Weekly Recap #121: Power-Ups! (Patreon)

Mostly I've been finishing up the power-ups for the Breakout clone and worked on the UI.

I've been polishing the power-ups for way too long. I'm very happy with how every one of them looks now, and I cut out the only one that didn't feel like it belonged in the game. That leaves us 8 stupidly over-worked power-ups, and most of them being quite overpowered. (that's fine though, it's in the spirit of the game)

It was important to me that every power-up has its own recognizable effects on screen. The ball that can go through bricks had to look POWERFUL, the explosive ball had to create actual explosions... That stuff took a lot more time than actually implementing the gameplay effects of the power-ups.

But hey at least the game looks that much more unique, so whatever!

I also worked on the UI. In the end I decided to integrate the score and the icons for the power-ups (obviously very necessary) into the background of the game. I'm quite happy with it!

I started working on special bricks! We have half-bricks, armored bricks and timed bricks that go into the background and back out every 2 seconds!

I don't think there'll be any more special bricks than that. I will however be working a little more on how the armored and timed bricks look, because I'm not quite satisfied with those yet. Functionally though, they all work!

So now I'll be working on the level progression and that should be pretty interesting! My idea for that is that the bricks scroll down and you have to destroy them before they get too low. You actually can't lose from letting your balls drop, you'll always get a new one. But you *need* to destroy all the bricks as they go down.

As you progress, there'll be more and more special bricks that are more complicated to deal with, and the bricks might start to scroll down faster.

I'm planning to make the ever-scrolling layout of bricks procedurally generated, from hand-made presets. More about that next week if it turns out to be a good idea!

Apart from that, it's only menus and sound left to do before the game is done. I'm not gonna say the game might be finished by the end of the week, because I already did that twice, but I really want to.

I've also been working on a logo for SUGAR! You're seeing the black & white (actually dark grey & light grey) versions which may or may not be definitive. I also want to try and do a colored version soon.

Let me know what you think!

This has been another ok week! Progress was made, just not at the pace I would wish for. We'll get there though.

As always I want to thank my Patreon supporters! You wouldn't be getting this ridiculously over-the-top Breakout clone without them! Here are the names of the 3$+ supporters!

Joseph White, Ryan Malm, rotatetranslate, Anne Le Clech, manuel odendahl, Austin East, Marcin Majewski, Zachary Cook, Jefff, Meru, Bitzawolf, Paul Nguyen, Dan Lewis, Christian Östman, Dan Rees-Jones, Reza Esmaili, Andreas Bretteville, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Giles Graham, Flo Devaux, Cole Smith, Thomas Wright, HERVAN, berkfrei, Tim and Alexandra Swast, Sasha Bilton, Jearl, Dave Hoffman, Chris McCluskey, Collin Caldwell, Andrew Reitano, Qristy Overton, Finn Ellis, Giovan, amy, Jakub Wasilewski, Brent Werness, Max Cahill, hushcoil, Jeremy Bouin, Jesse Bergerstock, Jacel the Thing, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, Andrew Reist, vaporstack

This coming week I'll be hard at work on the Breakout clone! Worst case scenario, we're having a Patreon release next week, but I really hope I can make it for this week. We'll see!

Have a great week!

Take care!

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