Happy 2014! I hope you had relaxing holidays, got some rest and ate well. I'm sure I did! I was away from home and the internet for almost 2 weeks, and along with all the relaxing I also managed to do some coding. Here's a dev update #10.
AOTY Results
My biggest excitement during Christmas was not what presents I would possibly get, but how Power Heroes would rank in the IndieDB App of the Year voting. I got my first surprise in early December when my game had made it into the top 50. After that, a 10 day voting period began to find the best of these top 50 games. Believe me, those 10 days felt longer than ordinary 10 days. So when the last second ticked off the timer I kept refreshing my browser on the main page to see the final results, but they were not published until one or two days later.
The first feature these guys made was the "Best Upcoming App of 2013". The only thing I knew was that I was in that category in the top 50 voting.
Excitement building up...
I carefully clicked the link to see which games were picked, and...
THIRD SPOT!
Yes that's right! Power Heroes ranked at the 3rd place! I was so thrilled. I don't know if it meant anything but nevertheless, for a guy making his first game I take this as a merit.
Side-effect to being featured was of course more eyes on Power Heroes. I saw a rise in view counts on my IndieDB page and probably doubled my followers there. Once again I must thank everyone who supported and voted, I appreciate this highly!
Hero Level-up System
I have decided on the hero progress model and it's in the game already. XP is tied to score where one XP is gained for each 1,000 score points. After enough XP (score) is collected, the hero levels up and gets a stat increase, like more power, health, etc. It's a simple system but gives another goal to work towards, and makes the heroes more capable of reaching later areas in the game.
Dynamic Quest System
I've had few test quests in the game for several months, but the whole system did not work very dynamically. Quests could be completed, but they would not be rewarded in any way nor would new quests be given to the player. This has been improved so that at any given time, you will have three active quests, and when a quest is completed it will be replaced with a new one. Completed quests are now also rewarded with coins. Basic stuff!
Boss Levels
In the last dev update I introduced bosses to you guys, and now I have a playable sewer level for the rat boss. It starts with a small dialogue before the fight and finishes with randomly appearing items for the hero to collect. The rat traverses around the level and is quite an easy kill, so maybe I have to tweak it a little bit to make it more challenging.
Random Thoughts
I feel the game is finally nearing its "feature complete" status, after which I will start adding content. I mean I only have like 7 areas that I have used for playtesting and I've played them TO DEATH. So creating fresh new content is something I look forward to and I expect it to expand the game to its full glory with lots of areas to explore. And nothing stops me from adding more features in updates after release.
Because I really need to start closing this project that has been in development for, uh, one and a half years (based on the date of my first post on TIGSource). Of course the direction of the game has changed a lot since then as I originally didn't really know where I wanted to go. I have also gone from knowing nothing about Objective C to making a game with it, so it has been a positive learning experience.
Until next time!
