Friday the 13th

Another week, another blog post!

It’s been a busy week for everyone this week and we have a new person on board.

Weekending 13/06/07

GoGo Digger:

The big news for the GoGo Digger project is that it now has a musician for the game, Trevor. He’s been busy cranking out music examples for the game and little riffs for various actions. His examples are really nice and the overall gaming experience will definitely be enhanced for the player due to the help of Trevor’s relaxing tunes.

Isaac has also been busy programming away. In fact I think he’s sent me a new build almost every other day, which is always nice to see. The game is really coming along now and is starting to feel really solid. In fact I ended up playing the latest version for over an hour without even realizing the time which is definitely a good sign for the quality of the game play, even more so when you realize I have been playing this game on and off for the past 6 years now on my mobile phone and the game is still missing a lot of polish and user interface refinement. It’s going to be really good when it’s finished, I promise you that (as long as you like puzzle / logic games of course).

Shuffle Blocks:

I’ve been working almost none stop on Shuffle Blocks this week. Mainly on creating a new Island picture for a mining colony you can visit in the game. To be honest, it’s been a real pain to do (well it’s not totally finished yet, but it will be by the end of the day). I didn’t really plan the picture as much as I should of, I just had a good idea for what I wanted and dived right in, which is normally never a good idea, especially if you are doing a picture that shows a large environment. Still it’s almost done now and it will look nice when it is finished (fingers crossed).

I also received the first build of the game from Dave. There’s only the basic movement rules implemented at the moment, but it’s amazing how much fun it is just moving stuff around on the board. It opens up a lot of other game design ideas I have for other games =). Of course the fact that Dave has everything moving nice and smoothly is also a big bonus and adds greatly to the gaming experience. It also feels a lot more arcadey then I expected it to, I know arcade and spelling games don’t really go together often, but this is definitely going to work. I am really chuffed about how well it’s turning out.

It’s a huge relief to know that what you thought would be a good game idea, does actually end up been a really playable game as no matter how long you work at the game design, until you have it in your grubby little mitts playing around with it you can never be totally sure it will all come together, and trust me, I do spend weeks and weeks working out how the basic game mechanics go together. I’ve often wrote down a game mechanic idea and left it for a couple of years until I could use it in something.

Dave has been beavering away coding again the whole week and keeps telling me about “classes” and other things that I don’t really know about to be honest (I am an artist after all ). We are also thinking about entering Shuffle Blocks into the Microsoft XNA competition to build a game for Xbox Live, so Dave is getting himself an Xbox 360 for testing purposes of course.

I’ll also start to update the download section with some art work picture from both the games soon, and I’ll tidy that page up as well as I’m doing it.

Well have a good week and see you next week.

Mike.

This entry was posted on 13/06/2008 at 04:36 pm and is filed under Current Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.