Hop Til You Drop Updates

So the new update for Hop Til You Drop is ready. The PC version is updated on IndieDB and can be downloaded from the link on the right and the XBLIG version will be submitted tomorrow (that's the earliest I can do it). The new update includes a number of additions and changes:

• New gameplay mode Time Attack. You get one minute to score as much as you can. Deaths subtract 200 points from your score but you respawn instantly
• New Characters
• New gameplay mechanic. Whenever you are jumping and come close to an obstacle time will slow down and you get bonus points. It's a nice risk vs reward system.
• Faster restarts. Whenever you die you can instantly restart a game, choose a new character, or exit to the main menu

I'm pretty happy with the new update. In other news I've been looking over distribution options for the PC version. I'm going to try out IndieCity first and and maybe Sellbox for hosting on the blog. I would love to get it on Desura but not sure if I'll be able to. I've also updated the leaderboard to not look so terrible. You can see it on the right hand side.

Happy Hopping!

New play mode and bullet time tweak

I recently submitted Hop Til You Drop for Desura so that I could do some beta testing over there. Unfortunately it was rejected for being too simple. One of my main goals was to keep the game simple but maybe it is too simple. There are also some parts that are too complicated.

New Play Mode

I was thinking about how to add some variety to the gameplay through new features or maybe a different play style mode. One idea I'm testing out right now is a Time Attack mode. In this mode you get 2 minutes to score as many points as you can. However, when you die the game doesn't end but instead you lose X amount of points. This would also have it's own daily and high score leaderboard section for this game type.

XBLIG removing some complication

In the XBLIG version there are separate scores for each "mode of play" based on the number of players. This is because in two player mode you get twice as many coins to fight over. I was worried people would play 3 player mode with just one person just so they could inflate their score. This was dumb to worry about I think... My goal will be to trim down the menu and only keep track of one high score and one daily high score

Bullet Time Tweak

Finally, a small bullet time tweak. It will now trigger around mines, chasers, and missles. However, it will only trigger when you are jumping. In the current version you can just stand next to a turret and keep getting bonuses constantly.

I'm still exploring some other gameplay tweaks and maybe one more gameplay mode for future updates. Keep Hopping!

Also just wanted to give a big thanks to the people who have downloaded and tried out the PC beta. There is one person in particular who keeps challenging me on the daily high score leaderboard.

Hop Til You Drop PC Beta

So I got around to getting the beta PC version of Hop Til You Drop up on IndieDB. That was really awesome. However, I found quickly that some people were having trouble playing the game after install. It would crash for them on certain screens. Naturally I was trying to debug into the client and couldn't find anything there (well, that's somewhat of a lie, more on that later). It was working fine for me on my laptop so I couldn't reproduce it either. So I thought maybe it has to do something with a new user being registered on the server. I looked on the server and found the problem, there were times when a new user registration was failing and the client wasn't getting back proper data.

First order of business on the next update is make the client more fault tolerant when it comes to the server being down etc.

Anyway, if you want to check the beta you can head on over to IndieDB or you can use the widget to the right.

Hop Til You Drop XBLIG Update

So I'm working on getting the first update for Hop Til You Drop ready for the XBLIG version. Here a few of the planned features for the update. Hopefully I can get it into playtesting early next week and shoot for an update the week after that or the following week.

I plan on adding three new characters. These should be fairly easy to unlock. I looked into giving each character different speeds and attributes but I really just want to keep the game fairly simple.

I plan on also looking into adding "online leaderboards" for the XBLIG version. These are implemented in the PC version but getting them on the XBLIG version is a little bit trickier. I'm not promising anything but I do think it would be a cool feature to have.

Lastly the most import new feature of them all is that it's a lot easier to play again after you are done. The results screen has been melded into the gameplay screen.

This is a screenshot from the PC Version but the Xbox version is the same except the text is for controller buttons

This allows you to get back to the action quickly. When I was making the game this never really seemed to be a problem, because I was thinking with a programmer's mentality. Game end = True. Show Results(). Go to Main Menu(). This is how it was supposed to work based on the code and that's how it did work. This was terribly wrong. I was so use to playing the game in this flow that it never occurred to me that I should be letting them get right back into the action. This did come up in peer review on the last review that pushed Hop Til You Drop into the marketplace. However, I did have a chance to pull it and change it and resubmit it. Unfortunately I thought it wasn't a problem. Luckily someone let me know how big of a mistake this was

Edit: I totally forgot to mention the new bullet time effect. Currently in the game whenever you are near any type of enemy you get bonus points. In the new update whenever you have a close call with a missle it will slow down time and give you more bonus points. I'll try to get a video of it up today.

Hop Til You Drop PC Edition

I wanted to take some time out today to go over some of the new features I'm planning on implementing for the Windows version of Hop Til You Drop. The main reason that most of these features will be on Windows and not on the XBLIG version is that on the PC I can contact an external server. This allows for easier multiplayer components and storing data such as Global Leaderboards. Without further ado lets get on with the new features:

• Global Leaderboards

  I get to use the term Leaderboards on Windows! XBLIG prevents the use of the term because they don't want users to think they are actually looking at a real Leaderboard. In the Windows version all highscores and daily highscores will be tracked on an external server.

• Online User Counter

  This will show you how many players are currently playing the game. This is important because now players will get ...

• Bombs

  Everyday the server will compute the top 1% and top 3% of the players with the highest daily highscore. The top 1% will get one of each bomb that is currently in the game. The top 3% will get one random bomb. These bombs are used to mess with other players who are online. One example is the invert controls bomb. Whenever a player uses one of these bombs, all the players who are currently online will have their movement keys inverted. So far there are 3 bombs (Scary, Invert Controls, Slow Down Player) but I want to add more. I hope this brings a community feel to the game

So not a huge amount of new features but I'm planning on adding plenty more and some bug fixes along the way. A couple of ideas I'm contemplating is making it so the Hoppers have different attributes such as speed and jump speed. I'm also playing around with the idea of having power ups appear that would give certain things such as a speed boost, surviving one hit, double your score for a limited time, etc. A beta for the Windows edition will start hopefully sometime soon so I can gather more feedback on what to do to improve the game.

Hop Til You Drop Released

Whew. It's been a long day. Hop Til You Drop got released on XBLIG and I've been going none stop to try to get the word out there. Hopefully reviews will start to pop up and there will be some word of mouth marketing going on :) Here is a gameplay video I just made: I've also been hard at work on making the Windows version with more features. More news about that to come.

It's been a while

So it's been a while since I've posted on this blogger. I've been creating video game prototypes for the last couple of years but nothing ever really got any traction. I've played with Unity, UDK, pygame, and many others but I kept coming back to XNA. I finally decided about 2 months ago I was going to make another XBOX game. So I ponied up the money for the registration fee and signed up. I was now giving myself a year to make at least one game. I quickly developed a prototype that I liked and decided to go with that. So I'm back and going to try to keep this blog updated so I can get some good exposure until I get a website or something going.