Universal Swing King and the Temple of Bling

Hi TA my name is Greg and I run a small 2 man studio called Shedworks, from (you guessed it) my shed.

I wanted to share our upcoming game, Swing King and the Temple of Bling



We've been working on this for a few months now with a fellow developer we met at the London Indies pub night and now I finally feel like it's progressed enough to start showing people and getting outside opinions.

The core gameplay of the game revolves around swinging around poles to navigate through environments and solving puzzles in your hunt for treasure. We have a ton of mechanics all built into our level design, and we're adding more as we go. I'll be sharing more in the next few weeks up to release.

 

Thanks! Fingers crossed!

 

Oh wow! High praise, thank you very much. I'd be interested in seeing the game you're working on for sure, do you have any links?

 

I'm glad people are enjoying the name! We wanted a bit of a fun Indiana Jones-esque title. When we made ourselves laugh with the name we were happy to pick this one!

 

I thought I'd drop a small update about a few mechanics we are exploring at the moment. The most obvious are the mechanical clamping doors. Players will have to time their swings to get through these doors or, in some cases, bounce off them to open up new routes.

Another shown in the gifs below are the sticky spider webs. These allow players to choose when to eject themselves from a specific position, crucial for timing.

I'd love to hear what people think of these mechanics and how we might use them!

 

Yep, exactly. We wanted to keep it simple in terms of controlling the player, all of the mechanical explorations are done through level design.

It provides us with some interesting limitations to design around and it's been a really fun process to balance that, but it also means that it never gets more complex in terms of player input. I'll hopefully have more levels and mechanics to show in the next few weeks!

 

Another update and a new mechanic! We've now got moving poles in the game. These poles will transport you around the temples as you hunt for treasure.

This can get pretty interesting as it breaks one of our key movement limitations and adds a new dimension to traversal, but at the moment it does some weird stuff to the swing speed of the character that we'll have to fix up shortly. It can be quite tricky to make sure timing between different moving poles matches up with other timers in the game but it's just an issue of mathematics and trial and error really, nothing overly complex but it adds a nice dimension to the game.

 

Oh cool, it's a nice little game - I'm not very good though a little fast for me but could adapt nicely to a tablet.

The game we were initially inspired by was 'Clu Clu Land', our friend Zion had a prototype that had the player in control of both hands individually at first and we worked with him to iterate on the concept and develop it to where it is today. I think it's become it's own thing now and plays really, really differently to Clu Clu Land but the heritage is still there if you know.

We've gone through hundreds of art iterations in the last few months - I'll make sure to update with a post about that process if people are interested!

 

We got our first bit of press yesterday afternoon from PocketGamer, they were really complementary about the look of the game and it's really given us a lot of encouragement for this project. When games take so long to make, your enthusiasm can definitely take hits but when people on here or in the press give us the fantastic feedback we've gotten so far it really helps us to get a project like this over the line.

Take a look at the article here.

 

We’ve been playing with our sticky web mechanic and using it to navigate levels and puzzles in interesting ways. Some of these are more successful than others but getting the timing right can feel really satisfying! It really changes the pace of the game too, it slows things right down which can be a nice break from the normal movement patterns of the game.

 

Quick update on a new mechanic for Swing King - we now have these timed spikes which pretty much do what they say on the tin!



We’ve slowed down a little on updates as we’ve been implementing backend stuff like analytics lately for our upcoming alpha so we can start to figure out what levels work well and make adjustments based on the data we get. We're also just working on polishing up levels and mechanics for our first two 'Temples' and making sure we have those locked down before we add any new levels, mechanics or themes.

 

New update and a new mechanic! This mechanic is the one-way door system, it allows our monkey protagonist to travel through one direction but not another, very simple but it can cause all sorts of conundrums.

We’ve started to lock-in a few levels and are making strong progress in the early levels. We’re starting to add new temples and levels and we’ve got a load of back end stuff sorted so expect us to open for a beta shortly! Will keep you guys updated and hopefully get some gameplay feedback back from you soon.

 

New Swing King Temple update! We’ve locked in our first two temples for Swing King, the vibrant red Jungle Temple and the weeping, purple Sadness Temple - and today we are happy to introduce our new Temple, the underwater Coral Temple! Each Temple is comprised of 15 levels, and will explore a series of unique mechanics and testing puzzles to solve.

We're looking to get in some more new mechanics soon, but polishing things up and making sure we have all our boring back end stuff sorted means that those development updates become far less frequent.