Finally after a year of toiling long days and nights, I have submitted Gum Drop to the Xbox Game Communities review process. It's been a long and ardous task but it's well worth it! Hopefully I have squashed all the bugs that will make the game fail peer review.

Exciting days indeed, but it will defnitely be a long wait to get the game approved :(

 Here's the box art for the game. booyah!

Seems like the delay of pushing out 3.1 stuff out the door on Games Communities will take longer than expected. So I will revert back to 3.0 and get my game to peer review possibly before the end of June. So the game will be playable to the millions of people out there soon!

I really don't have a good arguement to try and jam in Avatar and Video support into Gum Drop. Seems like a feature that is good to have for marketing but really does not add anything to the game for me. Plus, I want to get the game out before the glut of Avatar enabled games go out, and seemingly less games might go out before that so I may have less launch competition. 

Stay tuned for more announcements!

Now that Gum Drop's features have stabilized, I am now working on doing level balancing and Release testing at the same time. The game has progressed so much since I started it 1 year ago, but I am really proud of what I have accomplished. All together now Gum Drop has 20 levels, over 20 different kinds of enemies, 11 different power ups, 10+ different projectiles. The game has also recieved alot of polish. What I am really proud of the game is that most if not all the work was done by me other than music. I had complete control on what the art direction and gameplay direction went. This is the type of game I wanted it to be, a really fun and unique shooter.

 But now things are starting to wind down to a close as I am wrapping up the project as it will be released sometime within the next 2 months  on Xbox Game Communities. Ahh.. Gum Drop!

Got a short but sweet review on http://playthisthing.com/gum-drop. I'm glad that reviewers were getting the concept of the game, but it does seem I need to expand the game beyond having a novel game mechanic to something more meaningful.

 Well anyways, more updates to the game, I am now up to 17 levels with around 19 different enemy types with their unique behaviour and abilities. I'm glad that the system I built is flexible enough that I can whip up a new level and enemy within 20 minutes. The biggest problem right now is getting ideas for new levels and enemies :) But I'd rather have that problem over performance or stability issues hehe :)

Having worked on the environmental hazards, I was inspired to add a level where there is this gigantic gravity well spinning in a counter clockwise direction that affects all objects in the level. This resulted in what I think is a pretty fun and dynamic level where survival is top priority as all the objects in the game are in constant motion because of the gravity well. It also maginfies the danger of enemy projectiles because they are harder to see and have increased velocity. I've also added rumble support for the gamepad, adding rumble to smashing and the player getting damaged. Work on the game continues at a steady yet relaxed pace. Thankfully I architectured the game so that adding these new concepts and features to the game is a trivial matter, leaving me more time to work on the design of the game rather than the technical implementation.

There is however a concern that has been in the back of my mind since I started deploying to the Xbox. It is the performance degredation in relation to the .net CLR on the Xbox being non-generational. Which greatly affects my game because of all the objects that tend to be garbage collected. I know that I should be mroe careful with it, and I read most of the optimizations needed to do it, but it just seems really a bad judgement in part of microsoft to add such a gimped version of the CLR to the 360, making cross platform development a more tedious task, especially for indie developers with limited time, skill and resources to optimize for the 360. Don't get me wrong, I am greatful for all the hardwork the XNA team has put into the SDK, but I just wish these were addressed more publicly rather than keeping developers silent on the issue.

Well enough with the rants, here's the video of the new level I am working on, Enjoy!

First of all, I would like to thank everyone for their support and encouragement throughout the development of Gum Drop. Without the feedback and honesty from everyone, I would have not been able to get the game in such a polished state. 

In other news, Gum Drop continues development for the next competitions, mainly Dream Build Play and the Independent Games Festival. I have already slated a bunch of new features that I would like to add to the game before I submit them. Currently one of those new features are environmental hazards. Currently I have two implemented in the game, storm and gravity. Storm is a pretty simple damage over time hazard where any game object within its area will take damage. Gravity is what you think it would be, is a area where there is a gravitational pull in the center. It is very similar to the gravity power up, but this one is on a permanent basis and does not move.

As I keep collecting feedback on Gum Drop a couple of issues have popped out that needs to be cropped. Mainly the chatter feature that I implemented a while back. The chatter feature was originally meant to add depth to the game by adding back story, status reports, and tutorial tips. However as test plays were done people have complained that they never really looked at that screen. Only really looked at it during a lul in action which was not alot. I was somewhat using it as a crutch to get gameplay ideas conveyed to people. Obviously this did not do what I wanted and all it did was clutter the UI. Now I have to work on putting these "concept panels" in the launch screen to potray how these gameplay elements work with the game. Hopefully this would be enough idea to give the player an idea of what to do without overburdening text.

I'm also planning on getting better artwork in for the power ups to make them more inline in the game rather than make them look like children's blocks floating in space. The work never ends! 

So the funny thing with indie game development is that flip flopping major parts of the game is not that uncommon. Especially since decision making is done by 1 or 2 people, with greater tolerance for risk. I myself had taken that same action, from now on Gum Drop will not allow the player to fire any projectiles from his ship. The only means of attack from the player is from his new S.M.A.S.H (Structural Mining Automated Swinging Hammer) that allows the player to exact pain to the enemies in one clean blow. This is a stark change for my game because I once classified it as a shooter, now it is closer to a beat em up than a top down shooter. :)

This decision was not just a spur of the moment, I have been focus testing my game with different users and I have noticed that they loved swinging stuff around and collecting them. But when enemies can around, the comments dropped off as shooting became the means to kill the enemy and the supposed feature of the game took a back seat. This was under consideration for a long time, but the risk aversion voice in my head kept telling me to shy away from it. However if I stayed the course, my game will just fall into something generic and forgettable, Which will ultimately not win me anything but more "what-if this game had more of this cool feature instead of this over used mechanic" :) So with a few days before my deadline, I chose to take the plunge and take the game to a whole new direction. Hopefuly this pays off and makes the game the success I want it to be.

 This is what it means to be indie, taking risks and sticking it to the man :) Without further ado here is the video of the new S.M.A.S.H system.

Now that I have shifted focus on UI and the first time experience, I say that I am feeling better about the project. However that does not mean that I will be working on it any less, I will probably work on it more the next days. The first checkpoint is almost here and I am excited to see how it goes.

 Last I worked on with the game is improving the experience with the loading screen, actually putting a launch button for the player to press to launch the ship off the base. I still need to work on making it more fun to actually launch the ship :) Pop up messages are now additive blend so they are bright and shiny now. I've also worked on the base to make it more base-y and add more details and possibly doodads on it. Another big change was integrating the rest of the music into the game so the game now has three distinct music themes. 

 Well without further rantings, here is another video of Gum Drop