Shocktopus Beta

February 4, 2015

It has arrived!  An open beta for ~~The Electric Shocktopus~~!

A Brief Fishstory

Once upon a time, Andy, a dear friend of mine, had an idea for a platformer where you were electrically charged.  You could electrically attract and repel to fling yourself all around the level.  But, the part that excited him most, was Magnetic Fields.  You see, when electric charges move in magnetic fields, they *curve*.  Picture running out of a building, only to be flipped up in a semicircle and find yourself re-entering the building… via the second story.  And upside down.

Thus SHOCKTOPUS was born.

Actually, thus a game filled with weird boxes was born…

What a game!

Which then became a game called MagneToad!

No one else is stealin’ my credit for this!

(Skipped it for copyright reasons / Marvel wouldn’t return my calls)

So then I created Maxwell’s Monkey!

Cute, but not a snappy enough name.

…and thus…

…finally…

…after a string of weird punny names, The Electric Shocktopus was conceived.

“Wait, why does the octopus want bananas?” Potassium.

Of course, that was a couple years ago.  I developed the game over the course of nearly a year, finally bringing my vision to life.

Interlude

Where it sat for a year, waiting.  My initial plan was to release the game as a flash game.  Give the game away free online, and I’d make money through some sponsorships/advertising.  But that plan never panned out.  Turns out, that’s (a) much less common/lucrative than it once was, and (b) not a great fit for an educational game.  So the Shocktopus remained on the back burner, while I turned to other projects – like Bond Breaker.

Resurrection

The helpful and ever-present prodding from friends/family/forum-goers finally set me straight.  It was time to release this game.  But not as a flash game – that wasn’t going to work out.  Instead I’d release it as a game in Unity.  It’d be faster, stronger, bigger, and no longer confined by the browser window.  After a fair bit of work porting the game over, it went from looking like this…

Admittedly a bit of a step backwards…

…to this…

Now we’re talking!

…and finally up to its current state.

Weird, the bananas are now stars? 0% your daily potassium, 10^8% your daily hydrogen…

As I mentioned above, this is a Beta, so it isn’t finished by any measure.  There are a whole list of improvements I’m planning on making.  But it’s here – you can get it, play it, make and share levels, and when you do, throw some feedback my way.  I’m interested to hear what you think!

-Andy