Plasma Duel has been released!

I published the free and premium versions of Plasma Duel to production on New Years Eve so the game is now out there for everybody to play.

The next challenge for the game is visibility, there are over 500 games in the "top new arcade" category on Google Play - that's just the games released in the past 30 days.  Getting Plasma Duel anywhere near the top of that list will be a challenge.

My primary tactic to make some sort of impression on the charts is to take advantage of the current installed user base of Cherry Chaser and Super Snake.  I'm running a 100,000 house ads to the players of these games promoting Plasma Duel as a new game from the maker of the game they are playing.  I'm going to try to blitz those ads between now and Sunday to try to make an impression on the charts.

You can help me!

You can help me by giving Plasma Duel a rating on the Play Store.  If you enjoy the game please rate it and maybe give a few comments.  The ratings given to games influence their rankings quite heavily so every good rating I get will help me enormously at this stage.

Thanks to all who helped test the game, you rock!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.exobyte.plasmaduel&hl=en

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.

I started the the development process by reading up on the various game engine libraries that exist for the operating system.  There are not many to choose from, three or four possibilities.  I also had the option of creating my own engine but that's not really my area of expertise and I hate reinventing the wheel.  The other reason for using a ready made game engine is that it can provide me with access to OpenGL without having to do the coding myself.

In the end I'm using LibGDX, it's a nice library with a great community and even has a fair bit of documentation.

Earlier journal entries can be found in my "Nova Dawn Development Journal" which is separated from this journal as its focus is on game development for the Windows Mobile platform.

Continue to Nova Dawn Development Journal