Greetings!

This is the second devlog for our work on our game Brainroll. We have successfully delivered our first early access sprint and are now ready to continue work on our second sprint.

In order to update Brainroll, all you need to do is unzip the archive and replace the contents of your old Brainroll folder with the new one. Make sure you backup custom levels that you've created and then transfer them over to the custom_levels directory.

Version 0.4.3

For the previous sprint, we wanted to direct more focus on the level design, fixing bugs and laying some groundwork before future sprints. Midway through the sprint, we got some really valuable feedback which we are very grateful for, and this kind of steered the development of Brainroll into a different direction or perhaps turned some aspects into more well-organized work than before.

Some of the feedback we received is as follows:

• There is no user-friendly way to play custom levels
• No instructions for the in-game editor
• As of now the difficulty level is good, several users have reported some levels being hard and not being able to complete everything in one go
• Lack of variety in levels. (Mechanics and also map shapes)
• Hard to keep track of what level you are on
• Inconsistent UI, lack of mouse scroll support, keyboard navigation, etc
• Aesthetic variety in levels. (Make use of the black background or repetitive tiles)

In addition to everything mentioned in the Sprint 1 list of things to work on I managed to squeeze in fixes for playing custom levels and a way for the user to keep track of their current level in the release. Custom levels are saved within the custom_levels folder and are now accessible in-game through the play menu in a new tab. When paused in a level, the name of the level will now be displayed in the pause menu.

Also as an attempt to include more variety in the levels instead of introducing a new mechanic every 25 levels we’ve lowered the count to every 15 levels. This means that there are a total of 3 new mechanics included in this update.

The mechanics that we’ve included are Coins, Teleporters, and Spikes. For the spikes, we’ve only introduced 5 learner levels but in the next batch, you can expect that mechanic to appear more frequently. In addition to the new mechanics, I’ve also experimented a lot with different shapes for the maps, it's a really interesting concept that I intend to play around more with.

I am interested in hearing some feedback regarding this change, please get in touch with your thoughts and feedback regarding how the organization of levels works now. Also if you stumble on a level that feels out of place or is too hard/easy then please let us know.

As for the other feedback points, the level editor is a big part of the game right now, it’s a tool that I use myself every time I’m making a new brainroll level and I agree it can be very confusing and not feel 100% complete. I plan on reworking its UI a bit and also adding a help menu that displays controls and instructions on how to use it. But this is right now not a priority.

Full Changelog

All notable changes to this project for this release.

Added

• Internal tool for testing sprites and animations
• 25 new levels, including the mechanics: Coin, Teleporters & Spikes.
• A way to play your custom levels. Now in the play menu there is a new custom tab where your custom levels can be played from.
• Added a text string displaying the current level name on pause.

Fixed

• Bug where game crashes if you go out of bounds. This was turned into a new mechanic where you die if you go out of bounds which counts as a fail condition.
• Level ordering based on difficulty.
• Bug where top left tile in the level editor was cleared when placing a player spawn or goal.

Additional thoughts

I am really satisfied with the direction of where Brainroll is heading. We in the team are learning more about game development and game design every day and are very motivated and focused on our work. I also want to take the time and thank everyone who has been a part of the Brainroll early access so far, you have all given valuable feedback and your support means the world!

I have also got the chance to learn about a lot more improvement areas for our in-house game engine and am looking forward to future patches for it as well. The future is looking very bright!

Also just for fun,  I found some old screenshots of Brainroll in early development and thought I'd share them with this post.

Sprint 2

For the next sprint, I want to get the “core game loop” in place. With this, I mean the progression system for the game. I am thinking of a pretty simple system based on stars. You get 1-3 stars depending on your performance in a level. Your performance is in the number of moves it takes you to complete the level where less number of moves is better. 1 star will be awarded for just completing the level and 3 stars mean that you found the optimal solution to the level and 2 stars is somewhere in between.

So for the next sprint here are the tasks that will be focused on:

• Level serialization rework
• Adding level analyzer tool (To programmatically determine metadata about a level.)
• Add progression & score system based on the number of moves made in a level
• 25 additional levels & potential overhaul on some levels
• Credits
• Continue work on the story
• Work on graphics updates

Social Media

We are happy to hear from you, get in touch!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nullssondev

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQiugYROtgcVZa4Y3PScojg

Discord: https://discord.gg/cZc6G4Ffm9