I've done SOME work on Gravity Runner / Crystal Caverns of Kalin since I last posted in this thread, but I haven't spent too much time on it and I really do need to get back to it...
But this post is about something else!
New game:
Bobble Battle!
This was my entry into Ludum Dare 36.
We had originally wanted to do a sort of RTS/tower defense game where an advanced alien befriends a race of primitive people, and the alien would teach the primitives how to build tools and defenses out of the materials they had at hand, but he would also go out in a battle mech to fight off monsters. Unfortunately, our artist wasn't feeling well so we didn't get the variety of sprites that we wanted, and we ran into some technical difficulties that put us behind schedule. So we took the pieces we'd put together and the testing functions that we'd used just to make sure the other parts were working, and we figured out a completely different set of mechanics that could work with what we had built and redesigned the game around that.
Technologically speaking, I'm really proud of the world generator. There are some visual glitches where I didn't have the necessary sprites to fill in every possible way the map could be built, but... every game is played on a completely different map, generated on the fly!
I also made all of the sound effects, wrote the sound code, and did most of the animation code -- I was particularly happy when the crystal animations came together. I put a lot of effort into polish -- an important part of any game is making sure that everything that happens has weight to it, and little things like flashing when you take damage are a lot more important than they seem at first glance so that it FEELS like something is happening.
The other programmer handled the player controls and the combat mechanics, and we collaborated pretty closely on the AI. (We didn't have time to implement a proper pathfinding system, so between the two of us we were able to hack up a way for the friendly bobbles to figure out when they had gotten stuck and try to do something else.)