The challenge has ended! Between the last posting and this one I've made a good bunch of touchups, and alterations. One of those is the inclusion of a special "power up" block that eliminates all blocks of the color it unpickles on. All of these details are nice, but wouldn't you rather be playing it than reading about it? Pickle on!

I've begun doing most of the touch-ups to the game and implementing some of the required stuff in order to be able to call it complete. First off, I cleaned up the orange and green blocks to look more distinct. Green has been lightened up a bit to simply look more vibrant, while I changed the orange block to a gold colored block. The rest of the block colors are quite distinct and should be fine as they are.

In terms of stitching up loose ends I have created the obligatory "Game Over" indicator. This is simply a flashing little message displayed over the playgrid when you either die or back out to the menu via pressing escape. There is also a nice little screen notifying you when you beat the high score.

Lastly, I've added something I can't believe I didn't implement earlier: wall nudging. That is, upon the press of a key the wall will nudge itself one block's worth toward the right. This will allow more skilled players bypass any waiting that might need to be done during the earlier levels of the game.

I've added a bunch of good stuff to Pickle On! It now contains all of the stuff that one would expect for a puzzler game of this style: level advancing, new block color introduction, and score keeping. The current scheme of things is like so: each block is worth 10 points. Destroying more than one block at a time doubles the score gained. Every 20 blocks destroyed the level progresses (making the approaching wall of blocks move faster). Every 10 levels that are completed, a new block color is introduced (up to a total of six blocks colors). Pretty awesome!



I also went through and spiced up the title screen to have proper selection items. You can now toggle between "normal" and "large" sized playscreens - where large is double the size of normal. You can also turn the music on or off. As you can see from the main screen image, the highest score is also displayed to taunt you into trying to play in order to defeat it! The highlight bar for the current selected item pulsates, for a nice visual effect. Classic menu movement and selection sounds are also implemented.

All in all, the main core of the game is done. As it stands right now, it's essentially in a "turn in"-able state for then the challenge ends on the 24th. There is still a bunch of things I would like to do before I actually call this my final version for submission of the challenge. The main one that sticks out the most is finding some music that isn't annoying. Another is the fix up the block sprites so that they're more easily discernable from one another (for instance: red and orange are much too close in color).

If there is time, I may think about adding new animations to the blocks, or changing how they look altogether. This is something I will only attempt to do if I'm left with a bunch of free time this week--after fixing up all the current high priority stuff with the game, that is.

While I've been busy with classwork for the most part, I have been able to find some chunks of time to get a little bit of work done. As I have previously mentioned, I started up a project to submit for the currently running GDR challenge. The game now has an official title (so far): Pickle On! Originally I was going to call the game a simple: Pickle. While discussing this in the thread, someone replied "Pickle On!" I thought it sounded like the perfect name for a funky little game such as this.



I've made a good bit of progress in making things work a bit more smoothly. Now when the arrow is shot from the right side of the screen, the interaction when it hits the wall of incoming blocks is a lot more responsive. I threw in some animation as well as sound clips that are played when blocks destroy.



There is still a bunch of stuff that's still on the plate to be added. When blocks line up vertically, there is currently no animation. There is no scorekeeping whatsoever. A proper title screen and options screen still need to be implemented. I would like to beef up the spritework for the blocks, but this is going to take lowest precedence. If anything, some of the colors that look too similar need to be altered so it's easy to differenciate between all of them. As the player progresses, I also need to make the wall approach faster, and introduce different colored blocks along the way.

So, there is still a bunch of stuff I would love to add to this little game before the deadline. I'm not sure if I'll be able to implement all of it, however.