SLOA Refuses to Stay Dead

Cube Dev: SLOA Refuses to Stay Dead

I really didn't touch Just One Floor Deeper much this weekend.

That's not because I've abandoned it.

It's mostly because weekends don't involve a lot of time sitting in my office.

JOFD has reached the point where most of what I need to do requires the actual Cube, and the Cube lives in the office. Map development is also considerably easier on my 34" widescreen than it is on the laptop's 18" screen.

And I already can't wait to replace the 34" with the 39".

More screen good.

JOFD Is Still Very Much Alive

The good news is I left JOFD in a pretty good state.

Movement was finally behaving properly on the actual hardware, and the menus were mostly responding the way they're supposed to.

There are still some little things to clean up.

I need to go through the interface and update labels where something requires a double tap instead of a tap. I need another round of testing and final checks. And I still need to finish the audio.

I'm not particularly happy with the current title track, so that's probably getting replaced.

But the actual game?

Mostly done.

Which leaves a wonderfully short little list:

• Test everything.
• Fix whatever testing breaks.
• Finish the audio.
• Find some people willing to test it.
• Generate approximately 495 more dungeon maps.
• Figure out how publishing a .cub actually works.

You know.

Basically finished.

So I Got Bored

Since I wasn't spending much time in the office, I did what any responsible developer with one nearly finished game would do.

I played entirely too much Hole.io, Mahjong, and some arrow game.

Then I started another game.

Secret Life of Aliens.

SLOA Has Been Around for a While

SLOA isn't really a new idea for me.

Not even remotely.

I first came across The Secret Life of Aliens through a Lost Garden article way back in 2005.

The concept stuck with me.

Eventually I contacted the original author and received permission to use the concept and name, and I started building my own version in XNA for Xbox 360 Indie Games.

I never released it.

The prototype went onto the shelf...

...and stayed there for years.

Attempt Number Two

A couple years ago I pulled SLOA back out again when I was developing for the Infinity Game Table.

The IGT was naturally a multiplayer device, so I completely reworked the concept into a board game.

I had the design pretty well planned out.

I just hadn't really started building it yet.

Then Basic Fun bought Arcade1Up and development for the Infinity Game Table effectively disappeared.

So SLOA went back on the shelf.

Again.

Oddly enough, I recently stumbled across a legitimate retailer still selling the IGT.

Apparently nobody told the hardware it's dead, good news for us if BasicFun! ever decides to do the right thing and revive the table.

Attempt Number Three

Then I bought a WOWCube.

And after choosing the completely reasonable and sensible first project of building a ridiculously large dungeon crawler to learn the platform...

I started thinking about aliens again.

I like aliens.

And SLOA has apparently decided that twenty-ish years and multiple abandoned platforms aren't enough to kill it.

So here we are.

The Cube Is Earth

The old board game design obviously doesn't make much sense on the WOWCube, so this version needed another rethink.

This time, the physical Cube itself is becoming part of the game.

The Cube is Earth.

Different faces represent different regions of the planet, with different challenges and difficulty levels that will eventually affect gameplay.

Each face contains four screens, and each screen is divided into four cells.

That gives me 16 locations per face for the UFO to move through.

And that part is already working.

You can fly the UFO around a face, twist in different directions to move across the region, and travel around the Cube into completely different parts of the world.

The movement actually feels pretty good.

I'm trying not to think too hard about the fact that SLOA's movement started behaving while JOFD spent days fighting me over the concept of walking.

We Can Also Leave Earth

The UFO can now launch away from Earth and into space.

Eventually, that's where you'll transmit the information you've gathered back to your computer at home for your assignment.

That system doesn't have much gameplay attached to it yet, but the basic transition is there and gives me another piece to build on.

Fly around Earth.

Gather information.

Head into space.

Transmit it home.

We're starting to get the beginnings of an actual loop.

Of Course There's Already an Editor

Because apparently I don't know how to make a game anymore without also making development tools for the game...

SLOA already has its own web-based editor.

It's pretty basic right now.

I can adjust regions, tweak the signal animation, change its size and colors, and control some of the pieces I'm experimenting with without rebuilding everything by hand.

There's not much to it yet.

But if JOFD taught me anything, it's that these editors have a tendency to start small and then grow into giant control panels for practically the entire game.

I fully expect this one to do the same.

And Now I Have a Problem

I have JOFD sitting in the office.

It's mostly finished.

It needs testing, polish, audio, a mountain of maps and eventually a publishing process that I still need to learn.

And sitting over here is SLOA.

New systems.

New mechanics.

A UFO flying around a planet made out of a Cube.

And a giant pile of ideas I haven't built yet.

I know which one I should work on.

But there's nothing quite like a new project to get the mind flowing.

So...

Dungeons or aliens?

This might be a problem.