Animations

After trial and error I finally have some animations! I have never found animations to be very easy for me but I have always found the art fascinating with an incredible outcome. But I finally have something game worthy! I am proud of the hard work I put into these little guys. With more practice I hope to make them even better in the future. For now I am keeping them simple; none of the walk cycles I made are over 4 frames. This is also to prevent the game from being bogged down with too much info.  

Balance

Before we release the next rendition of our beta to our testers I will be going a bit of balancing. Most testers have stated that our levels are currently too difficult. Well fear no more! After checking out this article I feel much more comfortable tweaking our game. "Balancing is creating dynamics." This is the best way to describe it. So here goes! It is all about numbers. Lots and lots of number. I feel that we definitely have a good start with where we are so tweaking won't be as tedious as one might think.

Heat Map

Our programmer is amazing. So we're just about to send out another play test for our tester and we're getting very excited about it. The thing I am most excited about is the implementation of heat maps! You might look at this and say "what a gross mess" but this is really going to help with design of our levels. With the help of these heat maps we can see what areas of the map are being use most often. This will also show us what areas aren't being used and give us a good idea at how we can better utilize our level.

FireFight Ad

My programmer and I decided that it was time to get a little advertising going on our game. This was just our test run; round 1 if you prefer. Playing safe to begin with, we put $5 into a Facebook ad to see what it would get us. Just one day after, I can say the results were quite satisfying. We have reached almost 4k people and now have close to 60 likes on our page. This was very exciting for us. I had no idea what to expect, especially with a game that is still in progress.

I have currently been working on the art for a new level for our game. It will be the tutorial level! You're welcome play testers! We love you! Instead of throwing our poor play testers into the fray of level 1 with only a quick controls layout sheet, we're working on a full fledged level just so players can get a hang of the controls before the real fighting begins.