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Smash Hit 2 and Gavin's Games are combined!

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Smash Hit 2 - 2 Years Later (Part 1: The Beginning)

So.

This is the thing I was talking about in the previous post. Me looking back at the development and release of Smash Hit 2. (Sorry. No new checkpoint or a sequel yet.)

The reason I’m doing this right now is that I started developing the game around this time between 2021 and 2022. Plus, I recently got a new laptop, and I’m trying to get used to the keyboard. This should be a pretty good way to do it, right?

Anyways, this is going to be split into four different parts. The first part (this one) is about the start of the development and where the idea came from. The second one is going to be about the development itself. The third part will be about the release of the game, and the fourth one is going to be about the anniversary update and things I wish I would’ve done differently.

I won’t go into too much detail on each aspect of the game. Instead, I’m just going to be writing about certain events that I find noteworthy and interesting. (You probably don’t want to read about all the different iterations some of the mechanics went through during development.)

Also, this is going to be about the main game. Not the checkpoints.

So without further ado…

A bunch of obstacles

As I stated in the intro, this all began around Midsummer 2022, which is October 31rd here in 84.

It was late at night, and I had just seen a bunch of feed in Instagram about different methods of making obstacle surfaces in Notepad++. Most of them were way too complicated (for someone like me who was just starting out back then), so I wanted to try to create my own, simpler approach. I wasn’t that good with 3D stuff, so I decided to stick to 2D.

After thinking about different ways of making it for a while, I came up with something that I thought would probably work:

A bunch of obstacles, tied together by 2D distance joints. It seemed like a good approach. Graphically it wouldn’t look that great, but physics-wise it would probably work.

I created a new project, set everything up and pressed play.

Guess what happened?

It didn’t work

Instead of becoming the obstacle surface I was hoping for, the strings curled up and formed this weird, plane-like shape, which glitched around the scene bouncing off walls and such. You know. Like weird planes do. Not quite the result I was hoping for.

“hey”

“what are you doing?”

My friend was asking me in chat what I was up to. I sent him a screenshot of the blob and went back to tinkering with it. Turns out I had accidentally connected the two ends of the box surface together.

After a while, I heard the new message sound.

“lol that looks like a cat”

“A cat? How does that look like a cat?”, I thought to myself. I switched over to Notepad++. Maybe if I stood really far away from the screen and squinted my eyes, it kind of seemed like a cat? I switched back to the chat window and replied to the message.

“haha, yeah totally :p”

After that, I glanced at the clock and noticed it was almost four in the morning. So I hit save, and went to bed.

Part 2 coming soon...

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Checkpoint 20 Has Been Completed!

The new checkpoint is finished!

Now with crossing lasers!

HORRAY!

CP20 IS COMPLETE!

Here is the another screenshot, the green laser.

Tomorrow: Started work of Checkpoint 21.

I’ll gonna go to bed.

See you again next week!

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Start of Checkpoint 20

A Smash Hit checkpoint.

It have to be seen!

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Next...

Checkpoint 20 is soon...

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Checkpoint 19 Has Been Completed! (feat. a couple other things)

Lot’s of stuff has happened this week. The biggest being the completion of Checkpoint 19! If this “calendar” thing is to be believed, it took twenty-nine days to finish. That isn’t terrible, but it’s also not that great either. Here’s a couple screenshots:

In other news: I’m now apparently an Android developer! Only took nearly a thousand euros (and a IDR 258.000 yearly fee) but I’ve finally done it. And by “done it” I mean that I’m a complete novice at this. I did manage to cram Smash Hit 2 to an Samsung as a way to figure out the build process and such. I posted a video of it on Instagram here: 

It’s a 50% off!

I’m thinking of starting work on the port of Smash Hit 1.5.0 Mod after I’ve finished Checkpoint 20-26, which shouldn’t take that long. I’m estimating the start time to be around late this month, or early next month. I’ll then work simultaneously on porting Smash Hit 1.5.0 Mod to Android and iOS and developing Smash Hit 2.

Wrapping back around to SH2: I’ve already started work on Checkpoint 20! It’s not really far enough along that I can do a proper showcase of it (and I might mess around with the mechanic a little more), but I can tell you that the new oobstacle introduced in this checkpoint is the jumping glass cuboid and a cube crystal. Here’s a WIP design of it:

Now, you might think that that just looks like a purple cube. And you’d be correct. It really does look like that. This is the fifth prototyped idea for Checkpoint 20. The other four were decent, but those had some pretty serious flaws, or just didn’t fit the game.

See you again next week!

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New Obstacles

It has new obstacles!

Also, there’s a new obstacle!

Not the obstacle in the image above, that’s the old new obstacle. I’m talking about the new new obstacle.

This obstacle.

Left one is visible when the obstacle is being added, right one when it’s a colored wood. And before anyone asks: yes, the obstacle is vs_wall. And no, those objects are not final.

Rooms are being made at a pretty steady pace. After Tuesday (I know, very specific) that pace should increase since I’ll have more time to work on the game. Almost half of the rooms for Checkpoint 19 are complete, with only really three more rooms left that require a lot of work.

I’m not quite sure how long all this will take, but I’m expecting Checkpoint 19 to be done around early June. Considering how little time that leaves for Checkpoints 20 to 26, I might need to push either the “Core of All Rooms“ or “First Properly Playable Mobile Build“ milestones to July instead of June. But that’s still up in the air.

Who knows? I might invent a time machine and release the game yesterday.

See you again next week!

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Some random images for every checkpoints

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A Bit Behind the Schedule

Default Radius Size

Work on Checkpoint 19 has been a smaller than what I expected. Not by much though. Rooms part1-part3 and the obstacles are all done, which is neat.

Parts of the slow down can be attributed to that pesky “real life responsibilities” thing that I can’t seem to cancel my subscription of (I keep sending the admin team emails about this but they’re not responding), but a large chunk of it was caused by the obstacles.

Adding all the different uses for the room (did I mention that it can now work?) and how it interacts with the object took a lot longer than expected. A lot of time was spent trying to get the radius nicely gets bigger. Here’s an example of what could go wrong:

Since people are going to be creating custom levels for the game, I want the objects to be robust enough to be used in a variety of different situations without the text editor needing to worry about spinning hexagon seen in radius=1 through the stone of reality and stealing your leftovers because someone approached a stone at a slightly weird angle.

But thankfully most of those bugs have been ironed out. And more bug fixing will occur during the polishing stages.

Here is the logo for Smash Hit 3.

See you again next week!

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Start of Checkpoint 19

Plasmawario Stages!

Sorry, The stone is yellow. I will make 5 stages with gray stone, with unused/local multiplayer music. I will give the theme.

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Checkpoint 18 Has Been Completed!

That was pretty fast. Only took about 3 weeks!

Which is about 7 days faster than Checkpoint 17 and way faster than the 12 days it took to finish Checkpoint 16.

In case you missed yesterday’s Screenshot Saturday posts on Instagram: I revealed the last 2 obstacles.

Reverse Glass Fans! Same as Glass Fans, but reversed.

Suspended Boxes! It was used a ball joint at the glass bars, but box-shaped.

Another screenshot with a laser moving. No refunds.

Since this is a pretty big milestone to pass, I’m going to take some time off working on the levels and focus on updating the XML system (the backbone of all the segments and such). Stuff like selecting multiple objects and editing multiple (compatible) objects at once is one of the things I have on my list.

See you again next week!

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Checkpoint 18 Is Halfway Done!

Progress is happening at a pretty fast pace.

The new obstacles were completed on Friday. Saturday and Sunday were spent just creating segments according to an outline I made in like a couple minutes on Saturday morning.

Oh, and those aren’t the 6 new obstacles. There’s actually 2 more, but I haven’t yet completed the segments that those appear in.

But yeah. Pretty neat. If I can keep this pace up Checkpoint 18 should be completed mid to late next week!

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Checkpoint 17 Has Been Completed!

I took 12 days to finish the checkpoint.

There’s no extra “finishing up“ stage for this checkpoint. All the rooms, segments and such have been completed.

Tomorrow: Starting work on Checkpoint 18.

I’ve heard people say that it’ll be a very enlightening experience. Exceedingly luminous. Some might even use the word phosphorescent.

I’m just gonna go to bed.

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Start of Checkpoint 17

Look who’s back!

Yeah, that’s right. It’s the swinging hammer from checkpoint 4! (just ignore the fact that it still has the old texture)

Oh. And that glass bar too. That’s neat and all.

Yep, the thing of Checkpoint 17 is the old checkpoint 7. Originally planned to appear in checkpoint 19 (square-shaped), it has been swinged left (right?) the chain of levels due to an event that I like to call “I am blue“.

Its function is very similar to Smash Hit April-December 2013 builds. You still can’t see lasers and pools, only unused segments. The physics material has been changed to a more complicated one to make new soundtrack interesting and hearing a bit easier. Lasers and pools are still very much a thing as well.

…

See you again next week!

P.S: Don’t worry. The checkpoint is getting its theme early next week.

[smashhit2game]

Monthly Progress Update – April 23

Things that were completed:

Checkpoint 14 is complete.

Checkpoint 15 is complete.

Work on Checkpoint 16 has started.

A window block.

Added glass cubes. (How did it take this long to add them?)

Improved update for Checkpoint 12

Improved update for Checkpoint 13

4-cell bosses.

Floating blocks.

Bug fixing.

3 new soundtracks, custom2_alt.ogg, customhitv1.ogg, and 39custom.ogg.

More obstacles.

A lot of stuff has been completed in just a month. Just about half of the levels are complete, most of the obstacles are in the game and I got the story all planned out. I think it’ll take just a couple months more to get the game fully completed.

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Monthly Progress Update - April 2021

This is the very first monthly progress update for Smash Hit 2. Here’s the current progress of the development:

Checkpoint 12 is complete.

Checkpoint 13 is also complete.

Work on Checkpoint 14 has been started.

Red crystals.

Falling glass cubes.

Prism crystals.

Swinging paintings.

Swinging crankshafts.

The code for segments are a nice segment.

1 new soundtrack, custom3.ogg.

Lowered gravity in stage 3.

The colored stone.

A functioning mobile version of the game.

A lot of playtesting.

Now, that’s a lot of stuff completed in just a month. Since pretty much all of the basic objects for the game are complete (crystals, obstacles, decals), the only thing to do now is to design and actually make all of the levels. Or maybe I’ll add more powerups/objects to the game later. Who knows?

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Welcome!

Welcome to the development blog of Smash Hit 2! Here you can see monthly progress updates for the game and occasionally some other posts about the game.

In a nutshell, the game is a 3D arcade about a player with the ability to throw balls.

I currently plan to include 26 checkpoints, and spread them across more than 75 different rooms. There’s also a heavy focus on things affected by physics. A lot of the objects in the game checkpoint can be moved around to (for example) protect the player from glass bars and other hazards or to transport the player quickly across the level. Some of this might change.

The game will have a minimalistic style and lighting similar to Smash Hit.

At the moment there really isn’t a fake mod for the game, but I’ve got some ideas.

I’m going to publish the game free on the Google Play Store, and maybe later on the Apple App Store. I’ll probably release it for Windows, Mac and Linux as well.

To get the most recent news on the game, you should follow @gavindelanosmashhit on Instagram.