Eggy's Games

I loved the idea behind Time Sphere. It was very fun to develop. I made a small alpha of stopping bullets and Flashs movieclips when they touched the sphere and I was like hey this is a whole game right here! Lets look at the way I designed this.

The Level Editor Way Of Making Games

This game was made in a very different way than I usually make games. Usually I would make each level a different keyframe and drag and make the levels manually myself in Flash. However I was getting a little tired of this method So I decided to create a grid level editor system manually. I made my own with each number representing a different object in the game. So you used a seperate swf to generate these levels, and then you load the arrays in the game for each level. This meant I could just quickly design levels and import them in.

Time Sphere level editor

As we can see above I just used a basic UI and then you press SAVE to get the array code, I then simply set a variable like level1 = "level_array_here" and then voila I just loaded them one after another.

This was a lot of upfront work but it paid off in the end and taught me how to make custom level editors for my games. I used this later on for players to use themselves in Nodes 2 and Draw-Play 3

Graphics On The Front End

After I had these levels I designed custom grungy graphics to fit the style. I love pushing graphics into new styles to try experiment. This one was a challenge because I needed it to feel mechanical and grungy and most of my art was colourful and vibrant. I spent ages on the background just mixing boxes and shades of grey until it had that metallic background. I also used gradient textures for things like the boxes to fit the style. This effect end up coming out quite well in the end.

Level Design Objects

The great thing about good prototypes is the levels basically make themselves. Once you have springs being frozen, crushers being stopped, bullets stopped mid air. The levels just flow naturally as you introduce each object.

If you are finding your levels difficult to make, it might be a sign you haven't added enough interesting elements to your core gameplay for the game.

Development Fun

I think the best thing as a game developer is when things just come together and you are having a lot of fun making the game. If you are, you are probably making something great. The upside is even if it fails, you had fun making it.

Time Sphere did decently at the time, getting a sponsorship by MofunZone and pulling in a few million players. Overall I walked away with a nice grunge art style, a new game mechanic, a level editor system and a new game to release. I was happy and proud.

Hope you have a lot of fun stopping time in Time Sphere.

Ironically the game gets quite fast paced for a time stopping game. Also I love the grungy Main Menu.

FEEL THE GRUNGE!