Here’s a quick peak of the GUI and controls for Zen Cell, my opposite to Hyper Gauntlet. With a little luck it’ll be out by the end of the weekend!
Zen Cell GUI in action
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Tag Archives: zencell
Saturday Update #1 – Let’s get this ball rolling
Welcome to the first ever Saturday Update! This one goes live later than I’d normally like because I was doing old-man things like sleeping.
Hyper Gauntlet
Lots of progress on Hyper Gauntlet this week, the main point being that I’ve finished the beta version! Right now I’m building a folder of PR material before the big push, but expect a release data and price sometime this coming week. Are you excited? I know I am!
Looking for more concrete changes? Allow me to show you using pixels!
I changed the background colours to ease confusion
I’ve altered how level ups work (now they give you power-ups!)
Transparent blocks now show you when you’re immune to certain obstacles.
I’ve made ever so tiny cosmetic changes to the menu!
ZenCell
ZenCell is a small project I’ve been working on in-between Hyper Gauntlet bug-fixes. It’s a port of my old HTML5 game Cell into Unity. The process has gone faster than expected and after only two days of work, I have a surprisingly polished-feeling game. Given two more days I might finish it, which is a strange feeling after months of Hyper Gauntlet development.
ZenCell, like it’s predecessor is a game about matching colours together. Each cell has a certain amount available colours it can switch to when clicked on. The aim of the game is to find the right pattern of colours such that each cell’s colour is the same as or next to the colours of all neighbouring cells in the colour spectrum. But these are mere words, in the single digits. Lets look at this in kilowords:
The main menu
I wanted bright, calming and clean colours here. I took a lot of inspiration from the original Cell, but also from some puzzle games like Sokobond. As you can see, I plan to offer a daily seed challenge where you aim to complete an entire round in as few moves as possible.
Starting a game
Every game starts with this 3×3 cell structure. In the bottom right you can see a colour wheel showing which colours will be accepted as next to which other colours. When you hover the mouse over a cell the unavailable colours are darkened in the wheel so you can better plan your solution.
Almost done
All we have left is the bottom-left cell, and it looks like I can change that cell to the same blue that’s all around it. Bingo!
Now more blocks come into play with a snazzy circle animation!
Keep going in the same way
Until you’ve filled the screen!
I find it an incredibly calming game, and it’s filled to the brim with simple, instrumental music from Kevin McLeod’s fantastic website. I’ll make a video for you all to see it in action soon, but the priority for now is getting that Hyper Gauntlet release ready.
So that’s it for this week, tune in some time next week for another Saturday Update!