We had a quick dev meeting tonight, Tony has got a rough version of the game running on both PC and iPhone. I say “rough” but it’s actually a pretty good representation of how the game is going to play, and impressive to see so early in development.
We have decided on a portrait screen mode instead of landscape, even though this is different to how the original PC version of Enigma was designed, we feel this will be more comfortable for one handed play, and a portion of the bottom of the screen will be used as a kind of track pad to control the bat. (We have a lot of control methods in mind to try out so more on this later).
Tony also managed to hook up some algorithmic level generation stuff I wrote years ago, it’s a miracle it worked really, but it has potential.
In the original game, ball movement was locked to 45 degree angles, we are going to experiment with allowing the ball to move in any angle, so if the bat is moving when the ball collides with it, the ball’s rebound direction will be affected. Fun stuff!
Some other ideas we discussed but still need to flesh out a bit – algorithmic background animations, algorithmic block sounds (to make them sound a bit musical), the nature of level progression.
Oh yeah, while I remember, we wanted to post a link to the two shareware games we worked on back in our student days [circa 1995] – Enigma and Fracas. Both of these are for DOS and you may have trouble running them these days on your fancy PC, but you are welcome to give them a try. They are now freeware so go get them.
Apologies for the lack of pictures posted so far, I’ll try to remedy this as soon as i can 🙂
Nick