Friday, June 6, 2014

Peak Condition Log 06: It's finished! (for now?)

Download Peak Condition for either PC or Mac.

I finished the game by the end of May as I'd planned, but "finished" is a relative term, apparently. More on that below.

 Here's the new stuff:
  • Settled on the title "Peak Condition". Thanks J. Walton!
  • Added sound effects. Thanks freesound.org!
  • Added a "lunge" maneuver. Hit space bar when both of your climbing picks are attached and you'll lunge upwards and forwards, which is great for getting up onto ledges. Careful though: lunging drains all your pick stamina.
  • Added 4 difficulty levels for mountain generation: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert. The difficulty for a mountain is determined by the random seed string length, so longer mountain names are more difficult.
  • Added a ring of trees around the mountain to fence the player in and add some scenery.
  • Added a very rough tutorial which is played when the mountain seed is set to "Mt. Tutor".
  • Added a new death animation.
  • Fixed the victory detection.
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes and tweaks.

Phew, that last weekend in May was pretty busy! I squandered an entire Saturday's worth of gorgeous Summer weather, but I'm really happy with how much I got done. I completed all but one of the tasks in my "MVP" list on Trello. I can finally call this one finished and move onto my next prototype!

That was the plan, anyway. When I showed the game to my design meetup group last Sunday, I got a lot of great feedback and encouragement to continue working on it. When I look at my Trello board, there are still several features I'm just dying to get into the game. I feel like this concept has still got a lot of unfulfilled potential, and I'm not quite ready to call it quits yet.

However, I am ready to take a break for a while. I'll probably play around with some other prototype ideas I've been eager to start on before coming back to Peak Condition. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the current build and where you think the game could go in the future.

1 comment:

  1. I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's very entertaining and although I know absolutely nothing about climbing mountains, suprisingly inclusive. Pretty fluid too. Sound effects were messing up and destroying my ears, so I muted it, but it's a very fun game to listen to music to while playing, which is at times hard to find.

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