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A top-down 2d puzzle shooter. You're a cleanup turret and your main mission is to destroy the malfunctioning maintenance droids, before they destroy you or any other still working maintenance droids.

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How hard should a first release be. Short levels and limited levels makes us a wee bit unsure.

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Our game Rookeys is the result of this year's Global Game Jam in January. Thinking that a mobile game would be easy to put together we decided to try and have a go at it. Ah, how nice it is to be ignorant sometimes..

Anyways, a couple of months later we decided to actually finish the project seeing as we both wanted to learn more about developing for touch controls. We are only two students and our knowledge was very limited but after a lot of hard work and very late nights, we are actually nearing the end of development. All that's left is some graphics assets and balancing.

Yesterday was the day we started balancing and yeesh was that tedious work. The game is level based in the same way as e.g. "Angry Birds", but the levels are also very short. We want to keep updating Rookeys with more content after the release, but at the moment we can't know exactly how quickly this will happen since we've never released a mobile game before. Therefore we want to make the game interesting enough to keep playing until we get the next batch of content ready.

The initial inspiration for the game was "Hotline Miami" and its level of difficulty. We've made it slightly easier but still not self playing, absolutely not. But despite having 24 levels in the release, we're worried it will still be too little for the player. Therefore we're making it really difficult to reach 100% on every level. Kind of along the lines of "10 Second Ninja".

This is what I was doing yesterday, playing the levels over and over again to be able to estimate what's reasonable (possible). It might not be fun but grunt work is a big part of game development. Also, I'm pretty sure I'm the best Rookeys player in the world right now.

Actually winning this one
Actually winning this one

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