Reflex cover
Reflex screenshot
Steam
Genre: Strategy

Reflex

2 Year Anniversary - Demo Released
Hi all. It's been a while. I've been rather busy with a lot of other things and that has taken me away from game development for a while. Hopefully that will be changing soon and I can get back to working on something new.

In the meantime. Reflex is coming up to it's 2 anniversary - and so I thought I'd make a few changes.

A demo version of the game is now available to download via the Reflex itch.io page. This version allows you to try out the first 16 levels of the game. Progress is continued to the full version if you decide to buy it.

The itch.io version has been updated slightly. It's just a small patch that changes the head start time between sub-levels (levels that contain more than one floor) from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. This is because I felt that the pause was too long. As this is the only change you could keep using the previous build to keep those extra 5 seconds - I won't tell anyone ;)

I've decided to lower the price of the game to $2.99. Sales have not been near to what I expected and I'm guessing that people don't want to pay $5 for a relatively small puzzle game these days. Hopefully sales will pick up as a result.

Quick Fix Patch
Just a quick patch to fix the 10 second head-start fix that was applied during the QOL update not resetting properly if the level was restarted.
Level 5.23 has also been tweaked slightly to lower the difficulty on the 4th floor.

Reflex - Quality of Life Update
This is a relatively small update that makes a few improvements to the game:

  • Adjusted the texture page compression to increase loading speed - this is especially noticeable on the Android version.
  • For levels that feature more than 1 floor there is now a 10 second head-start to allow you to plan your strategy. It was felt that this would be a useful change to avoid frustration for players that aren't quite as quick at dealing with sudden level changes.

Updated Gameplay Trailer
Since the launch of the game about 7 months ago I've been wanting to update the gameplay trailer so that it is easier to see what's going on if you only play it inside the Steam windows (instead of full screen). Finally, I've managed to grab some time to be able to do it. The new trailer replaces the previous one so you can check it out on the main store page for the game.

Reflex - Dev Diary 84

Reflex – Dev Diary 83
Finally, after a week or so of battling it out with the Google Cloud verification team Reflex is available on the Google Play store.

The Android version is identical visually to the Windows version except you play by tapping the game board and dragging the screen around with your finger. The Android version also supports vibrations for when a missile is destroyed (can be turned off); it also supports Google Achievements.

The game can be purchased from the store by clicking here.

For full details on the game, visit the Reflex product page.

Game Update 1.0.2.2001
The game will no longer hurt your ears and attempt to play dozens of explosion sounds when you have multiple missiles in play when the timer runs out.

On rare occasions, the level music would stop playing after a level had been failed. This has been fixed.

Game Update 1.0.1.1985
Tweak level 4.14 to make it fairer
Change texture sheet compression for faster load times
Tweak the final level to correct issues with timing on the final section
Fix the game completed message that is displayed when loading or starting a new game.

Reflex has left Early Access
It is with great pleasure that I can now announce that the Steam version of Reflex has left Early Access and is complete.

This has been quite the passion project for me, and I am extremely happy with the final product. Hopefully, you guys will be too.

The official release version had the following alterations and tweaks from the last EA version:


  • All 102 levels available
  • Fix holder that cannot be deconstructed if it is interacting with 2+ missiles
  • Increase max missile count to 16
  • Remove missile speed limiting on collision with another missile
  • Finished all levels at 3 star rating on steam build – phew!
  • Fix final achievement
  • Prevent earthquakes from happening between level transitions
  • Add stats to control steam achievements as they were broken!
  • Fix other achievements
  • Tweak timing on 5.18
  • Add screenwipe to ar ident
  • Another attempt to hide the pause between the main menu pages
  • Remove early access display block
  • Fix Ruiniation trophy
  • Fix reactor 4 showing lights at the wrong angle
  • Sync Steam achievements
  • Adjust intro/outro textfader to fit properly
  • Fix camera not being active
  • Add in some more savegame instances
  • Fix tutorial outline
  • Add texture prefetching to hopefully help Android performance for sequences
  • Fix level ranks not being reset on new game start
  • Fix save after a world is complete and if the player immediately quits the game afterwards
  • Make first strike achievement doable!


Most of the effort between EA2 and this final release was in the testing and tweaking of the world 5 levels. These levels are some of the most complicated and quite often they look perfectly doable on paper, but turn out to be utterly impossible in-game.

I will be monitoring the Steam discussion page as much as I can and will address any player questions that come up.

Happy playing 🙂

Reflex - Developer Diary 77
This week continues the final stages of development for Reflex. The focus this time has been on Achievements for the Steam and Google Play versions of the game.

First up was to get an official build ready for submission to Google Play. Thankfully YoYoGames has a reasonably helpful document about setting up a game and integrating the extension. The downside is the supplied game project that is supposed to explain how it works is badly documented. Anyway, the process for signing up to be a Google Play developer is a long and particularly complex affair. And once again required a whole new set of graphics and the achievement icons all needed to be saved out at yet another resolution. After about 4 hours the process was complete and I had set up Reflex on Google Play for internal testing.

Next came the process of getting a build onto the Google Play store so I could install it on my tablet and try it out. 12 builds later and I had adapted the game to sign in to Google Play and start to post achievement details.

Previously, the achievements were saved as a part of the settings for the game. After implementing the functionality in the Android version I realised that they needed to be synced rather than using local data. This is because, if an Android player decided to sign out of Google Play and then sign in as a different user the achievements would match up with the new account.

So, after a lot of fiddling about (thanks Google), the Achievements are now synced when the game starts or the player signs in for both Steam and Google Play.

After getting a nice and stable Android build I sat down and played through most of the game (yikes). This highlighted a couple of very minor issues that needed addressing. Here’s this weeks changelog:


  • Android achievements work a bit differently to Steam. Incremental achievements do not automatically unlock when they reach the 100% mark.
  • Attempt workaround for QOI decompression (GMS slowdown issue on Android)
  • Hide achievements when Google Play is not available
  • Remove early access display block ready for final release on Steam
  • Don’t display trophy notice on Android when Achivements are synced
  • Fix Ruination trophy – wasn’t counting up
  • Fix reactor 4 showing lights at the wrong angle
  • Sync Steam achievements both ways
  • Adjust intro/outro textfader to fit better
  • Fix camera not being active (no_camera variable misplaced)
  • Add in some more savegame instances to fix it so you no longer need to redo level 24 of a world if you didn’t do level 1 of the next.
  • Fix tutorial animation outline
  • Add texture prefetching to hopefully help Android performance for sequences (QOI issue)
  • Add in No Google Play notice when needed
  • Trophy award notification display no longer shown if Google Play is active (same as Steam if overlay is on)
  • Trophy ping sound no longer plays if steam overlay or google play is active
  • Fix level ranks not being reset on new game start
  • Fix save after a world is complete and if the player immediately quits the game
  • Fix Android achievements by actually using the correct codes – grr
  • Reduce screengrab size to help performance on Android
  • Set up app on Google Play
  • Add Google Play Services
  • Add GP Achievements and signin
  • Fix tutorials constantly creating themselves – opps
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