The game is now com­plete!  Well, in truth I’ve had a few new ideas, but this release set­tles every­thing designed into the game orig­i­nally.  Play­ers should find the Es more man­age­able, but may find more chal­lenge else­where.  The music is also a lit­tle less painful.  Down­loads and full release notes:

http://​www​.game​sof​grey​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​?​p​=​292

Have fun!  And any feed­back is greatly appreciated.

Mosaic is suc­cess­fully com­plete! And it’s every­thing I wanted it to be You lay down tiles with your move­ments, and enclos­ing areas fills them in with tiles, killing ene­mies within. In the last hours I man­aged to cob­ble together a pro­ce­dural music engine that gen­er­ates sounds based one the posi­tion of mosaic tiles on the map – AND IT SOUNDS AMAZING! Maybe I’m skewed because I thought it would sound awful, espe­cially since I know noth­ing of audio or music theory…

More details and the down­loads for Windows/​Mac/​Linux. Hover over the ‘?‘ in-​​game for detailed instruc­tions, or look at the spoil­ers in the Escape menu for more details.

Too lazy to down­load? Okay, here’s a video:

Mosaic is now already at what I can call a com­plete state, but I have 12 hours left and I’m still look­ing to add more pol­ish, in par­tic­u­lar sounds. How­ever what I could dearly do with right now is an idea of game bal­ance, and for that I need playtesters! Here’s the cur­rent build:

http://​game​sof​grey​.com/​g​a​m​e​s​/​m​o​s​a​i​c​-​a​l​p​h​a​.​zip (Win­dows stand­alone)
http://​game​sof​grey​.com/​g​a​m​e​s​/​m​o​s​a​i​c​-​m​o​d​-​a​l​p​h​a​.​zip (mod­ule folder only to work with T-​​Engine 1.0.0)

It’s a quick game and easy to get into, so I’d appre­ci­ate any­one giv­ing it a quick whirl. Let me know how far you get, how easy/​hard/​boring you find it, and what you think of the enemy bal­ance.  Hav­ing tested myself I feel it’s exactly the right level of dif­fi­culty, but I’ve made the seri­ous mis­take in the past of think­ing that’s fine for other people :/

The only known bug at present is the lay­ing of a super­flu­ous tile on level change. This has been there from day 1 and in spite of many hours of effort I haven’t man­aged to fix it! It doesn’t change game bal­ance at all, but it’s quite annoy­ing >:(

I have a well-​​tiled base now, I just need to build on it.  Mosaic now fills in pat­terns of tiles when you enclose a space, destroy­ing any ene­mies within, and it does it rather pret­tily I must say!  Only two basic ene­mies in so far, but more will come.  There are com­mand sequences too – do cer­tain moves in a row and it’ll have a big­ger effect.

Measly enemy, what are you in the face of beauty?!

Want to have a play?  Well here’s the cur­rent build.  There’s still much to do, but it should give an idea of how the game will feel.  Any prob­lems let me know!  Just Win­dows for now – I’ll have OSX and Linux ready on Sunday.

There’s a heavy ques­tion mark over whether or not I can get sounds in the way I want them.  Will have to see how much time I have…  But in terms of cen­tral game­play it will all be there.  And I’m rather enjoy­ing how this is turn­ing out 

I have many colours!  About a mil­lion in fact, which com­bined with ~100 dif­fer­ent tile out­lines makes for 100 mil­lion sub­tly dif­fer­ent mosaic tile types in the game.  This is, per­haps, too many, but the cull can wait.  At the moment I’m mar­vel­ling at the T-Engine’s propen­sity for on-​​the-​​fly tile con­struc­tion 

Disco rogue, yo!

Not sure about the @ /​ tre­ble clef combo.  Needs a bit of touch­ing up at least.  The scrolling starfield may go too, but it looks kinda funky.

I’ve been lis­ten­ing to Pachelbel’s Canon a lot.  It rep­re­sents a few of my ideas for the game.  When I get the game­play in, that is…

Remain­ing plan: Flood­fill of tiles in enclosed spaces, gen­er­a­tion of ene­mies that rip tiles apart, level advance­ment, add life, add sounds.  At some point I have to think up a vic­tory condition.