Blogs - DalriadaGames

This has been quite the week. Every week it seems is breaking new barriers of levels of production, and while you could argue I should get used to it, so far I simply can’t – it amazes me how much we can do in one week.

So let’s get onto my main focus this week, implementing the UI, and even beginning to program it’s functions also.

MICRO VS MACRO

When I studied at University, I was told by a lecturer that, “The User Interface, is Game Design. It is the game.” and

that has always stuck very heavily with me. The choice to make your UI elements, diegetic or not, to make them meta or not, all of these things slowly begin to construct the game you will have. On top of that, the means by which you prioritise your game’s UI, and assign positions for Micro and Macro elements can turn a program into a game, and a good game into a great one.

Fantastic UI from Civ V

I always loved and unintentionally refer to the UI from the Civilization games. The Civ series has SOOO much content to make you aware of at all times that it’s staggering. And yet it somehow manages to do just that so effectively.

It does this because of it’s many Micro and Macro elements. “What’s that?”

“A method for presenting large quantities of Data at high densities in a way that a broad overview of the data is given and yet an immense amount of detail is provides” – Ruddle, 2012

This is where Micro consists of Low Level detail, and Macro High Level Detail. And by the way, it’s notoriously hard to do, hence why the CIV series is released so few and far between. However, it seems it just might be the ticket for our game, so let’s see our current stab at it – and as always, remember that a lot of the art may just be placeholder, then again it may not be if people like it.

The Menu that appears at the top of the screen on every interface when your on the computer.

As I began to develop every screen that you would play through when you were on your terminal (the primary way you interact with your staff, Intel, research etc) I realised that I was adding certain elements in twice or more. Sometimes, I would switch from the first screen to the second because I needed information from the second to complete my task on the first. Which is absurd. I did this intentionally though as a means of prototyping and self testing. To identify which areas of my game would annoy me the most if I could not access it or struggled to do so.

That’s why I came up with this particular menu, which I’ve just named “The Shortcut Menu” as it saved me going to other screens. So interestingly enough, here it is again, try to guess what the icons mean, and I’ll explain them immediately underneath. If it didn’t match what you thought, send me a message or leave a comment about what you did think it was or how I could improve.

From Left to Right:

• The P Symbol Stands for Panic, it’s the current level of Panic the citizens of the city are at. If it reaches tier 5 panic/100% panic, then your citizens will be petitioning to have you removed as your clearly incapable of handling the threat. At other tiers it also has negative effects such as lowering your funding from the government.
• The T Symbol Stands for the Threat Level your current at. This is the general likelihood of an attack happening. Unlike Panic, Threat Level can be inaccurate based on your Intel. So if your Intel is poor, your Threat Level May be at 0, and then suddenly an attack will occur.
• The RF is your requisition funds, the funds given to you by the government to spend on Staff, Research, Intel, etc.
• Pause, Play, Fast, SuperFast, these change the speed at which time progresses. There is nothing worse than a game that needlessly makes you wait, so if you know your Intel is good, and all situations are handled, you can avoid the wait and skip forward a little to the next situation you do need to handle. Maybe you know a bomb will be planted in ten hours, but you have not much to do until then, skip to it! (Although it’s unlikely this will happen to this extent.)
• Exit, this quits you from the computer terminal where you can leave the office (game).
• Rules, this button takes you to the current list of rules regarding bombs. The rules change on a regular basis, e.g. one day you might always cut the first red wire, then the next day you definitely don’t. It’s updated regularly based on how good your Intel is. If your Intel is terrible, the rules too can be incorrect.
• Map, this takes you to the full view of the map where you can see the entire city and all of its districts. On this map will be all of the potential dangers, as well as current bombs, places to investigate, people to arrest etc.
• Day, Time, Year, Week. Exactly as it says on the tin. This is the current day and time, as well as the weeks and years you’ve been in office.
• Intel – This takes you to a screen that displays the full list of Intel you currently have on bombs/terror activities. The notifications shows unread pieces of Intel.
• Staff – This takes you to a screen that displays all the current staff you have, what they’re doing, and what issues they race. The notifications display unread staff issues.
• Email – (I’ll give you two guesses but you’re only going to need one.) This displays all of your emails and the notifications tell you how many are unread.
• UOD Temp Logo – This little icon takes you to the Overview Screen at any time, which shows tiny snippets of every screen in the game, so that you can easily select where you need to go.

So as you can see, there is an obnoxious amount of information to be conveyed in this tiny menu in its current iteration, but in my personal opinion, it’s actually a brilliant quick overview. Each of the items featured are needed regularly and none are waste/there for no reason. They are also not only featured here, but we’ll get to that. What do you think could be put here? Do you like the menu as it is?

Following on from last week, here’s how the new micro/macro elements have changes the screenshots. The emails have been changed, while actually still remaining true to the original concepts.

Here you see everything that you need to for an email, you have From, Subject, The

A picture of the list of email screen.

Substance of The Text, and a Positive and Negative response to each of the messages. Currently, this is it, and an X will take you back to the list of emails. However, that space in the middle and a couple of spaces around is expected to change quite dramatically, with things such as Displaying the Current Relationship Status between yourself and the person your contacting in the form of a number. E.g. Malcolm + 2

Another improvement this week comes in the form of the staff management screen, which now has a nice little piece of info about the latest Intel, so that you can better assign your staff. So if it looks like (based on Intel) there’s a suspicious activity happening, you can assign your agents to monitor the intercom.

As you can see, it’s a minor improvement from last week, but essential none the less. It’s all really beginning to come together. There’s the very obvious Intel being displayed on the right, but then just a subtle little cross next to the second staff member, so that at a glance you can see he’s injured. By inspecting further (without having to go to the separate more detailed screen) you can see he’s also unhappy, and loosing the tech skill.

Functionality

Perhaps (or arguably) more exciting though, is that the slow task of building the functionality you see is being put in. Already, Intel comes in at a steady rate (not the way I want it to work yet, but it does work.), there are certain “random encounter” emails that are sent to you, time progresses at the right speeds (pause, play, fast, superfast), panic & threat increase independently and all of the buttons work, just the majority send debugs at the minute rather than perform the action.

It’s the slow slow build towards having this brilliant creation that we’re going to pour our hearts and efforts into.

Kickstarter

The time has come to consider.

“Don’t Go Bang!” went from a mobile game (hence the particularly mobile friendly name) to a PC game. The funds needed to complete this task have grown exponentially, and while it’s no excuse – we are an Indie Team.

Which generally means two things,

1. We have little or no money.
2. We pour our hearts and countless hours into the projects we do have.

And you know which platform is great for allowing those kind of projects to continue?

You guessed it.

It’s obviously not set in stone, we haven’t launched the campaign or anything, but we’re definitely considering it, and even doing the preliminary planning on it. But as always, we want to know – what do you think?
Please get in touch in any of these places,

info@dontgobang.com – Any information or discussion regarding the game, Don’t Go Bang!

press@dontgobang.com – Press opportunities for the game (Interviews, Magazines, YouTube, Twitch etc)

contact@dalriadagames.com – General Inquiries About Anything At All

Or as always, please just get in touch @DalriadaConnor

Don’t think it’s just a standard repeat, I genuinely mean this everytime I say:

Thank you so much for all of your support, interest, kindness, and feedback, we appreciate it more and more everyday and your continued inspiration feeds ours throughout the weeks. Thank you, and until next time..

-@DalriadaConnor

There is so much to talk about this week, it’s overwhelming. And while I’m not sure how well I’ll manage to cover it all, I’ll do my best. Equally I’ve marked sections with beginning and end tags so you can skip areas you don’t care about.

Long story short – Don’t Go Bang! is now a PC Game.

“Rewind, how can you go from a mobile game to a PC game?”

It’s simple really, and we’re going to be as open and transparent with you all about it. We originally made PC games for clients, and then slowly transitioned to mobile game development where we could make our own content. We released a game, STARWARD, for Google Play, and like all naive indie developers, we thought it was going to take off and be the top game on the Play Store. But with 500,000 other games on the app store, it simply got lost. And the worst part is it was lost because for the longest time, we were secret about it, hiding our game for fear of it being stolen. But obscurity is worse than piracy. Our marketing for the game, began the day we released it. Big. Mistake.

So this time around we’ve been so much more open with you all, about “Don’t Go Bang!” and our other game, “Tumble Tower”. We’ve tried to keep you much more informed, even creating a brand new website to make our content easier to understand (even if it does need updated with the new content, will be done over the weekend.)

Now “Don’t Go Bang!” which has been my own project, completely done by me so far, has been so much fun to develop, and we got instant reactions that the game was fun and tense as a mobile game. You had to complete the tasks at just the right time to not explode and the fact the instructions played tricks on you during the game was brilliant. But then came the limitations, “Do you have multiple tools you can use?” Well no, because that’s too confusing for a mobile game/mobile market. It’s not a bad thing, but mobile games have to be one button/one action games. That’s what they are, people play for ten minutes at a time (generally), not 3+ hours. So we need to make it instantly playable. Next up, I always wanted to have instructions required to dispose of the bombs, and the instructions changed over time. But again, for a mobile game, no one wants to read instructions, they want to tap!

These limitations were actually really fun, and under them I built a brilliant game I’m really proud of. However, they were limiting by nature.

But moreover, a mobile game makes it’s revenue through ads. People don’t like paying for games and apps. It’s silly, people will pay 70p ($0.93) for a chocolate bar, but would absolutely avoid doing it for a game/app. But again, why not? – When there are thousands of similar free games. Now “Don’t Go Bang!” would have to be free, and would have to have ads in it. But where?

Do I force you to buy lives? Well no, because the game was level heavy and it was often acceptable for you to fail in order to learn. Okay, then power-ups? Sure, this is fine, but it just felt shovelled in, it wasn’t right for my game. My game was short and tense, I didn’t want you to be able to slow down time, or have the answer revealed. So banner ads? Again, this is fine, but just annoying. And (poor old me I know) if no one clicks on the ads, I make no income from this game that I just love making, and I can’t continue making content that I love with people that I trust and enjoy working with.

Solution. Production is changing. Don’t Go Bang becomes a PC Game.

“What changes can you make to “Don’t Go Bang!” to provide enough content to make it a PC game?” – Great question other me. (Archer fans, heeyo!)

Let me show you. Bare in mind the majority of the art is placeholder art to show off the concept.

So now, you start off being given an office. You are in charge of the newly formed Bomb Disposal Unit known as UOD (Unstable Ordinance Disposal) who are part of a much larger division, tasked with protecting the public from and ultimately capturing the terrorists known as Fraction (subject to change.)

Example of the Office Space you’ll get. (Yes the fan does rotate at different speeds if you click the different buttons.)

You’ll receive any newspaper articles or classified documents at this point in the game, as well as view your achievements/objectives on the back wall. This space will also be completely customisable via the shop menu in the computer (we’ll talk about that another day)

Once you click the computer you’ll be taken to the desktop interface, I’m not even going to show this off as it’s going to change massively, you can see it displayed here in it’s most basic prototyping form in the screenshot.

From there you can find all your subsequent screens. I say I’m not going to bother going into the main desktop as it’s probably going to be an overview/shortcut to every other screen I’m about to talk about.

Now one of the options in the interface is to view the Map, which displays current threats, current suspicions to be investigated, current population density (varies when festivals or events take place), and missions also.

This is just one district, “Glastonbury” in a much larger map.

A reminder of what the bombs currently look like on mobile, as they will be quite different for PC.

From here you can launch expeditions to threats, aka you can begin diffusing a bomb from this menu if there is one present. Now the bombs will vary quite differently now that I have the tools of a PC, including that you now need specific tools to diffuse different portions of the bomb.

But sometimes, two bombs will be identified at one time, and so you have two choices.

1. Diffuse one bomb and let the other go off, killing civilians or damaging property (always creates panic.)
2. Or hire/assign another member of staff to diffuse the bomb.

Bomb disposal experts can now be hired to tackle other bombs. Their average rating is displayed along with their name, their wage, their personality traits, and a separate “more info” button to find out their exact stats, a bio etc. You must choose your staff carefully, based on priority and time constraints. For instance, a 1 star hire is much cheaper than a 5 star hire, however the 1 star will perform much more poorly and may fail/be killed.

However, a 1 star can be trained over time, and so if time is not a major factor e.g. there was no bomb threats present at the current time, then you could train the employee up and save a ton of money. They will get a raise anyway for every star they increase by, but the raise will not be as much as those who already have 5 star careers will cost. Speaking of cost, the currency in the game is RF (requisition funds), these are the funds assigned to you by the government to manage your team. Should you run out of funds, your team will disband and ultimately you will lose. This is actually the most likely way you will lose, as even if a bomb goes off on you, you have a protective shell to protect you from 1 bomb blast, once it has been damaged a new one must be purchased. So essentially unless you run out of funds, you should be okay.

Example Of The Assign Staff Screen (Currently in Development)

Once you’ve acquired your staff, you can view them here. Here is where your assign their current tasks:

• Downtime – This increases a persons happiness over time. While they’re on downtime, they’re not practising their tech or Intel skills, so while they stay still at first, over time they will decrease that skill.
• Training – This allows you to train your operators in one of two skills, tech or Intel. Tech is their physical capability to disarm a bomb that they are aware of. Intel is their ability to find and diagnose a bomb before they go on the mission. It’s essential to have good Intel to get the correct bomb location, and also to know to bring the correct equipment.
• Monitor – This means they are currently searching for bombs, and monitoring chatter to provide you and the team with Intel.

As you can see to the right of each person, you can see their current well being, Intel skill, and tech skill. The Intel and tech skill will have numbers beside them, indicating which rank in that skill the operator is currently at. You can never lose a number in a rank, only your progress towards the next one. E.g. Once an operator is tech level nine, they always will be, but depending on how much they train it may take them longer to reach tech level ten.

Example Email

When you receive new intel, or a message from a citizen, you will get it in the form of an email also. The email displays who the message is from, what it’s about, and then various dialogue choices (slots shown at the bottom) as well as useful links to do the action mentioned in the email.

There has been a lot to cover in this one article, but nevertheless there is a lot more to come.

• Panic – The overall goal of the game is to restore order and eliminate the terrorist threat, but also to keep the people of the city calm. You are a government funded team, and if you begin to fail your tasks too often the citizens will become increasingly more panicked and petition to have your funds lowered, or ultimately have you removed. You must stop this from happening by performing admirably, effectively, responding to citizen emails and fears, and launching internet/information campaigns to calm the public.
• Scanner/Send Investigation Team – As briefly mentioned, the map displays information about the city currently, but in order to find bombs there has to be a process to do so. You can do this by scanning for suspicious signals, or physically sending an investigation team (at your expense) to reconnoitre the area and report back if there are threats or potential threats.
• Research – As Fraction grows, and their bomb making prowess increases, it’s your job to stay one step ahead, so you’d have to recruit avid researchers to provide you with the latest tools and equipment to deal with the threats.
• Shop – You should be able to customise your own office space. Not only because you want to have your own unique space, but because some items offer unique bonuses, such as sending your operatives out on missions in a calm state, increasing the chances they perform better. You can also buy the latest tools and equipment here to improve yourself and your team.
• Instructions List – Spoke about earlier, the instructions list is ever changing and requires your Intel teams expertise to be updated. So the instructions list for bombs one week, may say “Always cut the first red wire.” but it is your job to ensure your Intel team is well equipped enough to know if that rule ever changes. Equally, the Intel team can provide you with information about which bomb you are about to face, allowing you to prepare or research ahead of time. E.g. They might know a particular bomb is under construction, and know the attack will happen in three days. If your current tool set is unsatisfactory, you can invest in research to meet the demands and accomplish the mission by the time it arrives.

I understand this is a massive adjustment, but I truly believe this is the right decision and the correct direction to take the game and the company. We weren’t really planning to have this happen, but it slowly became more apparent that it was necessary and more fun. I strongly believe we can deliver an excellent game of a calibre we have yet to release. The design process so far has been truly exciting, and I can’t wait to see where it takes us.

As always thank you for your continued love and support on the projects, I always appreciate your feedback, your words, and your continued inspiration.

We’ll talk again soon when the next dev-log comes out, but hopefully before then. But until then…

-@DalriadaConnor

Well this has been one heck of a week, and yes you’ll be right to notice even the Dev Log is late. “Connor, what’s your problem? IT’S ONLY A DEV LOG!”
Oh, if only. Basically, how I fundamentally constructed the game completely made sense… until I tried to pair level components with bomb parts it was not used to. Then the whole thing went AWOL.

Basically (and apologies if this is boring, it’s quite tech heavy), the problem with the Bombs was that they are made up of various child game objects, called “Bomb Parts”. Now since it’s a 2D game, these Bomb Parts are technically on top of each other, and they each have multiple colliders on them for the various puzzle pieces. Colliders are just a component which detects to see if you’re interacting with an object or if an object is interacting with another object. It’s a check for calculations, physical or otherwise. Now the problem is that with many bomb parts technically on top of each other, you could interact with them all at once. So if the bomb part on top (the one you could see) had a red wire at position 1, and the bomb part underneath had a blue wire at position 1, and the instructions were to cut all the red wires – you would tap on the red wire you could see, but technically it would cut the red wire and also the blue wire underneath, and so the bomb would detonate.

Now the poor man’s solution would be to never have wires in the same position. But this is just lazy and limits the amount of bomb parts we can have or the variety of them, which completely defeats the purpose of the game.

Now it sounds simple, just tell the computer which bomb part is on top and only have those colliders active at a given time. Which is what we did do. So until you complete the bomb part you can see, the bomb parts below and their colliders do not exist, to avoid you accidentally blowing yourself up.

Simple – moving on – oh no wait… problem. Which is the top part of the bomb? How to I tell which part of the bomb is on top to know to show that one? Easy, check through an array of bomb parts. No not quite, because I first need to determine where the bomb parts should fit in an array the size of the potential bomb parts.

Let me just show you the code needed to do that…

Doesn’t this just look horrible. This took a solid day of problem solving amongst other things to be able to reach this solution. (And even then the final code looks a little different)

Basically – and this is getting really boring now – it’s going through each bomb and checking for which number I have predefined the bomb part to be placed, and then placing it in that position in the array so that the array knows which bomb part to show first, and then which parts it should show subsequently until it ends.

Once I managed this, I had to go through every bomb and assign a number to them, which was just monotonous. But once it was done, it’s done for good! Which is just nice to say it’s finally done, and I now have the levels 1-1 :-: 1-9 completed, all that’s left is to do the final bomb level, of which there will be one every set of 10 or so levels. That one will be a little different and I’m looking forward to showing it off once it’s fully completed.

One of the newer things I did manage to work on, was changing the instructions colours on specific words to whatever I wanted. Actually, it was incredibly easy. For any devs out there using Unity, very easy system for changing style of text.

As you can see, that allows me to do some cool and confusing things with the instructions text. As the instructional text always fades away after a given time, I thought it interesting to keep the colour text up there, even when the rest of the instructions are removed.

When the instructions get a little more complex, “Never cut the red (

Another little feature I added (and love by the way), is that each bomb beyond the tutorial levels (and one in the tutorial level just to explain the concept) will get it’s own serial code, displayed on top of the bomb. This part is unscrewed and removed, but you can still see it as it rests just before off-screen. Now sometimes this code will read something like “4JTAQ” which means nothing. Othertimes however, it will read “5TYRB” or something to that effect. Now the instructions dictate (and I’m unsure whether to show this every level or that you just have to remember) that you must cut the wires in the order that their first letter appears in the serial code. So in the above bomb, you would cut, yellow, red, red, blue.
Interestingly enough, because of the way the game works, I couldn’t randomly generate these and place them as text, I have to manually make them as an art file, so the tutorial one looks like this:

And while that art style reminds me – I thought the instruction for the Simon Says tutorial “Do what Simon Says” might get confusing for those who’ve never seen the game, so I literally named the little colour device S.I.M.O.N, like this:

To avoid any new players getting lost.

The next step over the coming week(and it’s already begun) is to complete the boss level and begin work on the newer levels, finally leaving the tutorial stage and making them really complex. I’ll then get fix the ranking system which is currently a little buggy.

Thanks so much to everyone who continues to follow us on this journey and support us, wishing you all a brilliant week ahead!

-@DalriadaConnor
(Also check out our new and improved website,Dalriadagames.com)

Until next time…

It's been quite the week here!

The short story, is that there is no progress on "Don't Go Bang!" this week! There is a why however:

We moved offices! - And we moved offices unexpectedly. Long story short we were moved to a new building which was still under construction, and that new building lacked electricity... which we consider essential. So we decided to take a last minute and well deserved R & R week! It wasn't quite that though, as we had meetings, an all day event, and we worked on some games that we're doing for clients and people we work with, but unfortunately it meant we weren't able to work on our own games this week. It was more just of a take it easier week.

But don't worry, the offices are scheduled to be finished between Friday and Monday, so we'll be back to the usual schedule next week!

Thanks to everyone who's keeping up to date with this game for the patience and support and hope you all have an incredible weekend!

Until then...

When I recently began making my journey into the world of making games for a living, I was under the impression that everything had to be a secret - that I had to keep my games to myself or someone else would come along and steal it. This was stupid. And purely my fault. I'm an indie developer, which means if I want people to take interest in my games, I have to be open, honest, and up to date with the product and what people know about it. Luckily I learned this harsh lesson early on, but can take so much from it as I move forward. So I will be telling all about the game, Don't Go Bang!

Last week was a very busy week in terms of bringing this game from prototype/proof of concept, to something that actually worked. But over the course of the week, rather than allowing myself to be proud of the current stage of the game my ambitions only grew stronger and I wanted to add more and more (whilst simultaneously being well aware of feature creep and techniques to avoid it). My ambitions grew but my core goal of making a simple game that anyone could play and an expert could master remained paramount.

So my solution is simply, in just about every puzzle, the road to completion will be tap or slide the right dials/puzzles/wires or something to that effect for completion. Complex tasks requiring 3-D models or anything too intensive is not going in. Just now, anyone who picks it up can play it until completion. I never want that to change. I want people to be challenged, and have to use their mental acuity to solve the puzzle, but I don't want there to be a confusion as to how to interact to accomplish that goal. E.g. You tap to cut the wire, not swipe. Why? Because everyone can tap a screen and everyone tries it first. "Hey wait a minute... who can't swipe a screen?" - To that, trust me when you're in this position, some people simply either don't enjoy it or it takes them a while to figure that out. That's what I'm avoiding. Those moments of... "What the hell do I do?"/"This isn't working the way I expected it to work."

For instance, a few friends suggested I use tools, and you drag the tools onto a specific puzzle and it allows you to complete it/perform better at the task. I said absolutely not. I don't want a tool to take up the space on the screen, I don't want an unreliable drag feature to stop people from playing, and most importantly - it's a game, so I don't want people spending their time searching through a virtual toolbox.

It's a puzzle game. The puzzle should be difficult enough. I shouldn't have pointless/futile controls to add to that.

With that in mind, this week I began the necessary work on a Simon Says style puzzle for the bomb, where there are four colours presented as a diamond, and the colours will be selected randomly and played in order. This sound easy, but it turned out to be a little more time consuming getting it to work RIGHT. It had to know which colour it should display, at what times it should change, is this colour one of the colours in the order, at what point is it pressed in the order etc.

(The image below shows the puzzle as it's just begun, it's currently highlighting yellow as the first colour to be pressed.)

But while it was a little more time consuming, it now works like a dream, adding a lovely amount of variation to the bomb disposal. Currently it will only play once, so four random colours will be selected and played, let's say the order is (red, yellow, blue, blue). Once you've pressed this combination in the correct order, the red light above the diamond will turn green, indicating you got it right, and a colour will be highlighted. (In this image it's also blue)

This indicates which colour wire you have to cut. Once you cut that wire, the corresponding light above that will turn green also. Assuming you performed your task correctly, the panel will be removed, and the next tier of the bomb is ready to be diffused. As I mentioned before, it can only be done once, but the code is there to allow progress, e.g. first 4 colours are selected, then these 4 + 1, then 5 +1, etc, but it will take some reshoogling of code, and for the time being I'm going to leave it as is. It cannot cause conflicts with other code, so I can literally sit it in the back burner for now and upgrade it when I decide I'm ready.

Now onto the really difficult part of the week - and one that came a little quicker than expected.

Last week I mentioned daily challenges, or ideally tri-daily challenges to keep users coming back and improving their skills/increasing their rank and requisition points. You could infer I could also add in weekly and monthly challenges too, which is true! I do intend to do that. However, quick math lesson:

3 challenges a day every day ((3 x 365) = 1095)

1 challenge a week, every week ((1 x 52) = (52 + 1095) = 1147)

and special challenge a month ((12 x 1) = (1147 + 12) = 1159

That's 1159 unique bombs for me to create. Absolutely no way. Completely unrealistic as a developer for a mobile game, or any game for that matter. So the only solution - make the daily/monthly/weekly bombs procedurally generated. If these difficult bombs have ten tiers (layers) and there are even just four puzzles, that's 10^4 bombs, meaning 10,000 unique bombs with that alone. Obviously, the more puzzle we create, the better, and if each of those puzzles is in turn, random, then we can easily achieve what we need. So if we say that we currently have two puzzles (Simon Says and regular wire cutting), and there can be between 5 - 10 tiers, then we already have a max of 100 unique bombs. However, this only relates to the uniqueness of the order the puzzles are in, but as each Simon Says puzzle will be different, and each wire puzzle will have a random amount of wires + in random orders, that number is technically much higher. However, in terms of gameplay, I would actually reduce that number to much lower than the original. As in to the player it'll feel like a handful of bombs repeating, rather than the actual number it is. But with more puzzles to add to the game, we can easily achieve this. Ideally, we could have 10 puzzles so that just 4 tiers would achieve the same 10^4 number that we need, but we'll have to wait and see. It's tough to judge, as the same puzzle is often different, but I'm unsure as to whether it will look as a repeat or if people will understand that the rules have changed and so thus the puzzle has also.

The next puzzle I have in mind, is an operation style game where you have slide your finger, all the way through the maze without touching the sides. This seems like a bit of a contradiction to my no dragging of objects rule, but in fact the code works quite differently and it might be okay, but a little testing will decipher that first.

Another puzzle idea, actually comes from the bombs changing. So the little hinted story, is that you are training to be a bomb diffuser, and are trained using bombs created by the Academy. However, at various points you will either train with IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), or will physically be in a different location diffusing a new type of bomb. As such, we can't have the bombs looking so fancy all the time.

So work began on implementing art assets/styles to mimic an IED. (As a side note, research into IED's even on Google leads to some disturbing images, I advise not looking.)

What my research told me is that mobile phones are often used as remote detonation devices, and simply battery packs are used to power them.

I thought this would somehow heighten the level of intensity when diffusing the bomb. The idea of seeing a doppelganger of a real live IED. While already when the timer nears zero, the flashing lights increase their frequency and a horrible alarm begins, as well as a flashing red over the whole screen - we thought perhaps the scariest thing you could see, is that with seconds to go to diffuse the bomb, the phone would light up, with the words, "Incoming Call: Unknown". Written across it. The idea of someone ready to blow you up sounded terrifying. And then, just to be cheeky, we added in that your real life phone actually vibrates as the phone in the game vibrates.

I got a little off-topic, but to be clear on where we are at now, we already have procedurally generated bombs, but the code needs reworked in various ways to make the game winnable. It also just needs general improvement. The work I'll be doing over the next week, is creating more puzzles and increasing the replay-ability and uniqueness of each bomb. Eventually I'll get around to power-ups, but they are not a complete priority right now, more for as the bombs grow actually difficult. I'll be improving the art and perhaps adding in a second bomb that looks completely different. Equally, we toyed with the ideas of rules which you have to remember after the immediate training sessions, e.g. [The bomb has a serial code] and the rule is that unless specified otherwise, you must always cut the wires in the order that the first letter appears in the serial code. So if your code was TYFUR1, you would cut the Yellow and then Red wires. But we're unsure as to whether each bomb should be explained from the beginning, or whether an element of memory and technical skill is required, so what do you think?

Lastly I just generally want to make several improvements and securities within the code. From the way I've built it, each part should function irrespective of whether adjacent parts do or not, so that the bombs are modular and can be in crazy orders. I just want to make sure I haven't missed anything, and that any combination can work with any other combination.

Let me know what you think of the game so far, if it sounds interesting to you or not, and any feedback or tips, either here or @DalriadaConnor

Wishing an amazing weekend to you all, looking forward to hearing from you again, but until then...

On Sunday (14th of August) I tweeted that I had this neat little idea in my head for a mobile game, and I was going to work on it for the day. At that point I thought nothing more of it. But by the Monday afternoon I already had a little working prototype.

The game lovingly titled "Don't Go Bang" is a simple game about diffusing different bombs over a series of levels. As always, the instructions start off simple and easy, and progressively get more difficult, forcing you to think and use what you know to complete the task at hand.

It begins with a flashing screen with the name of the game (don't worry, I'm going to add a little button that just says "Tap" so players don't wait for it to finish.)

And when you Tap the screen, the Start Menu appears.

Well actually it animates into place. The logo begins to fall away (it's all layered) and falls into the background and is dimmed a little so as not to be too noisy on the eye. A vignette appears around the edge to help capture the tension of the game, and your diffuser rank and requisition points are shown. Diffuser rank is just your experience counter based on how many bombs you've diffused and how well you did them (there are point modifiers + medals etc)

Then you have your requisition points, these are points you can spend on powerups, ranging from slowing down time, to help + tips. Options currently just resets your save data (for easiness from the developers point of testing) and exit pops up a menu to be sure you want to exit.) And when you click start, the screen fades to white, and this new menu appears.

Each level appears listed here, and you can scroll with your finger left and right to see more levels. Although only six are shown are here that is literally because I have six fully working levels so far (not bad for five and a half days.). If you click on a level, a new pop up scales into view.

It shows the level, some stats about it (currently not lots of info included), you best time you diffused the bomb in, the best medals you achieved, and a small piece of text that's relevant to the level. I went for a dark and cheeky humour for the game (which you'll see later) and it's how your told the story and instructions for bomb diffusal. When I say story as well, there is none, it's just a device used to explain why you're in a room with bombs.

And when you click play, you're presented with a bomb.

I tried to capture exactly what happens at the beginning of each level. The bomb has a cover over it, which is unscrewed automatically and the cover is slid off screen (you can see it almost off screen now, but don't worry it is fully off the bomb while you're playing.) You can see the instructions in the top left as well. Originally, this was just to stay there and be updated. But on maybe the third day, I decided to make it so that the instruction fades away after a few seconds, forcing you to pay attention at the beginning and remember it for the duration. As the bombs grow more difficult, you may be given more/additional instructions, but for now it's a single one.

The timer flashes and the noises are abuzz to add tension to the gameplay. When I talked earlier about the dark humour, I was thinking specifically of what happens when you fail. Let's suppose I cut the wrong wire, the bomb exploded and white fills the screen, when it fades away, you're presented with this.

The screen looks broken, your shouted at for breaking the one rule of the game (Don't Go Bang) and you have a little joke phrase poking fun at your failure on the right. Not going to lie, some of them get pretty dark. Here are some other examples.

The astute of you will notice the text's position is a little different in each picture, it's because it bobs closer and further away to the screen just to taunt you even more. I loved writing some of these, especially the darker ones (I've hid them for the sake of suspense.)

But let's assume you succeed - You'll get this:

(The screenshot below was actually taken using the camera icon you can see. I tried to catch the animation of the medals sliding into place.)

Here you get your passing mark (success at one medal) and then it displays your time when you diffused it. If you look really close you'll see the timer is still stopped in the background which I thought was a nice touch. The progress to your next diffuser rank is then shown and you're options to continue etc. From here on the top left you'll see that you can also take a screenshot and also share it with your connected friends etc. I'll put this on the fail screens as well but it's been a busy week so far.

And at that point that's it. You'll have nine levels, and then a really difficult bomb on the tenth. The background will change as you're placed to diffuse a live bomb instead so you'll be in a warzone potentially. When you complete that particularly difficult bomb you'll be given greater rewards/rank/powerups and then the process starts over again with a new ten levels.

Super simple, but so addicting so far. Every new prototype I've tried, people seem to love it, but what do you think? Please let me know here or @DalriadaConnor.

The future for Don't Go Bang? - Continue making more bombs now that I have a strong framework for everything else (level select etc), add in powerups, leaderboards, and then drum roll... daily challenges! Yeah now that I know how much fun I've been having making and playing this, I'm going to add a new mode - where you must train by playing the levels provided (I want there to be loads) and then you'll have daily + weekly + monthly events were you have extremely difficult bombs you have to diffuse. These will literally have timers up to five/ten mins and be super intense.

After a year of planning, hard work, and dedication, we finally managed to release our first game to Google Play, making it available for Android Devices at launch.

It's an incredible beautiful and unique game, as so many out there just follow the same principle. I honestly can't tell what I'm more proud of, the addicting gameplay, the gorgeous graphics, or the encapsulating soundtrack.

Every developer hits out with the same phrases when they're excited about their game, but really, just watch the trailer before you download the game, you'll see what I mean.

We update the game every week with any small fixes and massive content updates too!