Nearly There...

I've added loads of new stuff - all the sound fx are in, the music is in, tutorial levels, more levels...

After I made the game too easy by making it nearly impossible to fall, and then making it a bit too hard by making it really easy to fall, I had the brainwave that I could use these different approaches as a kind of difficulty level to ease people into the game. So, the game starts with it being nearly impossible to fall-off and then introduces the concept of being able to let go if you want to. It's still pretty tough when you get to the levels where you can fall off, but at least it shouldn't immediately put people off. Since the game is based around swinging and hanging, I thought it would make sense to repeat this theme through the front-end. Everything uses the idea of what I call hangers. You can hang lots of visual elements off them and they're simulated by the physics. Here's how the Level Select screen looks with this approach:

It's more interesting when it's all swinging about.

Here's a screenshot from one of the early tutorial levels:

As you can see, it's got the basic instructions as part of the background.

And here's another later level:

I've gone with a very simple hand drawn style. I found it's important to keep things as simple as possible or the screen can look too busy. This is especially important if you have a small display.

It's nearly done. Just a few more levels to make...

I had a go at making a full level and came to the conclusion that I'd made it too easy. Back when I added the grapple points I thought it was too hard, so I made it so the robot wouldn't let go unless there was a grapple point close enough. That made it virtually impossible to fall off resulting in a lack of challenge. I've changed it now so tapping will make the robot let go and tapping again makes him shoot an arm to the nearest grapple. This makes it much easier to fall off, but also makes it more fun as you have more freedom in how you swing around the level. I'm pleased with the result but I think there is a danger of people being put off too quickly, so I'll need to have some good tutorial levels or some mechanism to keep it simple on earlier levels.

I've also added some enemies that will appear if you hang around in one place too long. They're based on some unusual family allergies.

If you're not swinging quickly enough when one of these collides with you, you'll get knocked off.

I've also added an exit from the levels in the form of a builders rubbish chute. You just have to drop into it to finish the level.

Lots of other bits and pieces have also gone in. The end is in sight now...

Added the sound effects manager. Spent ages trying to work out why it wouldn't play any sounds. Finally discovered the SoundPool is a bit choosy about the format and size of sound files it will play. Changed my sound to .ogg format and crunched it down a bit and it's all working fine now.

I've also had a stab at a high-res version of the icon for when this finally goes up on Google Play

It's been a while so I thought I'd do a quick update. I've added a lot of the game functionality now. I have stacks of blocks that will collapse if you hit them. They are stacked in a hieratchy, so if you take out the bottom blocks, the whole lot will come down. This will form a sort of puzzle element where you need to drop some blocks to break them - I haven't fleshed that bit out yet. Also, got the level start sequence in place and the way the bonus stars appear in the arc of your swing if you are swinging in a nice rythm.

Started roughing out some ideas for the early tutorial levels. I'm going with a sketchy blueprint style as that seemed to fit. Still all WIP - hopefully I should have a complete level in the next week.

Added the initial functionality for pickup bonuses and simple VFX. I had the idea that when the bonuses appear they will sketch themselves in. That's why there's all the sketch stars in the screenshot. It's a hand drawn animation which is a style I might adopt for other things. When they finish appearing they will take on a more solid form, but I haven't got round to that yet.

I've been having some issues with the garbage collector triggering more often than I'd like. I tracked one problem down to me creating a new matrix array everytime I drew a sprite - which was alot of matrices. I fixed that one, but there seem to be some less frequent ones still cropping up now. I'll track it down.

Added some placeholder music. I wanted to test if it had any impact on framerate. Seems ok at the moment. I fell into the trap of the garbage collector collecting the MediaPlayer and killing the music. Fixed by making the scope more global.

Also have a company name and logo: