04 Jun Momonga Monday: A Challenge And A Lost City

Another Monday, another update 🙂 we are working hard on the boss levels and the interface. In addition, some of the levels are getting a new look and feel.

Panda’s Challenge

The first bossfight you will encounter is your mentor, Panda. After healing you, he gets you started with some target practice – and now it’s time for a tougher challenge.

Here is the concept art for this level:

I will not reveal all the details today, but I can tell you it involves a lot of pinballing. 😉

The Lost City

We had a couple of woodland levels that are getting a cosmetic makeover. As you can see in the Level Selection Map, there is an old city at the center. This city is kind of maya-ish, and we are giving the levels a makeover to match this new style.

The process for coming up with a level look-and-feel has five steps:

1. Create a rough draft of the storyline, focusing on the history of the environment and characters
2. Gather reference material (in this case, ancient mesoamerican civilizations)
3. Create a draft of the game mechanics (in this case that includes level design, as pinball is extremely environment-centric)
4. Create concept art of the level (combining mechanics, storyline and environment)
5. Create the 3D art assets

Step 1,2 and 3 are explorative and we usually take these steps simultaneously. A storyline influences the mechanics, and vice versa. There is no rigid process, except that we are exploring ideas in this stage. In step 4 and 5 we gather all that input and combine them to create solid art assets. This is simply matching the existing pieces to create the final picture.

For the Lost City levels, we are reworking existing levels. That means we have the game mechanics pretty much sorted out. What you see above is concept art of individual art assets, based on the storyline and reference material we found. These assets need to be positioned in the level. We create a rough sketch for this as well, which looks like this:

User Interface

Oh, the dreaded beautiful retina user interface. For weeks the Graphic User Interface (GUI) was getting a complete overhaul, and this meant that we could not play the game at all except in the editor and with older builds. But lo and behold! Yesterday we had a review session where the game was playable again, this time with the new interface. I think it is a big improvement, and I hope you will like it as much as I do. Next week we are going to optimize the system and fix a whole bunch of bugs that came with this massive undertaking. When we finally nail this thing, it will be good to get back to improving gameplay and adding levels!

Right now we are still working on optimizing the memory use. We work our way down from the new iPad’s huge retina display. This means we have texture widths of up to 2048 pixels! Compare that to the lousy 480 pixels of the iPhone 3GS and you see that this can become a bit of a memory issue.

You have seen the GUI visuals before so I have nothing much to add to that – but when it’s all finished I will post a short video of how the new interface in action.

That wraps it up for this week! If you are curious about the development of Momonga Pinball Adventures, I recommend you sign up for our newsletter.

Here is a list of the older Momonga Mondays:

• Did We Fail Miserably? (May 28)
• 4 Work-In-Progress Updates (May 21)
• 33 Cutest Momonga Pictures Ever (May 14)
• The New Retina Interface (May 7)
• Screenshots (April 30)
• Momo character design (April 23)
• General Kuton character design (April 16)
• Panda the Panda character design (April 9)
• Fry the Firefly character design (April 3)
• Six Things You Did Not Know About Momonga (March 26)
• The Owl Guards (March 19)

Take care everyone! See you next week 🙂