CHALLENGE MODE

I am back again. My part of the game is done and I’m still waiting on music. So while I wait, I decided to make a challenge mode. In Tetris it would be mode B. More traditional mobile games make it the campaign.

The bulk of development time was spent making the challenge mode menu. The menu can now scroll and shows three stars for each challenge to represent difficulty. When you confirm a challenge, you’re taken to a difficulty menu. Completing a higher difficulty will grant you the lesser difficulty stars.

Each challenge tweaks the game in simple ways and gives you goals for the sake of diversity. Some of the tweaks are removing or adding collectables, fast draining or recovering energy, adding grey blocks that give 0 points, increasing or decreasing death blocks and other interesting things. The goals include breaking X number of blocks, getting to a specific depth, collecting Y number of burgers, surviving X number of minutes and even obtaining a specific score.

Challenges record either time or a score depending on what they are. I had programmed them to record time only, then I thought that would be bad, since you can only get such a small time before no one can beat it. Having a high score for each seems more fun. I thought about removing the time in favor of the score, but why not have both? That way there can be challenges where you race to 100,000 points and others where you get as many points as possible in five minutes.

There are around fifteen challenges at the moment. Even on the highest difficulty, each one feels like it goes quick enough and there’s room for greater challenges. Its really what the game was missing and offers 30 extra minutes of content if I speed run the hardest difficulty. The HUD has also been modified for the challenge mode to show off how close you are to the goal.

An even better part to the challenge mode is that I designed it with 2 players competitive in mind. So two players can go through and compete against one another in each challenge as a race. This would be on the Windows version since there is no two player option for the Android version.

Here is an animation of the challenge menu system: