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The development of Lost Marbles: Part 2
Hey guys. Hopefully you found the first part to be interesting. Today we will finish up by looking at the alpha, beta and final versions of the game. All in all I believe these last three milestones lasted nearly two months.
Alpha:
By now what we have is really starting to look like a game. As with any alpha of any game, there are still bugs that need to be worked out. The biggest one we had for the longest time was the marbles falling through the ground tiles, seemingly at random sometimes. I believe that it still happens every once in a while today but it is a far cry from where it was at this time. We had sound in at FF2, but at this point Curtis was making it more advanced by adding 3D effects such as the sounds for wind and fire getting stronger as you got closer to them. Also, each marble was given its own melody. If a marble was alone, it would have its own unique melody and if they rolled near each other, you would hear the three mix together. These little touches really went a long way in making the player feel more in touch with the game world.
We started to get actual meshes for hazards, such as ice and fire tiles and a cannon. There were more particles being added all the time. Pretty much everything was looking better, including the HUD graphics. The marble selection indicator started with static images, but we thought it would be a cool idea to actually make it a 3D rendering. This way if a marble was rolling off screen, you could see it moving on the indicator and switch over to it. We finally got an actual clock to keep track of the level time, and you could now earn grades based on your time. With all this new and improved stuff coming in, our framerate was starting to take a hit, so much of beta would be us optimizing as much as we could for the final presentation.
Beta:
At this point we finally received most of our final assets from our designated artist. It probably took longer than we would have liked, but that’s another story for another time. Anyway, it was nice to have what would be in our game at the end so we could focus on finishing the rest of the game. The levels that we planned out months before are finally done and implemented, and they are rather fun to play to boot. The game is also fairly bug free. I think this is the time when we started adding the extra stuff to the game, including high scores and achievements.
We were able to add quite a lot, but I think we didn’t quite get in as much as we wanted. A level editor was always in the back of our minds, but that got scrapped fairly early on. I wish I had made the architecture for adding new levels a lot cleaner than it is, but when you have a deadline you do whatever it takes to just get it finished.
Final:
Here we are after five long, sometimes exhausting, usually enjoyable months. The game turned out great from our perspective (and most everyone else’s). The game had the feel we wanted, but it would have been nice to have a few more months to add more to it. These final weeks were mostly about play testing and bug fixing as well as getting ready for the all important final presentation.
One big thing that came from this final period was a total mistake. Mike was messing around with shader stuff and somehow, by total accident, made a really sweet looking cel-shaded style. We all agreed that it made our game look 100x better. We kept the old style as an option in the menu, but we made cel-shading the default look of the game. We also changed the wind and fire particles to make them cartoony, to fit the new style. I also randomly decided to add clouds to the game one day and everyone got a kick out of that. Sweet ass clouds.
All in all, it was a great five months. It was made easy by having five guys that all got along and wanted to make the best game that they possibly could. We all learned so much about the game development cycle and working within a team environment. It is pretty amazing to see what you can do in such a small amount of time, and hopefully this was a good illustration of all of our efforts.
