Pride of Place

It's with great pleasure, and perhaps a few nerves, that I announce the release of my latest game today, Pride of Place. It's available to play on Kongregate completely free, please check it out, let me know what you think, tell your friends and family etc.

'Sir, we appear to be heading for a giant credits sign'.

Presumably most readers have already clicked the link and are off playing so I could end this post here, but just in case there are any of you who like to have a little more information before clicking unknown links in a blog I'll delve a little deeper.

So, the blurb:

Pride of Place is part match-3 puzzle game, part crafting RPG but ALL action.
Play as a faithful drone protecting its captain in this story-driven sci-fi puzzler.
Target his enemies and gather the materials they drop to craft the powerful items he'll need to survive and prosper.
Fight to save a civilization, maybe even fall in love, but is everything as it seems?

Convinced yet? Great here's that link again. For those of you still reading...

The Story

Wait, are those his pyjamas?

The story is an important part of the game, there's a new part revealed after each level, so I won't go into detail here and spoil anything.
I can say that Pride of Place has a sci-fi theme, it features a space drifter who has inexplicably found himself as captain of a starship and his long-suffering robot assistant. The heroic duo will find themselves on a strange planet with bad guys to fight and good guys to save.

A bustling space city, with four (4) shops.

The Gameplay

Nice of them to line up like that, you'd be in trouble if they all rushed you at once.

Match-3 type games are well known by now so I won't go into that too much either. Matching your enemies will help the robot assistant target them, allowing him to aid and protect his captain. Once defeated, enemies drop materials that can be used to craft new weapons and armour, allowing you to tackle the fiercer creatures you'll find deeper into the game.

Let's head into this lava cave full of giant scorpions and skulls and things.

Fight your way through 13 varied levels, from lava caves to abandoned labs to the infamous Garnak Pits to finally unravel the mystery.

An entirely different lava level, see the lava is a different colour and everything.

Pride of Place is available to play completely free on Kongregate, please take the time to check it out and let me know what you think.

Rubble Games II: The Re-Rubbling

I've just had a read through my previous blog post, written almost a year ago now, in which I said I expected to be doing client work for the rest of 2018 and thought it unlikely I'd get much done on my own projects. As it turned out I was entirely correct in that assessment. I finished my last piece of work for my client at the end of last year and, apart from a couple of brief dives into the new version of the framework I use to make games (Phaser), I did very little on my own projects during that time. I also said that I was putting the blog to bed, so this post is to briefly announce that I'm waking it back up again.

Phaser 3

Since returning to my own projects I've been working on my first Phaser 3 game.  I've previously used Phaser 2 for everything, including my client work, but the new version seems stable enough to make the change. So far I haven't found the difference to be huge, some of the names of things have changed and I've had to search for the new way of doing things sometimes but like many devs I tend to look things up a lot anyway. On the other hand I haven't really seen any great benefit either, with perhaps one or two exceptions. This probably means I'm not using it's full potential yet, so perhaps later in the year I'll start having a few wow moments.

New Game

My current project is a Sci-Fi themed match-3 game with a few bells and whistles in the shape of a crafting system for equipping your character with progressively more powerful gear. In it's current state the game is playable but needs a fair bit of polish, I'm currently working on the story and gating certain bits of content behind progression through that. Once that's finished I want to improve a few things then start general polishing. I'm aiming to release early in March, but that can feel either pretty optimistic or easily achievable depending on my daily progress. It's been around 18 months since I released a game of my own so I want to get this right, but also doing client work has taught me the importance of a quick turnaround and I want to carry that over into my own projects.

Here's some provisional artwork. It's not completely up to date and needs polish but I'm not expecting to make drastic changes.

The game is provisionally titled 'Pride of Place' as a sort of attempted pun on generic ship names, but I'm increasingly unhappy with that while also unable to come up with anything better so hopefully finishing the story elements will provide some inspiration.


That's all for now, I'll hopefully have a more in depth look at my upcoming game soon. Just a quick reminder that my previous game, Zombie Cannon Attack!, is still available on all these platforms:
Kongregate (web)
itch.io (desktop download)
Gamejolt (web & desktop)