I’ve been working on a new game for the last couple of weeks, on and off. It’s called Radias, and it looks quite nice. The visuals are all shiny and clean, it runs well on various iOS devices and has a few cool little UI touches in it. I’ve got some interesting ideas for how the music and SFX can work together with the gameplay. There’s just one small problem: I’m not actually sure it’s fun.
The aim of the game is to get all the arrows and coloured areas on all circles lined up at the same time. It’s simple at first, but later levels get harder quickly, with more circles, faster rotation and smaller safe zones. There’s definitely something promising going on, but the gameplay currently feels too simple. There’s no strategy to it, no risk or reward. The flow is all wrong too – it feels fragmented, disjointed.
I nearly had a creative sulk and binned the whole thing, but the point of doing something small and simple was to take a game from start to finish again in preparation for something bigger – and if I can’t get through this then there’s not much hope of that.
So I sent a very early alpha version out to a few people and got some really useful feedback, so I’ll be building that in and trying again. Getting positive feedback is a real shot in the arm, and I can go on with renewed faith in the idea now, thank fuck; I’d been dilly-dallying for days about whether to bin the lot and start something else (I did actually start something else as a secret side project, and it’s AWESOME, but more on that later).
Now I’ll be looking at how to improve the flow of the game, and how to introduce some more skill and strategy beside the core timing mechanic. The ideas I had for audio and music didn’t look like they were going to pan out either, so changing things up should let me look at that again. There’s some cool Flash tech that lets you pitch music up or down on the fly, which would be a good fit for the DJ/music creation vibe of Radias.
If you’d be interested in playing early versions (and ideally, giving me some handy-dandy feedback in the process) then find me on Twitter and say hi.
