DIMB - Dev Blog #5

Before I left for the Philippines at the start of March, I had set myself one goal: finish coding all of the main levels. That didn't include additional things like menu's, dialogue, story bits or any kind of polish. Just the actual levels that make up the challenging part of the game.

With nine days left until I fly back out, I am fairly comfortable that I am going to reach that goal. I have completed 67% of my tasks for the final Boss room in DIMB (according to Trello). One more day of finishing off the remaining tasks and making sure it plays ok, and all of the games levels are complete. After that is done, the polishing and fine-tuning stage starts which I imagine won't be as mentally straining, but will definitely be just as time consuming.

I got a taste of that this week, when I spent a day noting down every single minor presentation/gameplay issue in the current build, and then trying to find ways to correct them. The number of niggling little issues was infuriating, but fixing the whole myriad of them was deeply satisfying (sort of).

The big push this week was to get the Boss levels finished. And they almost are. The amount of trial and error involved in making the Boss levels fun, challenging and unique is insane. And I'm pretty sure the levels I have made aren't even that great. But I just want to be done with it at this point. 

On the art side of things, Chris has continued his smash streak and sent over new level art pretty much every day this week. Two thirds of all the levels have their final art in place now, with just the final challenge and Boss rooms now needing art. Although writing this out I've just realised Chris probably hasn't even seen what the Boss levels look like.

I could write and whinge about a million other little things but the bottom line is this: We're almost finished!

The game will soon be complete, released to the masses and probably instantly forgotten. But that won't matter because the next time I'm at a gaming or developer event, and I introduce myself as a game designer, I'll finally have something to back up my lofty claim.

Looking forward, once the HTML5 version of DIMB is complete, I will be turning my attention to porting the game to Android immediately. There will probably be a hundred and one more issues to face getting the game on Android, but that's to be expected. And it is totally worth it just to get the game onto the Google Play Store.

Any ways, it is late and hot in the Philippines so I will sign off for the evening, and just leave you with some new screenshots of what the game currently looks like.