Critters is NOT a Tower Defence.

The idea for critters originally came from the old DOS game called Chickens 2, by Brainchild Design. You can find the game here https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/chickens-2/.


Chickens 2 by Brainchild Design


I originally wanted to recreate this game for mobile platforms partly to practice mobile development and partly because it is a simple but addictive game design that is perfectly suited for Mobile platforms.
Chickens come from left and right end of the screen and must not reach opposite end. Every time a player shoots, time decreases by a second and there is a chance for a gem to be generated from a dead chicken that increases the time by a few seconds. Simple and addictive.

Few days later, and the first prototype was finished. It featured SDL for graphics and Box2D for physics.

Critters, Prototype 1



But as these things go, I soon encountered the feature creep. The game was fine as is an was was ready for porting to Android. BUT WHY STOP THERE! And the scope kept growing.
Why just have one map when we can have many. Why not implement different weapons, scrolling levels, parallax background, platforming!!! Thy sky is the limit!



Critters, The last screenshot before redesign

So the work begun on all the above for better or worse (mostly worse). And finally after a few weeks  the 3rd prototype was finished. And this one was shaping to become a real finished game. Most of the features were implemented, but the game simply wasn't that fun. The scrolling was on rails and very slow, parallax background were very difficult to setup in the level editor and frankly mostly unnoticeable in game, and mostly the gameplay was boring.

Critters, 2nd Prototype

And there was still an issue of me never developing for Android - You know, the target platform for Critters. Furthermore since my pain of choice is C++, I completely expected for development to be a living nightmare. (I was right, but more on that later).
So I decided to make a small but full featured game for android to not only learn development for Android but also the Google's process of uploading a game to Play Store.
Thus ABC-Pop was born.


More about that in the next update.






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