Friday 29 April 2011

MMH: Gameplay overhaul

Oops!  So yeah I missed a week posting.  Things have been very busy for me with work and holidays so I am a bit behind. Here's what's been going on so far.

I recently got some feedback for Make Me Happy from a couple of designers (those who are actually paid for it and have done for a number of years).  The feedback I got was a little disappointing so I had to have a big work around of the gameplay.  Luckily, the basic idea of the game hasn't changed only the objectives per level.  I think this will be a great little game for very young children and could be useful teaching them all sorts of good skills like identifying and learning colours, shapes, pattern matching etc

Only time will tell with this little game.  I hope to jump in and rejig my code next weekend so between now and then I need to properly hammer out the mechanics so that everything is solid.  Fingers crossed that it all goes well.

Friday 15 April 2011

Make Me Happy: Initial playtests

So, these last few weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster for me (and I expect next week will be a lot of the same).  So not much development has been done to MMH this week.  I let a few friends at work playtest an early version and from their feedback I have decreased the speed at which the images rotate in the first levels.  I need to revisit this later as I want to gradually increase the speed within each level to improve the challenge.

Another issue was the GUI.  My participants seemed to misunderstand that the score was being displayed on the meter and the time as a number.  I decided to switch these around so that the meter now displayed the elapsed time and the points for the round was displayed as a fraction (shown in the previous posts screenshots).

This change seems much better.  The placement of all of these items are being tweaked but so far this is how it's looking.


I hope (if I have time) to implement "connect 3" and "match the sequence" functionality into the later stages of the game to mix up the gameplay and constantly challenge the player.  I'm thinking the best way to easily show that the gameplay will be different in each level (other than a pop-up) would be to use a different coloured board.

I'll see how effective this is during playtests.

Friday 8 April 2011

Make Me Happy: So far...

Make Me Happy is a simple, small and smiley mobile game. The smiley's appear in a grid 3 by 3.  You click on the happy smiley to increase your score to make the character happy.  When the character is happy you will progress onto the next level. If you click on a non-smiley you will either not gain any points or lose points.  This is because these make the character sad.  Make the character happy before the timer runs out.

If you gain enough score you could unlock the Bonus round for the world.  Each Bonus level is different.  Follow the instructions on screen here to make me happy.

Keep Smiling!