Developing a game from a dream

Hi!, My name is Davit Masia, and i'm the developer behind Kronbits . Started as a pixel-artist more than ten years ago. Now, after discover Construct 2 i've been developing my own games.

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A month ago i had a dream about playing a game, so when i wake up i made the design i remembered on my notebook and started to develop and tweet each step/progress.

All started with this tweet:

(NOTE: I started others thread/tweets to avoid large loadings. Part2 and Part3 )

There are more than 80 Tweets talking about the game with photos, gifs, videos and all problems/ideas i had until now and i still do. On twitter click on "Show more" to read all the next tweet about the process. Here i'm going to post only the relevant ones for this article.

This is the first design on paper i did:

Explaining how was the game in my dream:

And this is the first thing playable i posted to give a better idea of the game:

The numbers you see in the left corner is the distance between the mouse and the center of the square that is used to apply more or less force to the shot.

From here i started to develop the game without any final design, gameplay elements or other guide. Simply adding more and more features to get if not the same, the most close gameplay i had on my dream which is the next one:

That was on my dream!. A black starfield, some retro feeling and me shooting a square/cube to collect items/coins and some particles and effects around it.

But as i mentioned in various tweets in the process, one of my fears comes true. In my dream when i was shooting the cube to get items/coins were done with a great precision that was imposible to achieve in the real world. How to fix that? Adding Bullet-Time!

Cool right? From here, adding the Bullet-Time feature i started to add all kind of stuff that not was on my dream to get better and better, as i said without any game design document, simply for fun.

Like for example adding some scroll, changing the zoom, planets with his own gravity,etc...

You can see some sprites like the center of the screen and the camera to understand how works the scroll and the game scale layout.

Als i tried to add different shaders and filters like the new starfield, some glow/bloom and effects...

The background was too distracting for the gameplay and the glow/blooms effects not helped but gives you a reference of things that can fit and which ones destroy the gameplay.

So i took another way for the visuals more simple/clean with a starfield more neutral and less distracting.

Better eh? Now all is more readable and less saturated.

So i started to play with this visual until i get something cool, always keeping in mind no distract too much the user from the important, the gameplay. Here you can see the progression:

And here you can see a video from youtube with last gameplay/visuals. Is a playlist with more than 20 videos from the first thing playable until the last version showing all the ideas i've been testing.

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The game has been released!, (Win/Mac/Linux) Enjoy!

https://kronbits.itch.io/cube-rampage

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Related Links:

My games: https://kronbits.itch.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavitMasia
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Kronbits
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/davitmasia

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