of only have single screen levels is still a possibility, though it'll mean either adding more level markers to the world maps, or creating more world maps. As we're running out of memory pages on the 128k Spectrum, we'd need to put more level markers within a map, and that makes the map look busier and not as clean.

Wrk continues - it's possible that we might split the project off into a separate future project which can utilise some of these features!

The making of Gloop Troops: The Lost Crown

Gloop Troops: The Lost Crown is now out as part of the Little Shop of Pixel titles on Spectaculator! here is our 'making of' for this game, which almost never got released!

The Lost Crown started development whilst we were finishing up the development of Gloop Troops. Whilst developing Gloop Troops, we found we were creating many more levels than what we had space for in the final game. Andy was continuously experimenting with both level design and what he could graphically achieve with our level tile set.

It was a difficult choice picking the final 30 levels for Gloop Troops. We knew that we wanted some tutorial levels for the start of the game, and so had to allocate around 5 or 6 level slots for those. These tutorial levels were designed separately and were crafted so that each one would teach the player one or two of the game's mechanics.

After picking the levels we wanted we for Gloop Troops we found that we had quite a few levels left lying around, and came up with the idea of doing a B-side game! The B-side game would be on the other side of the tape and would act as a Gloop Troops 1.5, a little something extra for those who we'd given a copy of the physical tape to. We'd also planned to release this B - side game shortly after Gloop Troops, so that anyone who enjoyed the game could have a little more to play whilst we went back to our adventure game.

We took a good look at the levels which hadn't made it into the final copy of Gloop Troops. Some of these levels re-visited themes which we thought were already included in Gloop Troops ( such as cycling up and down the screen ), some of them had their difficulty either a little too high or too low, and some of them looked similar to other existing levels.

Andy selected the 15 levels which he liked the most and set to work. Each level was to be re-skinned and fleshed out properly. As our set of levels within this 'lost levels' collection was reduced, we would be able to increase the number of graphical tiles available to each screen to give them all a more striking look!

Gloop Troops: The Lost Levels - Level 1

More space for tiles meant we could radically change the look of each level if desired.

Fewer levels meant more space for graphic tiles and tile configurations!

More custom tiles for each level!

We released Gloop Troops whilst we were still working on our lost level collection, now titled Gloop Troops: The Lost Crown. The game was finished and we created a small print run of tapes to hand out to some friends and family who'd put up with us talking endlessly about Spectrum hardware, and compressing code down into just a few K :-)

However, from the feedback of Gloop Troops, it was clear that whilst Gloop Troops was enjoyed as a game, there were some omissions which we'd either missed ( such as adding music / configurable keys ) or hadn't considered. Rather than release another game a month later, which felt similar to our previous game, we instead decided to tackle a full Gloop Troops 2. We also once again pushed our adventure game back until this was completed.

A year and a bit has gone by and Gloop Troops 2 has snowballed into quite an epic project! We're hoping to release it soon, but there's always one more feature to write or tweak. It has ended up resulting in a complete re-write of the Gloop Troops code base ( everything now has to work with the 128k memory pages )! So its development has taken a longer than initially planned.

When Jon contacted us about Spectaculator we thought it would be an excellent opportunity to re-visit Gloop Troops: The Lost Crown and to give it a unique release, and to also be a bonus for his emulator! We re-visited the game and made a few tweaks for iPhone controls ( such swapping name entry to left and right on the stick so that we could keep up as a jump button ). We also re-visted some of the levels as they were a little too tricky with touch controls ( specifically - there is a level which had a 2 block gap to fall through - this proved to be much too fiddly ).

We're very excited that The Lost Crown has finally found a home, and we hope that you enjoy playing it!

Little shop of pixels is now on the iPhone!

Thanks to the awesome work of Jon Needle, our games are now available as part of free iPhone version of Spectaculator!

But that's not all :-)

We've also provided our previously unreleased game as an exclusive for the emulator! Gloop Troops: The Lost Crown!

We'll shortly post up a making of for Gloop Troops: The Lost Crown and why it was previously unreleased in a future blog post!

More news to announce shortly

Some very exciting developments have been occurring lately and we're very excited to talk about what we have coming up ( along with Gloop Troops 2! ). In the mean time I've re-edited the Spectrum sprite rendering techniques post as it needed a bit more information of what's involved with rendering sprites on the Spectrum and what we did for Gloop Troops and Crimbo!

World 4 - Final Cutscreen

The final version of the world 4 cutscreen.

World 3 - Final Cutscreen

The final version of the world 3 cutscreen.