If you have been following the development of our game Blobbit Push you may of read Mark (Ripley) and myself picked up the reigns to the game again last year. Now you may be asking, why is it taking so long, what the heck have you been doing all this time? Well that’s a good question, and I must say it’s a valid question at that! Simple answer is between us we just haven’t had the time to devote to finishing it off whilst juggling contractual jobs and life stuff.
Origins of the Blobbit logo and meanderings…Time travel back to June 2018 and read a brief history of the game here
Okay, so where are we at with it. Here’s a brief summary of what Blobbit Push is and what we’re doing to bring it to fruition. The game can best be described as Sokoban with baddies. It was never intended to be anything more than that, and to be honest, the original J2ME game we developed, and for a brief time browser game was initially designed to tap in to the casual gaming market.
The web & J2ME versions were released but then things changed, iPhone happened, Android happened and Steam happened! Initially we thought about porting the game but the original graphics were designed for a smaller screen and a lower resolution. I had this bright idea to scale up all the art, re-animate the sprites and with it push (no pun intended) the look further. The new enhanced Blobbit Push was underway!
The new graphics took the game to a whole new level, as did the sprite animations… all created in my favouring Pixel Art software, ProMotion from Cosmigo, with every pixel drawn one at a time just as I started out doing back in the days of Dpaint and my Amiga 1000. Old Skool!
The biggest change we made was to add a proper front end to the new game, the original was just a simple title screen with a very basic level select system that was functional but lacked any real visual pizazz. Some kind of key framed, possibly skeletal animation system needed to be implemented so we can have the fluidity of the menus with an eye on making the presentation as polished as we can.
After a bit of research, we opted to use Dragon Bones to do all the animations. It was pretty easy to pick up, and it wasn’t long before I got my head around the way it all worked. I managed to create a nice front end system with all the usual bells and whistles you would expect; we were on the path to getting the game looking awesome! This was back before skeletal animation systems were more developed so choices (on a budget) were very limited. Looking back now I think Blender or Spine would have probably been a better choice perhaps?
In the meantime I was still working on the new tile sets as the original tiles were far less stylised and though they looked fine, for the new displays I wanted more details which meant re-creating them.
A lot has changed since the original mobile phone game, but in order to release a version on newer systems a lot had to change! The original level maps were created in Tiled (Mapeditor.org) using a single layer which worked well at the time; the new maps continued to be edited using this software, but to get more out of the graphics we added more layers to the levels this provides more flexibility and looks a whole lot better with the overall design of the game.
So what’s left to do?
Most of the work that needs to be carried out is updating the existing assets to work for a PC based/Landscape format screen. A lot of the original assets were designed for portrait mode with many of the core assets requiring re-editing to make them look presentable.
Godot re-write:
Mark has been converting the existing code over to Godot Engine, so far the process has been fairly painless, but that doesn’t mean to say we’re near to having a playable game again. There’s a lot to do so as we move forward, with that said we hope to show something in the not too distant future.
Level Maps:
The original level maps were created for use on a phone screen in portrait mode, so as we’re aiming to release this on steam these maps are being re-edited for the more eye pleasing landscape aspect.
Tile Sets:
The tile sets themselves are about 75% complete with many of the missing extras planned being set pieces and dressing. Specifically the tiles for the last set of levels.
Sprites:
Most of the sprites are complete, there are a few animations that could do with a few extra frames so these will need completing. I also need to go through and add some FX to them given we’re now using Godot to write the game.
UI and Front End:
The UI animations are about 50% complete. They’re mostly done but… with the update to the new landscape aspect I’m having to work through and re-calibrate them all and for some reason unbeknown to me some of them aren’t working correctly. They still look bloody good though!
Game Design:
The biggest thing left to add is the game completion stuff, as in there is none at the moment other than a very basic completed spaceship sprite which needs to be worked into the final level.
There are a number of game play features that still need work, such as an undo move and rewind system, as making a Sokoban game without an undo move just doesn’t work, more so when there are baddies walking about getting in the way too!
Audio:
The audio needs to be worked on, we need a new sound track.
Sound Effects are mostly in place but we will require more, which I expect we will probably create these ourselves.
Before I end this post, I am thinking about adding a specific Blobbit page to the site where a dev blog can be properly maintained and a progress overview similar to the above can be shown. We are toying with the idea of crowd funding the completion of the game so we can devote some series time to actually finishing it.
Until next time, thanks for reading and please check out our .
