Monday 27 March 2017

Weekly Development Progress Report, 27/03/2017

Well, it's been a pretty challenging week. I won't get into the reasons as it's not development related but it did delay the release of Super Endless Kingdom on Newgrounds. However, after spending the latter half of the week adding achievements and medals (only on Newgrounds for now but I'm planning to integrate them further for the final version) and getting to grips with a new API I finally managed to release today (hurrah!), see here for proof.

If you have a Newgrounds account please give the game a play and leave a review or rating, the feedback will really help as I prepare the next update, and if you don't have a Newgrounds account then by all means sign up and then restart this sentence. It'll only take a minute 😜

New Project

As I said last week, I've started a new project as a way to let off a bit of steam while I get Super Endless Kingdom ready for a full release. I'm still not ready to talk about it quite yet, but my intention is for it to be much smaller in scope (we'll see if I can fight off feature creep) and for it to be designed for mobile play while also still functioning in a browser. I do have some new artwork to share though, and I'm planning to have more to show on Saturday.

Something something loose cannon blah blah bend the rules blah get the job done etc

Thursday 23 March 2017

Weekly Development Progress Report, 20/03/2017

A little late this week as I've been busy with family stuff and getting Super Endless Kingdom ready for release on Newgrounds. After releasing on Kongregate and pushing out 3 update in a week I took a little break last week to start on a new, much smaller, project. I'm not quite ready to talk about it yet so for now here's a gif by way of sneak preview.

February Update

I've been tracking a few stats with the intention of releasing a quick monthly update without quite finding the time. As I don't have much else to write this week I thought I'd just stick it in here for now.

February saw me launch the Rubble Games twitter account and by the end of the month I'd reached 310 followers.

I also launched this blog, making 4 posts that gained a total of 165 page views.

In total I worked 122.5 hrs in February, which works out at roughly 4.4 hours per day. For comparison in January I worked 129.5 hours, but as that was a longer month it averaged out at 4.2/day, so February was slightly busier.



Monday 13 March 2017

Weekly Development Progress Report, 13/03/2017

Last week I uploaded Super Endless Kingdom to Kongregate (play it here) and I mostly spent last week dealing with the feedback I received. As a proof of concept the launch went well, the Kongregate upload process and API are both pretty easy to get to grips with and I have a much clearer understanding of the rating system and the stages a new game has to go through. However, as an actual game launch it's been a slow start to say the least. I'll outline some of the positives and negatives below.


The Good

The upload worked with very little trouble. I've integrated with the Kongregate stats API to provide leaderboards for three separate stats and received no reports of bugs or crashes (so far). I've received a lot of useful feedback, so much so that I'm just about finished with the 3rd update of the last week (more on that below). The game has also earned a small (very small 😆) amount of money through Kongregate's revenue share scheme.

The Bad

While I still consider the game to be in beta, I found out too late that Kongregate's beta programme is only for a select few games. New games go through a review process but that was over in a few days, something else I wasn't prepared for. The most visible feedback I received was pretty negative and didn't really seem to take account of the game being a work in progress. Although I was able to find something useful even from a highly negative review it doesn't change the fact that it's still one of the most prominent comments, despite being several versions out of date. Still, all in all I've learned a lot about Kongregate as a platform and I'm very happy with the changes I've made over the last week.

Your tax <insert denomination here> at work.

The Updates

I've made a few quality of life updates to explain things better and remove some of the rough edges that people were getting snagged on, both literally and figuratively. I added separate hitboxes for collision detection to the player depending on whether the character is interacting with scenery or monsters to allow the player to move around scenery in a more intuitive way, this was simple in itself but caused other problems (the solution to which can only be described as an enormous kludge). I've also made many of the enemies spawn earlier on the game to improve variety.
However the major changes are the addition of a berserker style melee attack and the ability to move diagonally, both of these are pretty major changes to the basic gameplay that have only been tested by me over a few days. It does feel a little risky to make changes that affect the core of the game so quickly when that core has been in place for 6 months or so, but I feel I'm still early enough in the development and release process to take a bit of a chance. Once I've incorporated all the current feedback I'll be looking at uploading my game to other sites such as Newgrounds or Itch.io.

I'm spinning around, move outta my way - or else!
The Rest

Also this week I changed host for www.superendlesskingdom.com from heroku to github and removed all server side functionality (basically just a login system). The site already loads much faster and I'll be looking at ways to make further improvements this week.

Monday 6 March 2017

Weekly Development Progress Report, 06/03/2017

There were some pretty major changes this week but for a number of reasons it ended up being fairly quiet despite that. I spent the first few days reworking the layout of www.superendlesskingdom.com and removing the login requirements in preparation for opening up the beta testing to all. There are still a few issues in some mobile browsers but overall I'm much happier with how the site looks now.


With the site redone I went ahead with a (very) soft launch of the open beta on 1st March and, unfortunately, as soon as the beta launched my domain went down leaving both my sites inaccessible for nearly a full day.

I'd been planning on putting Super Endless Kingdom on a few portal sites such as Kongregate and Newgrounds eventually, and the problems with my own site prompted me to bring this forward. I spent the rest of the week getting ready to deploy on Kongregate and after a little more testing I published there today. Please have a look here, ratings are very important for discoverability on Kongregate so I'd really appreciate it if you can spare a few minutes to play and leave a good rating.