This weekend I took part in the Iamagamer 48 hour game jam to produce a game with a strong female lead.  Given the time constraints I designed a fairly simple platform game where a girl is attempting to escape from a castle where she's been captured.

I chose to use the event as an opportunity to try out developing in MonoGame using Xamarin Studio.  I chose a Monogame OpenGL app and as I worked on creating the game I discovered that this target platform seems to lack a few features.  The biggest missing feature for OpenGL  apps is the ability to load compressed audio files.

The (nearly) finished game, called "Tash", can be downloaded using the link below:
https://googledrive.com/host/0B9PNQjKOeiybWU1sTGNvczZQVVk/Tash.zip

I did not finish the game but got to the point where the castle is fully explorable and most of the powerups work.  I did not have time to create some nice graphics so all the image files used are placeholders I created in about half an hour.  I also didn't manage to get any sound into the game, partially due to the problem with not being able to load compressed audio.  The biggest missing feature is the ability to win the game and escape from the castle.

I found programming in C# to be just as comfortable as I remember it.  Monogame is a nice game library although I'm dubious of the level of support it currently has for the Windows Desktop Platform.  As a library with the tagline "write once, play everywhere" they should get that fixed although I understand that the focus of the library is mobile game development.

Xamarin Studio as a development environment was eminently usable and didn't cause me many issues.  I had a problem with some dialog boxes opening behind the main window which meant I had to kill the task on one occasion, but my files were automatically recovered,  It's not quite as feature rich as Visual Studio or Eclipse but the most important things such as step by step debugging are there.

In conclusion, if I do another game jam I would like to try coding with my usual LibGDX library on Eclipse.  It would be nice to make a fairly direct comparison of how productive I can be.  I would expect to be much more productive with LibGDX as I've already discovered all the main gotchas and tricks for this type of game.  LibGDX also gives me the option to deploy to HTML5 and play on the web which is really useful for game jams, I don't know that Monogame has the option.

I've recently been thinking carefully about the single player campaign for Plasma Duel.  My design was for the single player mode to advance sequentially through progressively harder opponents, with each opponent having nine levels.  So the player would play nine levels against the first opponent, then nine levels against the next opponent and so on, unlocking each next level as they progress.

I considered this from the point of view of the player and thought about how I would find this experience if I was a new player of the game.  Playing nine levels before you reach the next opponent is a relatively large investment of time to get a small pay-off in increased difficulty.  Doing so repeatedly for over eighty levels felt like an experience that would not be engaging.  I decided that I need to mix things up a bit and in the course of doing so introduce the tried and tested concept of the end of level boss.

I have now revised my design so that I no longer have each AI opponent having nine levels of their own.  Instead, I have introduced the concept of chapters.  There will be eight chapters of increasing difficulty with each chapter having three AI opponents.  The third opponent in each chapter will only appear on the last level, in effect becoming an end of chapter boss.

The effect of this on the player is that instead of a strictly linear experience, they now climb to small crescendos of difficulty followed by some easier levels to give them some relief and a dose of dopamine as they feel better about themselves again.  This should result in a much more engaging experience and keep players playing the game, hopefully right the way through to its conclusion.

This is particularly important in a game that will be primarily funded through advertising revenue.  For this category of game the income is directly proportional to amount of time the game is played.  Contrast that to paid apps where the income is proportional to the number of sales, even if the players stop playing the game within a few days.