Also, for those if you who want to contribute but aren't a programmer or artist... here's your chance to be a level designer.
Matti and I sat down the other day and talked about what the best way to handle the level files would be, and eventually Matti suggested a visual representation of the level itself, in text form. I thought this to be genius, so while he was busy coding up the actual game, I started work on the level loader & format. The loader itself was easy business, and honestly, so was the format.
The level files look something like this:
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--- --- --- [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] --- --- ---
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[3] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [3]
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--- --- --- --- [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] --- --- --- ---
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Now, as you can see, this is a pretty obvious visual representation of a brick breaker level. What the symbols mean, that's not so obvious, but luckily, I've written a short guide that will get distributed with the game if anyone wants to bother making new levels for it. Essentially, though, it's just: "[#]" = normal brick, where # is equal to hardness. "[*]" = unbreakable brick. And, "***" = explosive brick. The only requirement of this level format is that it's displayed in a fixed-width font, otherwise, it won't look right. The above font is Courier, which works great.
If anybody out there wants to, they could use this information to go ahead and start making levels for us! Post 'em in the comments below, or message me on Facebook, or e-mail me, or basically contact me in any way you possibly can, and I'll almost certainly include your level.
Oh, but a couple quick notes: level size is 17 bricks wide, 19 bricks tall. Explosive bricks do 1 damage to every brick touching them. Unbreakable bricks are... unbreakable, and as such, are not required to be destroyed in order to progress to the next level. And, on a separate note, feel free to name your level. There's a good chance that we'll include level names in the game. It isn't a priority, but it certainly isn't hard to do at all.
And a quick suggestion, while I'm at it. Because of the fact that this is co-op, there is a person on top of the level, and a person on the bottom of the level. It's good form to make a middle line (on line #10) and be symmetrical on both sides. This way, each players scoring potential is identical. Also, it just looks good.
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