Yeah, I know the previous post was posted under 48 hours ago, but at this point I needed to make quick progress and get a version of the game ready that I felt was polished enough to serve as the final product. As such, this will also be the last (official) post regarding the development of “Candy Nightmare”, and fill focus on those last little changes I made from the previous iterations.

So, what was changed since last time? Mechanics-wise, nothing was really touched, as they were in place. A few fixes to ensure that you would only get the “penalty-click” when actually clicking wrongly within the playing field, as well as making the timer count with 1 decimal rather than displaying clean seconds (I could go all out and make it 2 decimals, but found it slightly overkill).

Now, the major part for the last bit was getting the game to look and feel like it was intended, which meant making actual graphics, and make the game pieces look closer to how they were originally intended – which meant closely resembling those from the paper prototype. After my first attempt of doing those, I caught myself doing a fatal error that I knew I would hate any other game developer for doing with a game like this: it was not colorblind-friendly! It seemed that the shades of orange and green I had chosen messed with my own red/green-colorblindness, which meant that I either wasted a critical amount of time to tell them apart, or fail because of clicking the wrong icon. Easily fixed, luckily.

All in all, the polished graphics turned out to make a nice addition to the game and raised the polished look quite a bit. Still, it is far from being exceptionally pretty, but then again I never bragged about being a graphical artist. Regardless, it turned out to look very close to intended result, and that was the most important thing. It got to the level where I could look myself in the mirror and say “Good job, Emil. Good job.”, while working the ever-so-effective claps on my own shoulder.

On top of that, I added a few simple sounds to give the game a bit of depth: A crunching sound when picking up a piece of candy, a buzzer-sound to inform that the given click was wrong and finally some semi-scary ambiance to empathize on the “nightmare” part of the name. Simple, yet effective, and reactive feedback is always a good thing.

As for the last few words on the game, I thought it would be fun to look at what could be in store for the future, when looking at what the “pitch” for the idea was. It is intended as a “social competitive” one-on-one game, intended to be played on smartphones or devices like that, where the two (or, theoretically, more) face off on a given randomly generated level. The player who got the fastest time or the most pieces of candy within the time-limit would win. Simple and quick.

I hope to some day return and make it a reality, so that the Münster Monsters will be able to battle for candy domination and keep Birdman from snatching it from their hands.

But, I suppose you just want to play it, right? Good, because I got that covered already. Enjoy! Oh, and what is the fastest time you can get?

Candy Nightmare
The sweets have been stolen by the evil Birdman, the Münster Monster’s archenemy! They must be located before time runs out, and Birdman swoops in to eat them!

Link: Candy Nightmare Prototype!