Hey folks, another couple of weeks have passed since the announcement of my third game this year! Read this post, if you’ve missed it.

At first: Sorry for the delay, again! This “A Game A Month”-Project is more ambitious than I thought. There is a lot that currently prevents me from game development. Last month I moved and now I write my master thesis. In detail: 6 weeks have passed since the announcement and I had only 10 days for coding (something about 25 – 30 hours). I think this is the first big lesson I learned, since I started this project: It’s very important to manage your time properly if you want to stay productive. I have to find a way to improve my time management skills. Maybe it will be better in the next few months 😉

Get to the point, is the game finished??

Yes and No. The idea was to make a simple casual mobile game using the Defold Engine. The good news is, that the game has a playable state. But it’s not in a state that I’d like it to be for publishing it on Google Play. Therefore I decided to publish the current state as a playable Html5 version on itch.io and take some more time to expand it and release it for mobile devices. So the mobile version will be the goal for next month.

But for now, here it is: Tapmoji! Try it out and give me some feedback! You can play it in the browser on mobile devices, too.

Current state

The current state is as follows: The GUI shows three emoticons that have to be caught, the current score, a countdown and the remaining lifes. There are emoticons moving across the screen in different modes: horizontally and vertically, and popping up at random positions. After tapping on the needed emoticons, a new screen appears, showing that the level is finished. Tapping this screen starts the next level. With every level the speed of the movement is increased, so it gets harder to recognize the emoticons. Also the spawning interval is decreased, so there are more emoticons at the same time on the screen. Tapping on wrong emoticons decreases the amount of hearts. If the player has no lifes left or the time runs out, a “game over” screen appears, showing the total score.

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There are still some Todo’s!

The game was already playtested by some friends, and it was well received! But the todo list list is still very long:

• Creating a menu screen
• Creating a screen showing collected emoticons
• Getting stars(?) for completing a level
• Using stars to unlock a new random emoticon
• More moving modes for emoticons
• More visual feedback for actions like tapping wrong/right emoticon, loosing a life, …
• Sounds
• Release on Google Play

Originally it was supposed to be a short project that should be completed quickly due to lack of time, but for me it’s just too much fun to end it halfdone. And I think that this is a condition that is very important and valuable in game development.

My experience with Defold

Defold was totally new to me and I would like to share some on-boarding experience with you and compare it with my experience with the Godot Engine, which I used in my last project. I will take my time to compare these engines and publish another post in a few days regarding this topic. So stay tuned!

Source code

Of course this project is open-source and you can check the code at GitHub or download it right here:

Have fun playing it on itch.io, and stay tuned for the release of the mobile version!