26/07/2008 by admin.

Good morning everyone,
  Just to let you know that I have opened the Beta testing open to everyone (well it already was really, it’s just that I wanted people to sign up to the News Letter for various reasons which I will explain later), so if you want to try the game out just go to http://www.badbumble.com/6.html and read the instructions for downloading the game.

  To be honest I’m a bit annoyed by a couple of ranting e-mails I received from a couple of people complaining about having to sign up to the News Letter first before downloading the game.

  Now I admit that I’ve not had a lot of sleep for the past couple of weeks (so I apologize for the rant that is about to come) as working a 40 hour day job and then coming home to continue working on what is basically a gift for people does take it out on you, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had great fun doing GoGo Digger, but it still slowly kills you when you are only getting 5 hours sleep a night for a couple of weeks, just so you hit a dead line you promised people you don’t even know (can you tell I’m a little bit tired and miffed about this).

  So to get e-mails complaining about having to sign up for a news letter I find very strange and a bit rude to be honest.  The reasons I wanted to get people to sign up for the News Letter (still) are:

1)  I didn’t really want the Beta version flying around the Internet until it had been fully tested (I know, this is what I’ve just done, but I felt I needed to show that there wasn’t any thing sinister behind getting people to sign up to the News Letter).

2)  It allows us to e-mail people when we did updates to GoGo Digger, or if we did special versions of the game like Christmas and Halloween versions (which where planned, not sure that will happen now).

3)  It gave the team a bit of a moral boost knowing that people are interested in the games as even a simple game like GoGo Digger still takes a huge commitment not only by me, but every one else in the team.

  So anyway, that’s my rant over with and I do apologize to all the other people that have just sat there, happy, waiting for the game to be released and been nice and polite about it, but I just needed to blow off some steam I think.

  So anyway, I hope you go to the website and try the game out and let me know what you think of it in the forums, but please don’t spread it around until the game has finished Beta testing, when the game is finished you can pass it on to anyone you like in fact I encourage it =)

 
Thanks and have a good weekend (I’m off to bed to catch up on some lost sleep),

Mike.

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25/07/2008 by admin.

Hello,

  Well it’s been a really busy week for everyone this week.  The big news of course is that GoGo Digger is finished and will be released for play testing this today at 8pm GMT.

  I’ll be sending the link to the download location to all the News Letter subscribers with the password for the forum to leave messages, feed back and any bugs you may find, which I hope there will not be too many as the game has been played a LOT over the past few weeks and has been tweaked a fair bit during the week and with it using the Torque engine, it should be solid and stable on most peoples machines.

Weekending 25/07/08

GoGo Digger:

  What more can I say?  The game is finished now and unless someone finds something seriously wrong with the game, it should / will be released next Friday as Gold.

   Isaac has been busy the whole week making changes to the game, be it new graphics or some other little tweak one of us as thought of and has also worked some long hours as well.

  Trevor also redid the game over riff for me as well, which fits a lot better in the game.  It’s really hard trying to explain what I want from a musical point of view as I’m not musical at all and until the game is close to been completed it’s really hard to tell what will work with the game so I am happy that the music came out as well as it did and I’ve had the main theme tune in my head the whole morning which must be a good sign.

  Finally I would just like to say a big thank you to both Isaac and Trevor for working so hard on this project as without them, it would never of been done.  This is especially true of Isaac, as had it not been for his total enthusiasm to work on a project with me, GoGo Digger would have sat on my hard drive gathering dust.

Shuffle Blocks:

  To be honest, with GoGo Digger going live this week, I’ve not had a chance to do anything with Shuffle Blocks, but that will change next week (I promise Dave, honest mate ).

  Dave has been knocking away at the project and has added the word list and target words as well as all the different types of blocks in the game.

  There should be another build next week, so there will be more information then and I’ll be knocking stuff out for the game next week, which will be kind of nice to get back to work on this project again as I think it will be a really nice game when it’s finished.

Right that’s it from me this week, which isn’t too bad seeing as I’ve posted 3 times this week.  So have a good weekend, download the game and let me know what you think of it.

Cheers,

Mike.

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25/07/2008 by admin.

Hello every one,
Just a really quick update to let everyone know that GoGo Digger is finished and ready for testing!
So if you want to try the game, but not yet subscribed to the News Letter, you should do it today as the offer to be a Game Tester will end on Sunday night at midnight.
I’ve also updated the GoGo Digger web page a bit with new graphics, so have a quick look and any feed back from you guys is more then welcome.
I’ll update the blog later today as I need to get to work (bills to pay).

Thanks,

Mike.

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23/07/2008 by admin.

Just a quick update for everyone.
I’ve added a new GoGo Digger wall paper to the Downloads section. I’ve also been told that some people are having problems signing up to the news letter? If you are and you want to join (it’s the only way to get to be a test on the game and to officially download the game) then send an e-mail (from the e-mail address you want adding) to mike.moore@badbumble.com with a header that says News Letter in it so I can see it straight away and I will add you to the list by hand.

The game by the way, is feeling really nice and it’s been a fun couple of weeks for the GoGo Digger project just adding little touches here and there and cleaning up little things that just don’t seem important during the project, but you notice when everything comes together and you see something and think “that’s not really right”, so you change it.

Stuff still to do before Friday:

1. Create an EMUL for the installer (you know those software agreements that you never, ever read that stop the company from getting into trouble if anything goes wrong with the software), which is a lot harder then I expected and certainly a lot duller then I expected (and I didn’t have high hopes at the start).
2. I’ve still got to sort out a protective area on the site, to upload the game too so the play testers can download it.
3. Do a little icon for the program.
4. Try getting as much publicity for the game as I can.

If you guys are regulars on any game sites that might be interested in a new free ware game, it would be nice if you could pass the message on / link to Badbumble or even if you could recommend any sites (e-mails to mike.moore@badbumble.com), that would be a help.

Right then, that’s it for me, for now. I guess I should get back to the EMUL (at least it will make me sleepy for bed time).

All the best,

Mike Moore
www.badbumble.com

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18/07/2008 by admin.

Hello again.

It’s been a good, busy week for me this week with a lot of work been done (nearly all of it on GoGo Digger). This is the best time for me in the project cycle as the game is almost complete. It’s in a late Beta stage at the moment, so if you didn’t know better you would think the game was complete.

To this end, I’m now going to be looking for Beta Testers for the game and ten lucky testers will get their names immortalised in the game for ever, for every one to see (maybe more testers, if there’s room on the Credits Screen). So all you need to do is sign up to the news letter and I will send out an invite to everyone on the list with the opportunity to test the game out. All been well, the game will be ready for testing on the 25^th July 2008 (as long as nothing nasty happens between now and next Friday).

Weekending 18/07/08

GoGo Digger:
I’ve been working hard on GoGo Digger pretty much the whole week and there’s been a lot done.

I’ve re-build the 3D font again for all the text in the game.

I’ve done all the major sound effects as well (different sounds for the bombs, explosions, bonus collections and other stuff). I’m hoping that I’ve done all the sound effects, but until they are implemented, it’s hard to say for sure that all the bases are covered and the sounds work as expected.

I’ve redone all the menu’s so that everything reads a lot better on screen and things like together better.

Isaac has been away for a couple of days, so when he came back, he had a pile of e-mails from me rambling on about asking him to add this or that feature and to swap the graphics for the new graphics because they look a bit nicer. He has already implemented a few things already.

This is probable the best time in the full project as everything is coming together now, the game is 99% done and you can see everything and it plays without any bugs (fingers crossed) and now you can just add little touches to the game to give it the little bit more polish.

Shuffle Blocks:

To be honest, most of my time has been taken up with GoGo Digger this week, but I did finish the explosion which looks nice an cinematic.

Dave has been busy testing the code out and the rough game play mechanics to see just how hard the basic game is, which presented a couple of surprises to just how hard the game can be and how we will need to create some rules on how often certain letters appear. I was half expecting this to be honest, but I was surprised at how hard this game can get after adding just a couple of special blocks.

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11/07/2008 by admin.

Welcome back again.

Well after 2 days I’ve finally got rid of the electrical smoke smell (not sure if that’s a good or bad thing) and I’ve spent the last 2 days solid, scan disking the hard drives (yeah, I’ve got a lot of hard disk space and most of it is full of rubbish or years old work) and I’ve lost a couple of files which has set me back a bit.
You may have noticed that I’ve set up the forums on the board. I spent almost a full day trying to get my own forum working, but gave up n the end due to lack of time (I’ll set my own up after Shuffle Blocks is finished) and went with “CreateMyBB”, which is why there’s adverts on there, but as a stop gap, it seems fine and is really easy to set up. So I apologize about the adverts on the forum (I take no responsibility for them), but it’s part of the “CreateMyBB” and I think it’s a small price to pay to get a forum up and running. At the moment, you have to register to enter text on the forum, but I’m willing to change that if enough people e-mail me asking to. It’s just that I don’t want random people just posting rubbish / offensive stuff on there and getting people to register is a good way of stopping that.

Weekending 11/07/08
GoGo Digger:
As I’ve said, it’s been a bit of a bad week for me with the aftermath of my PC throwing a wobbler and losing a couple of file which I’ve got to replace again now. The main one is rebuilding the 3D font again for the menus. Fingers crossed and if I don’t get any distractions, I’m hoping to get all the menus finished this weekend. Isaac has been looking at Luck 7 this week just to get a rough idea for the project and already has a rough, playable demo up and running.

Shuffle Blocks:
While the PC was off sorting itself out, I went off looking for my Pyromania CD’s (a collection of real explosions that had been filmed (used in a lot of TV shows like Babylon 5, Star Trek and I think even Star Wars)) I bought ages ago and never really used so I went hunting through the house looking for them. After several hours I found them stuck in an old moving box along with a load of old PC and Dream Cast games (just need to find my Dream Cast now, I’ve forgotten just how good the Dream Cast was for games).

Dave has re-writing the core game routines now which has reduced the size of the game by about 25% and made it more flexible so we can add extra features with out too much trouble. He had to take some time off to relax a bit as he’s not feeling 100% at the moment, but he will soon be back hammering away at the keyboard. Hope you feel better soon mate.

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06/07/2008 by admin.

Just a quick note to let you know that the forums are up and running now, so feel free to have a look around and post any questions you may have.

Thanks,

Mike.

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04/07/2008 by admin.

Hello again and I hope you had a good week.

It’s been a bad week for me as my main PC stopped working and I’ve been waiting for new bits for most of the week, which too be fair has allowed me to take a bit of a rest as it slowly takes it out of you working a full time day job and then coming home to sit at your computer and do another 3 hours before going to bed to do it all again.

So because I now have some free time, I’ve been sat playing “Puzzle Quest” on the PSP (great game (on any format (PC/DS/Wii), but is starting to get a bit repetitive now after 10+ hours) and Sega Rally on the 360 which is okay (still not a patch on the Arcade version of Sega Rally 2). I also got Blue Dragon for the 360 as well (the 360 games where going cheap in the local super market), but when I opened the box, the game disks were missing! I also ordered Bio Shock off e-bay, but that went missing in the post (thinking about it, I’ve not had that great a week really).

Still I’m back up and running again now so I don’t have any excuses for been lazy now, but I can still smell a faint electrical smoke smell =/

Weekending 4/07/08

GoGo Digger:

It’s been a bit of a bad week for me this week with regards to both projects as my main PC died on me and I’ve only just got it up and working again. What work I have done this week has mainly been looking around for sound effects and some menu design / polish work. Trevor has sent another couple of riffs for the game and Isaac has been busy adding finishing details and looking at the next game.

Shuffle Blocks:

I’ve not really had much of a chance to work on this game except for finding some nice sound effects for the game.

Dave has been busy re-writing the core game routines to make everything run smoother and require less processing power.

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