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Dev Blog #4 - The April Roadmap

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Hey everyone! Welcome to the first of many "roadmap" blog posts that outline our goals for the month. This series will give you an in-depth look at our current priorities and what we plan to have released for Super Plexis each month. Let's jump in: 

Battle

Endless mode and battle engine

  • Polish the implementation for the first animated battle background

  • Chain combos (this applies to all game modes)

  • Garbage blocks start to arrive after a certain level (garbage blocks apply to most game modes)

  • Animated match explosions and garbage block explosions

  • Health bar and damage systems

  • Board shake tests

  • Animated lift

  • Animated blocks

  • Beginning development of AI systems / local multiplayer

Andrew's Notes: "These are basic necessities for finishing the bare minimum battle engine and making Endless mode really feel like a real challenge. Remember that Endless mode also comes paired with an “Endless (CLASSIC)” mode which is almost identical to puzzle league style endless / marathon modes."

 

Design

Music and sound

  • Login screen music, title screen music, and battle music

  • UI and gameplay sound effects

Andrew's Notes: "I’m hopeful that the major build for April will include music, and if we’re lucky I could even have sound effects implemented."

 

User interface / experience

  • Animated title screen

  • Local storage of user preferences

  • Audio settings interface

  • Video settings interface

  • Controller / keyboard settings interface (not accessible if touch enabled)

  • Keyboard / mouse settings interface (not accessible if touch enabled)

  • Arcade games interface

  • Battle setup, countdown, health bars, and end-game interfaces

  • In-game notifications

Andrew's Notes: "Most of this won’t be animated, and once it’s all put together we can implement animations very soon after (like notification bounce or achievement glimmers / shines, etc). Please note that achievements and other unlockables will not be implemented in this build because they require online game servers."

 

Updated UI Designs

  • Game Mode Selection

  • Misc  

Gabe’s Notes: “As you may have seen in the preview build already, the menus will be quite different than the original iOS prototype. The new designs will allow us to build the same version of the game to all devices, and all elements will automatically scale / re-arrange themselves to fit. Expect to see more examples of this UI as we add new modes to the game (along with more “under development” placeholder buttons!)”

 

Background Art

  • Polish Title Screen background

  • Polish Loftwood Battle

  • Reformat Azure Background

Gabe’s Notes: “The new 16:9 format means all our old mobile backgrounds will need to be updated accordingly. Just like the Title Screen and Loftwood backgrounds (currently in the preview build), this means drawing in a much wider field of view with new details. And animation too!”

 

Converting / Updating Music and SFX

  • Title Screen

  • Loftwood Battle

Gabe’s Notes: “Now that the game is running on more than just mobile devices, its time to get the audio more stereo-ready for PC! The existing songs were written at wildly different times with different sounds/instruments over the past couple years and ill be doing a fresh pass on all of them to unite their styles (and maybe add some new stuff too!)”

 

New Block Details

  • Block art refresh / new frames

Gabe’s Notes: “We’ll be experimenting with different resolutions of blocks depending on the current screen size, but we’ve also been playing with a fresh new idea related to how “expressive” the blocks are in their different states of gameplay. Won’t say any more than that for now!”

 

Technical

Mouse / touch input 

  • Grab-and-drag single cursor rework to support touch and mouse input

  • Detect when the player switches from mouse to keyboard and back again

Andrew's Notes: "When players use the mouse the grab-and-drag cursor should activate, and then if the player goes back to using keyboard or controller than whichever cursor they were using for that will reactivate (single cursor or boomerang cursor)."

 

Local game server testing

  • Systems and architecture that allow players to enter and exit games smoothly

  • Support for multiple game modes (necessary before working on VS mode)

  • Client side prediction and server side correction

  • Beginnings of the game replay system

  • All handled over TCP / IP

Andrew's Notes: "This is my primary task for April. If I can deliver a successful build by the end of the month with local game servers, we will be extremely close to the first online multiplayer build. The local game server tests simulate what it would be like to play online with extremely low ping. Local game servers are also the backup in case no online game servers are accessible."

That's everything for April! We'll be checking in with smaller updates throughout the month, but to stay up to date with the latest progress join us over on discord: https://discord.gg/cJXzN4z