Hello everyone! Let me show you a game I'm making with my friends! We started this on Global Game Jam 2018, quite a fun game evolved from the initial idea! Mars Power Industries is a Power Management Puzzle. It's colony management, but you only care about electricity and oil. We got a hidden story, we got sci fi tones, we got mmmmmm square-wavey retro synth music lifted straight from the hit 1957 film Blader-Runner. Check it out! Out Now! Congratulations on your first tiny colony! Taking the post of Plumber/Electrician must be tough there, we know how lonely it might get and you probably miss your family. Don't worry! We provide music. No silence in space. Studies shown employees exhibit terrific stress when surrounded by silence, it is to be avoided. The pleasant soothing sounds of a distant synth will calm you right away... and continue calming you through the years... Imagine a spaceship slowly moving through endless black pudding, with no one on board but you and the lights. And the lights are broken. The point is - please fix the lights! --- Mars Power Industries management Theme and the tone of the game straight out of Dune or old-school Starcraft. Same distant lonely space feeling. Ever watched the film Moon? You're just there to fix the power. Do the plumbing. Something evil happening? Don't mind that... GOAL: Power up houses on Mars! Just think, relax and enjoy the cosmic scenery! HOW: Build towers to send power. All houses powered - you win! Genre: Puzzle. Levels: 60! According to Wikipedia, that's three score. 60 also occurs several times in the Bible, for example as the age of Isaac when Jacob and Esau were born,[6] and the number of warriors escorting King Solomon.[7] Story: Subtle, no cutscenes, only environment storytelling! The big Mars Mystery awaits haha! Fun: Enjoyable! - iPhone X support - 3D Touch support - Haptic feedback! Just chill and explore what strange devices are up there on planet Mars! 1.Build towers to power houses! 2. Extend electricity! 3.Obstacles!(oh yes we got them, you know this classic one?) Story so far: This started out as a small game for Global Game Jam 2018.Was WAAAY different in the beginning.. The screens in the next post should tell you that... We took our time to develop this idea. There are 4 people involved here, we're making this game in our spare time. We're freelancers! This is our first collaboration and our first experience in Unity. Bad experience. But I have some years in the industry around my belt, but still I had to resign from my client to have the TIME needed to finish this game. I feel there's something special here! I hope you feel it too! So far we've been through 4 different designs already. I can tell you the game is definitely better than it was in January, but the team morale is really running low. We hope to release the game soon, it's almost done, and with everything that's been constantly changing, it's a relief to finally have the game in the state where we CANNOT change anything for the sake of our souls... How difficult might this project be? Read on and see for yourself! We got FEATURED on the App Store. Best game in the pre-order category! 7A Games Team: - Arek @rarykos (that's me) : Game Design, Art Direction, Sound Design, Programming - Lukasz @lukz_dev : Programming, additional Game Design - Piotr @evilentity : Programming, Tool Programmer, iOS know-it-all - Kuba : Pixel Artist, the person that brought you pixel colour #45cc46 and who could forget #3288ff Technologies: - Unity - Photoshop & Aseprite for pixel art - Animate (new Adobe Flash) for mockups, prototyping and art direction. - Adobe Audition for sound design. - HitFilm for videos, screenToGif for gifs. Release date: 15th August! Available for PRE-ORDER! Mars Power Industries Let me know what you think! I don't bite!
Thank you for that confidence! We're currently redesigning the towers and the interface, hopefully it's easier to read what each tower does! I'm not sure about the effects, I guess they do work, but they're not the quality that I'd like. Does anybody have any ideas? Let me show you a VERY VERY simple test puzzle (while gifs don't work currently, let's use gfycat) https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/EvenWarpedBushsqueaker
BetaWatch – A Quick Look at a Few Up and Coming Games Still in Beta They look like they work. I don't mind them, but I don't really know much about development just what I like playing!
cute music and brain teasing just sound great! if more strategic mechanic, even better! keep eyes on it
I'd like to betatest this one. Send me a PM when you are ready so i can give you my TestFlight details. Thanks!.
Okay, tests are ready to begin! I'll PM whoever's interested! Let me know if you'd like to test the game! And the preorder is on! HERE And we have a video! Any feedback how to improve the store page, the video or the game would be GREATLY appreciated!
Okay, lots of changes seems like, thank you for the feedback! I'll work on clarity and puzzle variation, I have a few ideas already how to add some spice to the game! Hmm I have to change the release date to 15th August to be sure all of this can be completed and tested in due time. I'll be back in a short while with a new version
Okay, didn't expect that! I actually don't believe this! Yay, Mars got featured! And right below is OLDTV! Haha, another game from @applicattura here (of Agent Wonky and Tap Knight fame) What a crazy world we live in! I'm still implementing the feedback I got from the lovely beta testers here! Thank you! I'm half way there. Mostly dealing with bugs and compatibility issues, but now I'm expanding the mechanics a bit, expect more content! Progress was quite slow, my time was consumed on WORKidle, over there we've been preparing WORKidle to go into official beta tests and more issues came up than expected... But there will be a new version of Mars to test in a week! Probably the last one before release, I don't want to spoil all the surprises before the release! PM me if you'd like to test!
Update! Final stretch! August 15th is in sight. Localizing the game takes a while, it turns out. A few more bugs, a few more design problems to fix. We're almost finished with the story, and I'm super happy I didn't spoil anything, I don't know how I held back, but I did! Last week before release. Time to put in the last levels, last touches. And then we just wait. We'll be making a proper trailer, teasing the story, for the release, seems like that's the least we can do. There's not much else we CAN do, we don't have the budget for anything else. We're just doing this in our free time and really once we're finished, it will be a success JUST to have the game done. And to think it was featured as a good pre-order. Wow. I'm staying up late, doing the finishing touches, there's not enough hours in the day to do everything, but for the release that we've planned and everyone is waiting - I gotta do it. Enjoy a quiet day on Mars! We have a 1000 preorders. I hope those people will like it. They're putting their money on the line, that's some pressure. We're doing the best we can to provide some entertainment. I hope that's enough. This pressure means that we need holidays after the development. I'm still here in the trenches, but the rest of the team had to leave for rest already, before the release. The stress of working full time jobs and ADDITIONAL free time game making is really tough. In the sad news, our programmer Lukasz got suddenly sick and was transported to the hospital. Appendix problems. It was yesterday, on the day he was supposed to leave on vacation. The cost of this unfortunate event is higher than our game has earned. Which really puts the game's success in perspective. So that's sad news Tuesday.
Yep! Although now we're bug hunting for last minute fixes! So far nobody noticed anything wrong! The release on 15th feels like it will go well! But I keep changing/adding levels all the time to have the best 60 of them! We've added a new object on Mars! Strawberry licorice crystals! They're bad news for the colonists... So now that we're getting close to the end, let's examine the road! First we had some fun building the Global Game Jam idea in January... It was bad. But after a few days We thought it could be expanded upon. We used Asana for project management and I think you can clearly see when we had our testing sessions... The game was built and rebuilt so many times, but 3 moments stand out: Initial joke idea finished (February to 1st April) - we're making this game to learn Unity, just something to showcase experience in our resumes. We won't publish this game. But it's good to finish a jam game. Day[9]'s 30 Day Challenge failed (1st April to 1st May) - hey people say this is kinda fun, we can polish this, change the mechanic, upgrade the visuals and maybe publish this! This will take a month guys. Really. I'm sure... "Real" Game (1st May to June 24th) - Okay so we couldn't do this in 30 days.... So many issues came up. But we have our jobs, we can continue doing this slowly, polishing the game, give it the time it deserves. People had fun! Let them have more! Polish (June 24th - present) - August 1st, I'm sure we'll have it done guys! Let's just quickly do this beta test thing. And I'm sure nothing will come up. We've sorted all the bugs, right? And the design is solid, right? Narrator: They were not. This brings us to the final week! We need to sort out our press kit, add the remaining levels, update the app store. We've localized the game to 12 languages so everyone can play in their own native language (yay). Final build in a week. Let's finish this! August 15th here we come!! Thank you for your time!
Okay, final version is up! We're just waiting for the release on 15th! I'm sending the finished final version to the testers as a thank you. And I'd like to officially thank everyone here for posting and reading the thread. It's been a fun journey, quite hard too. We've made so many changes, we could easily make another game with the wasted code and graphic assets haha. With the feedback we got the game has changed a lot and for the better! It's a lot more fun than I initially designed it to be. And it's localized to 12 languages just so everyone can have the same fun! Well, thank you! That's the last update before release. I'll share a couple promo codes in the other section soon! Here's the trailer Plus, the game got a spanking new logo!
And it's out! We're done Thank you everyone for reading and for this journey! We've made a fun little game, not sure it qualified for the hype, but it's done! Out Now!
