…continued from previous post


You can see here that the old style tended to make the edges blend with the background layer since the background layers are almost always darker so I was going to add a feature to control how dark the edges are on a per level basis. This quickly got scrapped because there was a bug in the shader code which made the tiles have no colour difference on the edges and once I saw how clean and simple it looked I left it as is except for deleting the now useless code in the shader 🙂

Hmm what else, well there are many better reasons to post regular updates but one would be to avoid picking from a list of changes spanning months.
The lighting system received yet another slight modification to improve performance and I believe it’s now fast enough to use temporary dynamic lights for explosions, lasers and other objects.

Last and most certainly least is the release date change. Had I stuck with the original design for lots of short levels then the game still might not of made the early 2014 release but since I changed the design to fewer, longer levels and to have a more diverse set of challenges on offer then I want to do it right and make the best double jumping platformer I can. Unfortunately, this means that I had to revise the original release date from early 2014 to late 2014. I must say I’m a little uncomfortable with that date because I feel Double JUMP has benefited most from an emergent style of design and it’s difficult to judge what ideas I should full implement, which ones I should never include and which can be ignored as excessive feature creep. I still have a modest list of objects and mechanics I want to add so calculating how long it would take to do those and any new good ideas that come along is a fault of my experience.

I learned so much over the last year and it’s been amazing how far I’ve come in terms of programming over the last 3 years, although I could’ve learned more had I not needed to work part time… Damn bills 🙂 On that note I’ve been thinking of either starting a Kickstarter campaign to help pay for art work, music and bills or create a short and low priced remake/port of SuperCube over to PC and XBOX 360 and release it for a very low price. Whatever happens though it would be essential to devote more development time for at least the final 6 months or so of development. Fortunately I live very cheaply so 6 months of development wouldn’t be asking for much and I have a friend who can compose the music at a modest deal so hopefully I can find enough support for Kickstarter if I choose that route.

Here’s looking forward to 2014.

Cheers