So, bad news time. Block'd has been delayed a bit longer than expected. We got the news yesterday that due to a single icon file (curse you Apple!) Block'd will need to be resubmitted for approval.
We have seen a wonderful amount of traffic surrounding the release of Block'd, so thank you for all of that support. We hope it will continue moving forward as we wait for official approval!
Thanks for the support.
I guess I should start off this post by saying that we planned on having block'd live on the App Store today. However, we may have miss-timed some things and so right now we are still waiting on approval from Apple which will hopefully come any day now. But in the mean time check out the official trailer for block'd here:
Again, we would like to apologize for our release date mix up, but we will let you know as soon as the game is live.
Thanks for all of your support
-Matt.
We’re super close to the release of block’d with only four more days standing in the way! (I’m getting pretty super excited). For today’s post in our 10 Days ’til Block’d series I’m going to talk a little bit about the music and sound effects in block’d. But first, make sure you catch up on yesterday’s post here if you haven’t already.
When we first started developing block’d we weren’t thinking about what kind of sound track we wanted to go with it or what kind of sound effects would fit the game. In fact, we weren’t really sure if we were going to have any kind of sounds in the game at all. As we were getting closer and closer to the finished product we asked ourselves if we thought it would be worth it to put in some sound effects and maybe a little sound track. I thought about this a little (and even wrote a blog post about game sound tracks and sound effects) and decided that a sound track could really help a game feel more professional. So with that decision made it was time to get to work.
The first thing I decided was that I didn’t just want one four minute song to repeat for as long as you played. I thought this would get rather annoying for most people that played the game longer than five minuets. So I started with a main menu song. I figured the song could be a little short and maybe a touch repetitive since most people aren’t going to spend a lot of time in the menu, but the next step was deciding what kind of music would fit the theme of the game best. Did I want something very slow and drawn out, or maybe something with a little bit of a beat, or maybe nothing but a beat. I eventually decided that the music should be relatively low key, but with a little beat to keep you going while you play though the levels. I wanted the music to be simple, with not too many instruments vying for attention.
I eventually got a good song for the main menu and started to apply my criteria to more songs for the actual game play. In the end I came up with three game play songs that will be on the game when it’s released. However, I do have some plans to keep working on a couple more songs to add to the game for a quick update but that’s a story for a different time. Now it’s time to talk a little bit about the sound effects.
Turns out sound effects were much, much, (so much) harder to come up with than the sound track. Because you only hear the sound for a second, and the sound effect has to blend in with the background music, it made my life a little challenging to come up with the right kind of noises. I spent a couple of weeks trying to find the right instrument at the right note at the right length of time for the sound effects. It was a battle between what sounded good and what sounded good with the background music. Because the background music is more electronic the sound effects would clash with it if they too had that electronic sound. At the same time they could get lost in the background music if they were’t strong enough to stand on their own. In the end I think I found the right sound and right pitch for the sound effects so that they would add to the background music and the overall play experience.
In the end I was happy with the way the sounds turned out on block’d and I hope you enjoy them too (if you don’t like them you can always turn them off in the options menu to the left of Group 1).
So thanks for sticking around through all of that, I know it was kinda long. Don’t forget, block’d comes out 7 / 7 / 14 so make sure to get it at the App Store when it comes out. Also make sure to check back here tomorrow for the next post in our 10 Days ’til Block’d series.
As always, thanks for reading
-Matt.
Today marks the sixth day until block’d is released and today’s post is part 2 of the level design process post. If you haven’t read part 1 yet make sure to go do that because this literally wont make any sense if you haven’t read that. Like seriously, even if you did read it yesterday (thank you again) you might want to go refresh yourself real quick. Okay. Remember where we left off? Alright, well with out further delay here is part 2 of the level design process post
In addition to this new way of creating levels, I also took into consideration the effects of having multiple start tiles touching each other. Say, for example, you have three start tiles in a reverse L shape and you touch the bottom left one. Theoretically they all start at the same time so does the bottom left one block the top right one and continue to move upwards, or does the top right one block the bottom left from moving up and continue to move to the left? These kinds of observations about how we had programmed the game added more and more difficulty to each level.
After having a few level builds under my belt it was time to add a new dimension to the game in the form of the tap counter. Some of the levels were almost impossible to loose, if you could tap all the tiles; so it was time to limit the number of taps. For the most part this wasn’t a difficult job as the level designer. However, there were some levels I thought would take eight moves, but only ended up taking six. And Austin found a way to cut the moves down on another level by about half. While adding the move limit did increase the difficulty (one of the beta testers was often frustrated by being one move over on more than a few levels) there was still one last feature of the game that could be exploited to add the final layer of difficulty.
Timing. For the purpose of this game timing is defined as touching a start tile before the previous start tile has finished expanding. Timing was the final step in making levels that couldn’t be beaten easily. With this new challenge some tiles would have to be tapped while others were still expanding to ensure that one tile’s path got to the corner, or to make sure that another tile’s path was blocked. The idea for timing in our game was really just a side effect of the way the game was programmed. The tiles expanded at a given rate and nothing stopped you from tapping another tile before the first one had stopped. I can’t remember the exact moment we discovered this, I think it was early on while we were still working on level zero, but I do remember thinking it was going to make the levels extremely challenging. Additionally it made the level design a little more challenging.
The main difficulty with designing timing levels was that I wouldn’t always get the timing right when I was drawing the levels on paper. At this point in the level design process I was still starting with one tile (or maybe a group of tiles) but I would then say “oh wait, what if a blue tile were to come in and block this path off” and then add a blue tile that would need to be tapped before the yellow tile’s path reached it. The level design process for these later levels is actually very similar to the previous design processes, just being conscious of the timing effect and using it to increase the difficulty. However, sometimes I wouldn’t quite get the timing right and I would end up with a level that wasn’t necessarily impossible, but was rather different from what I had originally intended.
With this last game mechanic exploited in the level design process I began creating the final, most difficult levels on larger, more difficult boards. The level design for block’d will continue to evolve as we introduce new groups with new tiles with new mechanics to keep the game fun and puzzling.
Anyway. . . block’d comes out July 7th for iOS devices. We’ve worked really hard on this and we hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do. Keep checking back here for our daily block’d count down and make sure to download block’d on July 7th from the App Store.
As always, thanks for reading
-Matt.
It’s only seven more days until the release of block’d and today I’m going to talk a little bit about the level design process. But first, if you haven’t already, make sure to catch up on yesterday’s post here. block’d was basically born through the process of coming up with levels and deciding whether or not it would make a good game. Some of the first levels (which didn’t actually make it into the final game) were crude sketches in the margins of class notes. The level design process, like all the other processes during development, evolved, creating new and different levels with different approaches for how to beat them.
Like I said before, the first levels were sketched out in the margin of my notes trying to decide if the basic concept for the game would be puzzling and enjoyable. I originally started out thinking that we would have a single grid size designed to match the dimensions of the iPhone screen so I started with the five by eight grid. The first levels were basically built one tile at a time, sketching its location and the path it would take upon expansion. Then a second tile would be placed, and a third tile (some in the path of others to achieve the chain reaction effect), until the tiles and all their inevitable paths would fill the board. With this technique, levels were built that gave us an idea of what the game could be, and from there we were off and running. However there were some flaws in this technique that needed patching.
Austin was playing one of the levels I had drawn out on paper. Not only did he beat the level quite easily, but he also did it in less moves than I had originally thought it was going to take (this is another point of evolution that we came to a little later on in the process). It was clear that the level design process was going to take a little more thought if the levels were going to be challenging. To do this, I started thinking about ways in which the paths could intersect such that if one tile was tapped first, its path would block off a portion of the board causing the player to loose the level. This created a linear way in which the player must make their moves in order to make sure no part of the board is blocked (incase you were wondering, this is where the name comes from. Credit to Austin for being clever. Up until then we were just calling it Tile Puzzle, which didn’t have the same kind of ring. Anyway). With this new way of thinking about things there turned out to be only one way to solve some of the levels. . .
So this actually turned out to be a much, much, much longer post then I had originally intended so I decided to break it up into a part 1 and part 2. I hope you enjoyed part 1 and make sure to check back tomorrow for part 2!
As always, thanks for reading
-Matt.
