This weekend I had some time (due to procrastinating on college assignments) to work on Untitled. I decided to spend it on the revised main menu, I would say the menu is about 70% finished.

My goal with the new main menu is to make the game more accessible. I don’t want to flood new players with a bunch of options and settings when they start the game. I also wanted to give the main menu more of a game menu feeling. The last major thing is to tie the leaderboards into the game.

The first thing I did was make the world generation, and options menus hide able. Now when you click Play the world Generation options are shown, with a Start Game button. I also changed the difficulty display, to accommodate a newer idea I had. I recently had the idea to add in preset difficulties, so you can click on one of the numbers and it will set your level to the world gen options (this farther addresses the issue of  players not changing their difficulty). A screen capture shows this best:

The Options menu was also changed to be hidden. The Graphical User Interface box was removed, and replaced with a toggle-able text (On or Off button). I also added the new Leaderboard option toggle to the Options menu (for what displays when you finish the level).

The leaderboard section isn’t finished yet. The plan is to show ten scores, that are view-able by difficulty, overall, or one of each (the new default for the in game leaderboard). There will also be buttons to set your world generation options. This isn’t intended to replace the leaderboard on the website, the website version shows hundreds of scores, where the in game menu will show 10 of each difficulty.

While I was working on the menu today I had a new idea, that I plan to implement. With the options menu hidden now, I want to make the Username easy to set. My thought is to have a splash page come up the first time you run the game. There will be a username box to set your username with, as well as information about the presets, and a few of the options that may not be clear like Leaderboard Display, and Leaderboard Submission. I plan to change the leaderboard score submission, so instead of having to push submit after each level, it will just submit the score. The Leaderboard Submission option will let you choose how the score submission is handled (Automatically, push the button, or never) I hope to see many more scores because of this change.

So unless something changes that is some of what will be changed in Beta 4.

I was thinking over the weekend that its not terribly often that Blogging Game Developers admit they made a mistake, I wanted to do my part in changing that. After all we learn best from experimenting and making mistakes, having flaws in your beta release is the point of releasing a beta. But you also want to iron out the flaws, and give them the attention they need.

It came to my attention over the weekend that Untitled Beta 3 has two major (an glaring) flaws. The first one is that out of the players who have (currently) submitted to the Online Leaderboard, they have all played with the default setting, and none of the others. Last week I mentioned I would be adding a play button next to the in game leaderboard, that would allow you to play the level that set that score.

The other issue is the one I want to focus on for this post, and that is the in game leaderboard itself. Just adding a play button doesn’t really address an underlying issue. The current way the in game leaderboard displays is from highest difficult, and highest score. Meaning that if ten people played at difficulty 10 it would then only display scores from difficulty 10. The purpose of having multiple difficulties is to allow the player control over what level they play. If you want to play a monochrome level you can, or bichromatic, and so on. I have always been and will continue to be pro player choice.

After a weekend of brainstorming the problem, and possible solutions I came up with two options.

1. Change the leaderboard to display only the current difficulty level, so if you play level 8 you will only see other level 8 scores. This is flawed in that it doesn’t encourage you to play any other difficulty level.

2. Have the leaderboard display the top score of each difficulty level, so you would have ten at the top, all the way down to difficulty 0. I believe this will solve the problem, and encourage you to try other difficulties.

I didn’t quite stop there, even after I had a viable solution to the problem. I decided it would be best to allow the player to choose what displays on the leaderboard. Right now I have three options in mind; Highest Overall (like it is now), Current Difficulty Level (as mentioned above) and the default setting would be one of each. That is the plan anyways, now just to find the time to work on the game, and not be interrupted.

I just though I would mention a few other ideas (So the internet can hold me to them)

– Since I will already be expanding the in game leaderboard file to contain all ten difficulty levels I will be adding in a page to view the top ten of each difficulty.

– Redesigning the Main Menu page, to a more traditional Game Main Menu (WASD selection (or mouse still), and hidden option menu (leaderboard will be here, and a quit button)

– Anything else that I catch, or is brought to my attention, so if you have an idea, email, tweet, or comment and I’ll take a look at it, and more than likely address the issue.

First I would like to welcome you to the new blog, I decided to move away from the old blog page (that really just displayed topics from a forum. To an actual blog software (WordPress of course 🙂 ) I wanted to have the full features of a blog, without the headache of writing code to make the previous blog do what I want (categories, tags, RSS syndication, and easy image upload) So here we are on http://blog.allaroundgames.net

Untitled Beta 3 was released a few days ago on the 19th. With it the website launched, to give a preview of the game, as well as provide a complete leaderboard that can be sorted. So what are you waiting for, go download and play and don’t forget to submit your highscore, and beat out my own scores.

In the next version I will be concentrating on finishing touches, ideas I’m considering:

– New font for the title, and play button

– Changing the Settings menu once again (ideally it would be collapsible)

– Adding a play button to the in game leaderboard (the one when you finish a  level) that will allow you to quickly play the same level as the score setter.

There will be a Beta 4 that will be largely cosmetic changes as mention above (I’m open to suggestions, just leave a comment, or email me) Most likely after Beta 4 the game will be officially release.

I’ll be participating in SOPA Game Jam, but I won’t be able to work much on the 18th. So instead I’ll be releasing on the 18th (even though this website will be down 😮 ), and working tonight, and tomorrow on the game.

I decided to go with my first idea, and make an extremely simple game, of shoot the target. The targets are randomly created on the screen, and you need to shoot them before they move off the screen. There is a time limit of thirty seconds, during that time you try to click as many of the targets as possible. The game will mention both SOPA, and PIPA. As well as having several songs that pertain to SOPA. On the main menu page there will be buttons to the SOPA website.

Another part of this game is the web component. There will be a total of all rouge sites shot down in the game that will be visible on the game page, as well as in the game.

So far I have:

Update (1-18-2012)
The game has been released, you can download it:

Shoot em’ Down

Over the past two weeks I have been working on Untitled Beta 3, there have been several issues with the Online Leaderboards (the very reason I have delayed it until Beta 3). As I have mentioned in the past my Ludum Dare 22 entry Alone In Space, has an online leaderboard, and I have been using that to determine the best possible way to have a Leadboard for Untitled.

The problem is there is no way to securely send data from Contruct to the internet. In Alone In Space… when you submit your highscore you ping a simi-hidden webpage with your username, score, and win or lose. To discover the webpage all you have to do is watch the packets on your network, and it will point you right to the page, where you can set your own score.

My first solution was to have a key, that the game knows, and the website knows. but the problem with this is the key is static, so once you know the key (you would see it when you saw what packets were sent) then you can once again put in any score.

The next obvious solution is to make the key change, every so often. The problem doing it this way is that you can’t have the key change even once a minute, because the client (that you download) and the webserver are not necessarily on the same time. Once every ten minutes works, but we still have the same problem as above, once you have the key, its good for ten minutes or so.

The solution, well there isn’t one, regardless of what I do there is no way to stop you from setting your own score if you are determined to. That doesn’t mean the idea listed above are not worth implementing, I will be using the rolling key change method.

In addition there will be a system in place that calculates the highest possible score, for the level you submit, and ensures that your score is below that maximum.

Once this is all implemented, then I’ll be looking over Untitled as a whole, and polishing anything I find that is lacking. Then I will release Beta 3.