It's Part 3 of a week long iPad app-from-scratch project, which covers the final day - Saturday. As mentioned in Part 2, things are getting tough: We have a game now, and there is 'fun' there, but there is a lot which is incomplete - not all powerups are implemented, some of the scoring presentation is lacking, art has only been first pass so far. There are a bunch of gameplay issues: The puck gets stuck occasionally (if against a bumper this tends to machinegun the sound effect), enemies have a tendency to swarm you, and sometimes the action gets too fast and frenetic, and you feel less in control than you really should. Not only that, but to get things done on time I have had to cut features that originally felt very 'core': The level based system, and multiplayer mode.

So with less than 24 hours left, what did we do?

Well, it was destined to be a tough day anyway: I had a zoo visit and a 30th birthday to attend. I could only get a few hours done in the morning, and maybe some in the dead of night. Beetlefeet was valiantly holding down the fort though, working on extending the code for the enemy spawner. I managed to get some particle code out of the way. Things looked like this:

Those with keen eyes will notice a vague starfield in the background - this is in lieu of some sort of psychadelic background effect that can maybe be added later, but for now a starfield will have to do! You can also see four types of enemy here, two pucks (yellow circles), a puck powerup (double yellow circles - collecting this would spawn yet another puck), and a green health powerup. Intriguing!

Now things are beginning to look more bla-dooey! Take that you shapes, with your arrogant lines and stuff. Not so tough now when blue particles are spewing out where all your precious angles used to be! Cower before my tri-puck attack! You may also marvel at my 11x multiplier and my score which is well on the way to being very healthy!

So anyway by the time Beetlefeet (who had done brilliant work getting enemies to spawn in programmable patterns) and I got to comparing notes it was quite late in the evening - it would have been another hard slog through the night to get something submitted - all those features that needed implementing, and existing things that needed polishing, not to mention the things that had been cut, which really should be in there. Oh and the BUGS. The stuck-puck which causes the bumper collision sound effect to trigger about a kajillion times per second and make the game sound like BUZCHUZCHUZCHUZCHUZHUZCH seemed to be happening all the time.

The decision was made: Hold it back. Were we really missing out on much by not being a launch app? Who knows? - but it is certain that what we had wouldn't have quite made the grade as a polished app, and I know we wouldn't have been completely satisfied knowing of all the cool things we wanted to put in the game but didn't have time for. Besides, I can just see Steve Jobs hearing BUZCHUZCHUZCHUZCHUZHUZCH and rejecting it in a second.

The exciting thing was, free of the oppressive time restriction, the game was free to roam where it would. The level system was back on the table - in a big way. Excited conversation ensued as to how this would work and what this would mean for game narrative and pacing. Which lead to other discussions about a whole bunch of mechanics and different game directions, which then lead to discussions about content and deeper game issues. And hello multiplayer, how you doin'?

You may have noticed that whilst I am super excited about all these ideas I am not spilling the beans on what these ideas actually are. Yes. They are for future Dev Diary installments. And yes, they will be awesome*.

The journey continues, with Dev Diary 3.5.

* Future Dev Diary installments reserve the right to potentially not be awesome.