Indie Game in progress #1

First of all, (as tends to be the trend these times) let me apologize for not posting so frequently as i planned. I've got a lot going on in my life and unfortunately I haven't had the time to write for this blog. I took a very enjoyable trip to Dubai with my family, and a absolutely insane trip to New York City; where I among vacationing, also did some marketing for my blog by putting my business card on subways around the city. In general I had a blast (and maybe I also got kind of blasted, but tell no-one about that).  I'm hoping I can get my friend, currently heavily engaged in Watch Dogs, to give me a review I can publish here, seeing as I haven't been able to aquire the game yet.

That being said; here is the first update post on my Indie game project; for now named "Project: Arena". I explained in my last post how it is a major part of my final exam thesis; for more info on this, read the article previous to this one.

I finally finished design on my intro/tutorial level where players learn how the game works. I've in the small sense started experimenting with astetichs, but for now I'm focusing on the core gameplay mechanics. It's almost there, but I'm still trying to solve a few problems with velocity, speed and gravity; although that all boils down to the hard part of the process...coding; witch is where my skills fall short. Luckily, Unity has a lot of great built-in features that helps ease the process and with the progress I've been making lately, this is what I plan to work on in the coming weeks, after ironing out a few other major papers for school. I'm now happy to report I've set up out the transition between levels, and as a result of nailing this, I just kept on doing what I like best about working on my game; designing levels and watching my friends and family getting annoyed for not completing them without several failures. I've completed the basic design for Level 1 (tutorial/intro) level 2 and level 3. I'm also happy to announce there is a nifty little easter egg in level 3. I just couldn't hold back when the idea struck me, and hitting two birds with one stone, with the easter egg I'm making a less than completely subtle reference to one of my all-time FAV games, Portal. The great thing about the easter egg, is that I don't feel it's been tacked on. It naturally sprung out of the original design idea I had for the level. I plan to upload a downloadable version of the game as soon as I get it to what I feel comfortable calling an alpha version (although, with other people playing it, technically it'd be a Beta but hey, you guys can be the exclusive test-players. The very first people outside of my inner circle who get to test out the game).

All in all, I'm very please with the progress so far, and I feel it's shaping up to be a much better project than I could've ever hoped for. I should post a youtube video soon enough, showing a walktrough of the first 3 stages, and maybe even some rageouts of my friends failing at the prototype level (currently not part of the game. Given it's difficulty level It won't be featured until much later in the game). That's all