As we continue chipping away at everything on our Deleveled wishlist, I wanted to let everybody in on a little bit of what Kyle and I both have on our near-future plates. We're expecting to have a very limited beta near the end of the month, so we want to be sure to have our game in a state that at least resembles what it would look like at launch.
For Kyle's part, this largely means continuing to iterate on game mechanic twists that we think could be fun. Not everything will end up making it to the final game but it's important that we try a bunch of stuff to find out what works and what doesn't. The main thing we're excited about right now is the ability to rotate the entire playing field 90 degrees. We've rigged up a couple of simple test levels to explore this mechanic and we think it's going to be a winner.
For my part, I've been going very hard on level design. We're hoping for a lot of levels to be included in our release but, at present, only about half of them actually exist. Similar to experimental mechanics, it's very important that we make way more levels than we can possibly include because not all of them are going to be fun or interesting to play. It's admittedly quite a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks but, ultimately, it'll help us make Deleveled the best that it can be.
Finally, both of us have been making a lot of mock-ups for background artwork. Obviously, the screenshots that we've shown so far all have an essentially identical look to them. We love the color blue but even we get a little fatigued looking at only that one shade for hours and hours. I'll be posting some of our mock-ups on @DeleveledGame later this week but, for now, just trust me when I say that they add a lot of visual flavor to this very simple-looking game.
As always, if you're interested in bite-sized updates of what's going on at Deleveled headquarters, give @DeleveledGame a follow on Twitter. If you're interested in what Kyle or I are doing, point your web browser to @ToasterFuel and @jpnance, respectively. Oh, and if you want to literally watch Kyle work the game, he has a gamedev stream that goes live every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at about 8:30am PT. It's good marketing to have a tease so here's one: on his stream, there's a way for you to fire Nerf balls at him.
Patrick
