0.9.4.8o (10/11/2015) :
– multi-touch enabled for the totems
– cancel yellow shots after xx frames (to prevent immediate cancel on quick shots)
– adjusted colors for yellow/orange/green dragon shoots (some players had trouble with previous colors)
– pixelation FX on big dragon only
– debug & fixes on big dragon
– ground work to better handle shaders availability on desktop and devices
– cameleon tweaks (appears only when close to target meteor)
– arcade mode tests (not public… yet)

0.9.4.8k (11/09/2015) :
– app size optimization

0.9.4.8i (01/09/2015) :
– replaced white shots and meteors by black shots and meteors (because color theory)
– game is available on Google Play Store!

0.9.4.8f (13/08/2015) :
– added spaces for readability in the score presented in the game over screen
– added space between totems, and made them slightly bigger
– changed cooldown value between 2 shots
– no more cancel when changing totem : any totem touched will shoot
– translated text to signal updates + added direct link to download page
– disabled google play services (not used at the moment)

0.9.4.8e (10/08/2015):
– changed shooters color so that the yellow one seems less green (following players’ feedback)
– added retry button in pause menu
– fiddled with various music bugs (hopefully solved)
– fiddled with exit menu bugs (corrected)
– worldwide score button is now always present in score page

0.9.4.8.a (02/08/2015) :
– linux version 1st export
– end game score screen : inverted retry/menu position + changed objects creation method

0.9.4.7.y (25/07/2015) :
– this changelog is a disater ^^
– pre alpha release candidate

(missing part… here you would have a lot of boring details about fixing small stuff, trying to implement facebook login… could also tell some things about trying to implement a stem based music system — it’s in there, in the main menu for now… this didn’t pan out because of some GMS bug, but hopefully it will be corrected at some point. This is also where I spent a lot of time with the musician trying to get the tune to the points it’s at now.)

0.9.4.7.f (22/03/2015) :
– room width has been expanded to 2304×1024, and game window is resizable and kinda “responsive”
– many assets have been modified to account for this resolution change, and many are waiting to be modified
– that’s a gamebreaking change, mainly for the big boss
– also tried the game at 60 fps. gameplay is ok, but animation are fps dependant and are playing at twice their normal speed
– there’s a new totem/shooter, circle shaped, allowing for more efficient controls
– score has been revamped, a lot of work remains, to integrate it better

0.9.4.6.q (31/01/2015) :
– integrated mini boss hit anim
– corrected multi part meteors code for 1st column
– level 1 can be fully played and beat

0.9.4.6.l/p (30/01/2015) :
– changed the flames behind the meteors to reflect the meteor color, visualy much better
– removed sparks that were supposed to indicate “atmosphere penetration”
– oh, and btw, changed the friggin totems to a circle shape. Now any color can be pulled with ease.
– (vs before, orange was a bit tricky)
– added effects and a “evil mask” to indicate meteor is in the danger zone

0.9.4.6.d/k (15/01/2015) :
– long time without adding to the changelog, mostly because I’ve been struggling with the mini boss at the end of level 1
– in short : difference between what we imagined the gameplay would be, and implementing an actuel fun gameplay
– plus I’m still a noob coder…
– anyway, mini boss begins to be fun to play
– on other battlefields, we have begun working on the sound design part with N.Koskas.
– he is sending super nice stuff, lots of stuff, and I’m adding that. Definitely gives flavour to the game.
– tweaking the points visual feedback, now stays in place (instead of moving up)
– todolist is very big 🙁
– 🙂

0.9.4.6.b/c (21/11/2014) :
– worked on tutorial, added colors and sprites, rewrote text to increase ease of read/comprehension.
– added new boss flame

0.9.4.6.a (18/11/2014) :
– added buttons to the pause screen for demonstration purpose (“easy” mode, reset game)
– changed text for “Save Score” (the whole save score routine has to be redone)
– tweaked color combo bonus explosion & text
– added boss state hit by center
– added blinking animation script for boss hit
– modified dragon hit / smoke animation

0.9.4.5.z (17/11/2014) :
– Windows 8 Native export problem solved (removing comments in shaders to allow compile / execution for this target)

0.9.4.5.w, x (16/11/2014) :
– test versions for Windows 8 Native export

0.9.4.5.v : (12/11/2014 – 15/11/2014) :
– added more time to combine colors (allows more time to play orange)
– selecting a color on a totem deselects all colors on other totems (no more multiple totems shooting simultaneously)
– added switch to remove totem selection sound (turned off for the time being)
– sun light more visible on title screen
– added fade to/from black persistent object, “nice” transitions on entering/exiting rooms
+
– more alpha on red halo / red mushroom title screen
– new explosion for color combo
– color combo code reviewed
– splash animation modified (bigger, faster)
– big boss : added wings animation, wings sound sync, smoke on burned states, movement code
– reward text code modifications (shorter life span…)
– bonus icons bug corrected (was displaying when count = 0)
– added invincible switch and 3 colors only switch for testing purposes (in ctrl_first vars)
– testing “quick” zone

0.9.4.5.u : ? (version de test pour title screen)

0.9.4.5.t : (8/11/2014) :
– added animations and flair to the title screen
– new language selection icon
– new sound selection icon
– redid how the surface is drawn ingame
– game is now fullscreen mandatory on windows (might be the cause of new problems down the line, we’ll see about that later)
– new sounds and animation for the chicken
– redid the end game score screen, cleaner but still has to be completely redone
– serious work on level one bosses begins
– added new music for end game score screen

0.9.4.5.s : (2/11/2014) :
– corrected the collision masks on shoots and meteors (was broken after redoing the objects)

0.9.4.5.r : (1/11/2014) :
– implemented full screen desaturation on hit
– minor change to scores screen (button alignment)

0.9.4.5.q : (31/10/2014) :
– integrated new background design
– debugged annoying crash when playing two games in a row
– the whole enemies destroyed chain counting code has to be redone, though (it’s a mess)
– added progressive desaturation effect to enemies on hit (should be full screen, so shader + surface, but I don’t know how, I’ll
have to ask on the fofo.

0.9.4.5.p : (24/10/2014) :
– integrated new shooter code
– testing black and white shader on meteors when hit

0.9.4.5.o : (23/10/2014) :
– begun adding nice endgame screen

0.9.4.5.n : (08/10/2014) :
– added texts (en/fr) on tutorial
– corrected a bug, probably related to last GM update (a ds list was reported as and breaking the game)
– minor correction on scores pages (allowing displaying longer names on local board)

0.9.4.5.k : (23/06/2014) :
– better enemy random rotation
– smaller enemy kill points font
– “double shots” bug adressed
– slightly better clouds generation
– new boss in the works

0.9.4.5.f : (10/05/2014) : added color combos, unused bonus when boss appear give points, dragonleon changes color of enemy only when attached to ennemy, still trying to find why some shoots don’t disappear after hiting an enemy.

0.9.4.5.c : (27/4/2014) : work has been done on : the title screen (new texts, new assets for language selection and sound option), the scoring system (“danger” zone aka low kill = more points), the online and local highscore (now records full name), boss phase (now correctly stays in “dying” state). A first version of the tutorial has been added, still rough but a first step.

0.9.4.5 : (6/4/2014) : new ennemy pattern and speeds, online highscores added.

0.9.4.4b : (23/3/2014) : added local highscore. yeah.

0.9.4.4a : (22/3/2014) : added “magic touch”, meaning player has now more latitude when sliding outside of the yellow and red totems (top and bottom), shoot intent is detected, hopefuly putting away a small frustration possibility.

0.9.4.3e : (21/3/2014) : bubbles have been tweaked and now appear at mid-game, and then more frequently in the last third of the round. The ennemy color changing Dragonleon is now spawning in the second half of the game, and he’s a real annoyance, but in a good sense, I guess… “Fractures” in the sky have been added to complete the darkening of the screen when you get hit. Perf issues are still a problem on GM 1.3, so I still work and export on 1.2, but some stuff is fucked with the aspect ratio because of that back and forth between versions… not too worried about that for now. Meeting a new musician today, perhaps we’ll have more tunes soon. Over and out.

0.9.4.1 : (15/3/2014) : huge performance problems on android export with GM:S 1.3. 7 fps is not an option… but 1.3 makes dealing with aspect ratio a breeze… hopefully, this performance problem is only temporary. Meanwhile, staying with old faithful 1.2. On other news, we have protective bubbles appearing hover ennemies, two taps to destroy. Another great sprite… We also have sick sprites for the main menu “play” button. Also, music now changes when a tune is over, instead of adlib repeating. Guess I’ll have to keep it from randomly selecting the same song that was playing before… Track and artist names are displayed, as a wip for the next musical step, the elusive qlrz radio that will allow going to another tune if you don’t like the current one. Now, for stuff that needs to be done : scoreboard (local & online), ennemy generation routine has to be refactored (overlaping ennemies are back… arg), ennemy depth too. Sound fx feedbacks should begin to be worked in. Slowdown bonus, perhaps. New pertubator, the dragoleon, aka the camelegon, should appear sorta randomly and change a few ennemies colors. Bonus points : finding a way to make the score and difficulty a product of some kind of skill curve… erf, so much to do…

0.9.3: (10/3/2014) : refactored a good chunk of ennemy logic, instead of 1 parent object + 1 ennemy object for each color, trying to cram it all into a single ennemy object that accepts parameter. Works all right but is far from complete and messed up the “don’t spawn here if there’s already an ennemy closeby” rule, as well as the rythms of the waves. I want to refactor this aspect too, though, so the game is broken until I can fix all that.
0.9.2 : (06/04/2014) : testing added difficulty by adding protective bubble around ennemies.

0.9.1 : (04/04/2014) : “nocturne” build for mark a*****.

0.9.0 : (03/03/2014) : anims lourdes enlevées et remplacées par animations scale (écume + algues au premier plan), ajout de sprites jaune/bleu/rouge permanents sur les totems pour bien signaler les couleurs (alphas animation à ajuster), taille des météores changée (+gros, du coup pas de changement sur sparks), ajout animation sur le bouclier.
0.8.9 : (01/03/2014) : massive optimisations by reducing some sprites sizes, and their frames numbers where possible. There is room for more optimisation, but it’s clearly the best optimisation route for the time being. Not surprising, since the code is very simple and straight forward… Also revamped the localization system, with ini files for each language. I was doing it wrong with strings being scattered through the code, and sometimes duplicated. Now everything (ahem… almost) is nicely tucked in one file by language.

0.8.8 : (28/02/2014) new sprites for shoots, bonus icons, removed rolling bonus system… this is moving very little… many bugz to be squashed. Morale is up, but time to work on the game is not really available in large quantities, and I’m paying technical debt a lot… anyway, some kind of website is almost ready to be open to the public, now if only we could get to a publicly showable demo, we could begin to send this in the internetz and see if we manage to get some response…

0.8.3 : (30/01/2014) added bonus chicken animation and direction of flight, feathers generator for the fun (it’s looking pretty bad for the moment), new sprites for shots (with lame colors…), new ennemy generation patterns, with speed adjustments ongoing and making the game pretty un-game-y. New sprites for the bottom “atmospheric entrance” fx under the ennemies. On a more gamedev pov, as I have currently less time and motivation to keep on working on the game, and as the ennemy generation and speed is very hard to pinpoint, making the game difficult and not very enjoyable to play, let’s say morale is pretty low. Knowing in advance this was going to happen (from meeting other devs or reading their toughts online) is kinda useful to cope with it all. It’s part of the process and I know I just have to keep pushing. Note to myself : study ennemy generation patterns, for example in space invaders and other “classics”, try new things by temporarily removing current ennemy generation system, also looking into shmup’s ennemy generation patterns and the “get them all, get a reward, get some of them, get less reward, they fly past you if you miss them and are only dangerous while onscreen)…. many things to ponder still 🙂

0.8.1 : (24/01/2014) time flies… new mechanics are tried, new sprites replaces old ones… ennemy generation has to be redone to allow gameplay variations, and many polishing points are being noted along the way, awaiting for better days to get a fix. The bonus system is also currently under heavy evaluation, might lead to awesomeness or to despair. Gamedev is hell and paradise at the same time, sometimes…

0.7.4 : (13/1/2014) I tought it wouldn’t work. I also tought it would be long to implement. Well, it took less than 15 minutes to implement, and it works quite all right, go figure… So, player doesn’t have to “move away” unwanted colors anymore, because selected colors vanish after 0.5 seconds. This is great, because it was a recurrent problem people were having with the base mechanism of the game, and I really couldn’t figure this one out, probably because the initial proto relied on yet another mechanism (shoot was automatic, so in fact moving selection around WAS the initial gameplay). Turns out (and I see a pattern there, a habit I have) my idea of the difficulty of something, the possibility of something, is sometimes quite out of touch with reality. I tend to say “this will be difficult” at the wrong moment, and possibly “this will be easy” is a foe to me just the same.

0.7.3 : (12/1/2014) small speed adjustments that makes the game far easier. Various depths corrections (texts appearing over other elements and such). New selection art, stars, the idea is to make it very clear what’s selected at any moment. As there were glitches, I decided to redo the whole selection scheme, and the new systems seems to work far better. I also have an idea to slightly modify the shapes of the underlying (and invisible) “push” zones, adding some margin of error that should prevent some frustration when the user moves left of the left totem or right of the right totem (right now, if you end your push too far out of the totem, your intent is not registered and no shooting happens). (But after some playtest, I think the new control scheme works really better and I don’t feel the “frustration” of missing a shot anymore… so maybe no other improvement is needed.)
On other news, new icons with the new title, and the title has been changed in the metas of the game.
There is some kind of bug when on the pause screen, the sound options seem to appear twice on android, and I can’t find why right now. Probably some issue with the surface creation, I will have to investigate that.
When hit, enemy speed is not reduced to initial speed anymore, it’s now going to initial speed + speed_up*0.75. Will probably be adjusted further in the future.
Keyboard controls have been suppressed for now. Will they come back ? Who knows ? 🙂
Another android glitch is that upon entering the main game room, all moving objects are very slow, there’s some “ralentissement”, and this will have to be fixed because it looks very unprofessionnal. Two ideas to fix that : delay the beginning of the game, perhaps by printing the current song’s name, might allow to “cover” the issue. Other idea is kind of “preloading” the offending objects in some way. Anyway, I feel I gave the game enough for a sunday 😉 It’s 3pm and I’m hungryyyyy !

0.7.2 : new name (qlrz), new enemies have different shapes to help differenciation, the boss is slowly appearing in the background, this will give a hint of the game time before boss final appearance. it’s january 8th 2014, we have decided to try and finish a complete level, polish everything as much as possible, and then make an early release of this. This will be dubbed “the demo”, we will give it away for free, and use this to evaluate the interest players may have for the game. So this will also serve as a test of our ability to market this, gather contacts etc.

0.7.0 : first bonus (temp shield) has been added, with temp art. Options menu has been added, allowing for sound/music on/off settings. Best score is also kept in the save file. Totems art has been redone, they are now bigger and thus easier to use in a small screen context (previous version was borderline impossible to play on my small 480×800 phone). Bigger news : jmdeebeat has delivered 17 (!) tunes and snippets, none really finished yet, but every tune is really amazing, so it’s really a great gift he is making to the project. We should have a session together at his studio sometime next week to select some musics and evaluate the kind of polish they need.
LP is on a paid gig for most of december, and my official job is keeping me busy, so not much time to advance the game. This might be the last version for quite some time, so here goes what I want to get done soonish : add at least another bonus that slows enemy speed by 0.x, modify shield bonus so that it’s infinite but only shields from one enemy, or maybe that’s a different bonus… bonuses should state their effect by text when clicked. At least one malus should be added, probably a row of supplementary enemies to begin with… What else… resolution issues should be adressed, I want the screen to resize correctly on phones and in browser. This includes solving the issues with texts that are cropped when they are defined with an arbitrary fixed length (think “500px”). Other things to add include but are not limited to : working towards a system capable of storing best scores online, and a tutorial, or at least some explanation screens before going through the trouble of making a full fledged tutorial.
Aaaaand… that’s all for now !

0.6.0 : gameplay overhaul, difficulty tuning prototype in place, the longer your chain the higher the challenge. needs better reversal, or bonus items to counter the vast speeds one can rapidely achieve. Better balancing of the colors proposed might be an avenue for later fine tuning. Various animations changed and added, nice boom feeling on meteors explosions, a little screenshake may be in order^^

0.5.9 : many news, but most important obviously is I ponied up the dow to buy GM:Studio Master. $500 out of my pocket, let’s say it’s my own little christmas…

0.4.8 : superbe cadeau de ****, 4 morceaux à utiliser librement ingame… implémenté *********** qui colle tellement bien. Ca remotive, pour sur. A part ça, ajout d’un écran pour les crédits.

0.4.6 : ajout d’un embryon de système pour afficher des textes, génération de textes au lieu de sprites pour gérer une partie du feedback / récompenses (points, messages d’encouragement…)

0.4.5 : new assets, still thinking too much and programming too little…

0.4.2 added simple pause on pressing P ingame, as well as a few others keys like Esc to go back to main menu or exit game when on start screen. Also added a screen shake on meteors hitting the totems. Big question now is : how to achieve an interesting gameplay, because although everything is pretty and functionnal, there is no f***ing game, and it’s almost as if the very first prototype was more of a satisfying experience.

0.4.1 so… last update was not working ok, changing the totems color to the currently selected color was distracting to some testers, so I simplified everything again. Now the next shoot color is indicated at the top of the totems (graphics will come later, when mister P. will have recovered from an injured wrist). I also made the rocks rotate, and this update is significantly more difficult, as I decreased the number of rocks by line (just one vs. 3 before), while at the same time speeding the whole falling down speed. Speed and frequency of the rocks should also increase over time.

0.4.0 becoming a habit… ok, new graphics and resolution is in, as well as new enemies, and the shooting mechanic seems to be mostly working.

0.3.5 long time without writing here, mostly implementing new graphics, new resolution, new shooting mechanics

0.2.6
-sound compression -various tweaks to difficulty/speed/tick

0.2.5 :
mouse control is click driven new record 8160 pts.

0.2.4 :
old controls backup

0.2.3 :
– difficulty tweaking (frequency/tick/enemy repartition)
– scoring system update
– best score to date w/ this settings : 4280pts

0.2.2 :
– music bugfix

0.2.1 :
– added tutorial
– temporary art and menus
– various “engine” enhancements

0.2.1
Initial prototyping.