31/01/2009 by admin.

Hello everyone,

  This will be a really quick message this week I’m afraid as I have a lot to do and I’m falling a sleep at he keyboard here.

  Been a pretty bad week for me and very expensive.  I’ve basically been prototyping up GoGo Digger for the iPhone.  I know you wouldn’t think that there was that much work to do on it to convert it across, but just working out how to display everything correctly on screen (you are going down to 320*480 instead of 640*480, so you are losing half your screen) and you have the control system to think about and what’s the best way to do it.  I also want to clean up and update the gf/x a bit for the game.

  So with this in mind, I spent most of the week downloading all the latest versions of TGB, iTGB, X-Code and the iPhone SDK.  I also went out and bought the latest version of the MAC OS (Leopard), as I know that you need that to run the iPhone SDK.  The one thing I didn’t know was that I also need an Intel based processor in the MAC or else you can’t install the iPhone part of the SDK.  After about an hour of cursing, swearing and punching the desk (I’ve got a really bad temper when it comes to computers (people I can keep calm with unless I don’t like you in the first place, but computers, I soon see red)), I calmed down and know I had to bite the bullet and buy another MAC.  After a lot of web surfing, I ended up buying the base model of the 20’ iMAC, and I’ll upgrade the memory myself up to 4 gig as it should only cost me about £50 quid.  This iPhone development thing is really costing me a fortune now and I just hope I can earn my money back from it with the iPhone version of GoGo Digger.

  Next week I’m off to Canada for a month to visit the wife (we have been marred for 16 months and we have only been together for a single week, so I’m really excited about this trip even if it is -40 there), so I’ve been trying to get the laptop ready, which means basically rebuilding it again from scratch, which is taking ages.  It’s a real pain trying to find all the CD’s and manuals / serial codes for every thing, not to mention all the Window’s updates and video codec’s again (I really hate computers with a passion).

  Also on another random note, I just bought the new MicroSoft Blue Laser Explorer Mouse (DUH!! I’ve just almost blinded myself looking under the mouse for that name of it, that blue light is really bright!).  Its suppose to be the all new, singing, super duper mouse that you can use anywhere (including a “Park Bench” (they keep mentioning the park bench which just seems a little strange to me, maybe there’s a niche market of people that sit on park benches with laptops that need ultra fine control where the touch pad just isn’t good enough, but I’m betting there’s more people with shinny black desks that don’t want to have to use a mouse mat)).  Well it’s pretty poor when I try using it on a pure black desk.  It jumps around constantly.  Stick it on top of a magazine and it’s really, really nice, but on a dark, shinny black desk and you can forget it.  Maybe I need to swap my nice comfy chair for a park bench?

Weekending 30/1/09

Lucky Seven:

  I’ve been doing a couple of little sketches for the robot character, which I’m still not happy with.  Every time I draw it, it just doesn’t feel right.  It’s either to high tech looking or not evil looking enough.  The basic graphical idea / theme for all the games is to have a kind of steam punk / cartoon feel style feel to them.  Everything is powered by steam / gears / pistons and mechanical contraptions and weird flying boats and stuff (yeah I know, a bit strange, but it gives me plenty of freedom to do what ever I want, yet gives it a fairly fresh feel to it at the same time).

  Isaac has been really ill this week so there’s not been much happening really.  I warned Isaac to take it easy and get better before he starts working on the games again as your health has got to come first. 

Shuffle Blocks:

  Tommy has done another track for the game which is really nice.  I wasn’t totally sure about it at first, but I kept listening to it for well other an hour while I was working and it actually works really well, it’s not in your face at all, but once you start listening to it you start to hear other melodies in there which I didn’t pick up on before (if that makes sense).

  Dave has been working on the engine so he can port it across to other platforms if needed, basically making everything modular so it can be slotted into later projects and the like, at least I think that’s what he was explaining to me (it’s late and my head hurts).  Dave has also been trying to build an iPhone development kit as well from spare PC parts (a MAC clone?), but doesn’t seem to be getting that fair and it sounds like more trouble then it’s worth.

  Right then, it’s getting late and I need to be up early for the iMAC to come (I’ll be gutted if I miss it) and at least I can use the old MAC G5 as a Linx test machine and port the games over for Linx as well (may as well make the most of it I guess).

  I’ll still post about the same time again next week, but don’t really expect a lot of progress next week as I’ll be travelling for over 40 hours straight to get to Canada, so that’s going to be almost two days lost (planes and the Grey Hound and a lot of waiting around).

  Any way, have a good week and I hope I’ll see you next week and before I forget, thank you to every one that has been signing up to the blog and it’s okay to leave comments or ask questions if you want to.

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Shuffle Blocks, GoGo Digger, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | No Comments »

24/01/2009 by admin.

Hello,

  How are you?  I hope you are well.

Well it’s been a really hectic week for me, this week.  The day job has been none stop with early starts almost every day.  So when I have been doing game work on the night time, I’ve been half dead (like I am now) and I’ve been making a few stupid mistakes or going off on wild tangents, but it’s not all bad and I do find it fairly relaxing doing the graphics.

  Well you may have noticed that I added a couple of new wall papers to the Lucky 7 page and the logos and full name of the game.  Talking about the name of the game, I’m still not sure if I should stick the GoGo name in to the title or not.  He will be in the game, but that would be one really long title (Gogo Lucky 7: Escape from Monster Island), so I think I will leave it as it is now as it’s already long enough as it is.  It took me almost the whole weekend to get those two wall papers done (along with other little gf/x jobs) as I had to redo the logos again as I didn’t save the original layers (I’m a big, daft, fool for not doing that), but looking on the bright side, I should never need anything as big as the current resolution you on the wall papers.  The main reason for do the wall papers where that I wanted to play with my new copy of LightWave and this was a good excuse and I wanted to show what the overall graphical style for the game is without showing too much of the game off (it actually doesn’t show anything of the game off except for a couple of the monsters in the game).

  Speaking of LightWave, you know how I just bought the upgrade last week (did I mention that (wink)), well I just got an e-mail / advert telling me that because Newtek Europe is now 10 years old and the new official (free) update of LightWave V9.6 has just come out, for a few extra pounds you can get the software LWCAD V3 with the new bundle (to buy this by itself is about £400), so as you can imagine I was a bit gutted, but used to this kind of thing as when ever I buy anything nice, it either gets updated with a new model or drops right down in price.  Anyway to cut a long story short the really nice lady at Newtek said that she would see if she could help me out as I bought my update so close to the new promotional deal.  I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t happen to me a lot and most companies don’t want to know me once they have my money, so I am really, really impressed by NewTek’s customer services and I already rated LightWave very highly.  I think NewTek have a customer for life with me.

  It was also my birthday this week, but been on call out for work this week I couldn’t even go for a birthday drink in case I got called out and I had to drive (I wont even have a single drink if I’m driving), but that’s okay when you get as old as me, you don’t want to celebrate your birthday that much and all the candles on the cake would be a huge fire hazard =)

Weekending 23/1/09

Lucky Seven:

  So what have I done on Lucky 7 this week?  Let’s see, I updated the web page for the game a bit and added a couple of wallpapers from the game, which I hope you like and download.  If nothing else, it will give you an idea for the overall look and feel for the game.

  I’ve also finished the little 2D icons for the Quest Mode Level Selection of the game, which to be honest, may change slightly once the rest of the style / theme of that screen has been finalised.  Most of them are animated to help the player understand what each one of them represents.  Actually each one of them represents a different rule or feature of the level which can be added to the level, so by just quickly looking at the icons, the player can get a good feel of the difficulty of the level.

  This is a rough mock up of the Quest Mode level selection.  It uses real in game graphics and is mainly just for Isaac and myself to work out the correct sizes and positions for everything.  Making sure that we are able to give the player enough information without cluttering up the screen or scaring the player off because it looks to complex, which in itself is harder then it seems as when you design something, you already know what everything does, so it already makes perfect sense to you, but a new, fresh pair of eyes will point out all the weaknesses in your design.

  Any way, Isaac has got all this in the game and has the basic foundations in so when you complete a level, it unlocks the surrounding levels for the player to try (which should allow the player to keep on playing without getting stuck on a level and make it really hard for us to get the difficulty level right as the player can and properly will go off in an unexpected direction).

  I guess I should explain a bit more about what you are looking at.  The top part is the basic level map where each block represents a level (the colours of the blocks also have a meaning).  You noticed that most of the blocks have a glass window effect around them, well this means that, that level is currently unavailable to the player and must be unlocked.  The blocks with the gold frames around them are special bonus rounds that will unlock / rewards the player.

  Isaac has been out of contact for most of the week as he has been away on a business trip, but knowing Isaac, he has found time to work on the game.

  Tommy has sent some sound effects for the game and they sound really good, and that’s without hearing them in the game, so when they are implemented into the game, they should really, really add to the game.

Shuffle Blocks:

  To be honest, I’ve not had any time to work on this game, but Dave and Tommy has.  Tommy has done a really nice tune for the game, which I listened to for well over 50 minutes  looped, without realising it, so it will be great for a word game where you don’t want to be distracted by an annoying tune.  It’s really nice.

  Dave has been busy with sick kids, trying to sort out a MAC development solution for himself and various code “house keeping” on Shuffle Blocks (which went way over my head when he was explaining it to me, but it will make the other games a lot easier to do and make new features for Shuffle Blocks a lot easier to do).

Well I’m falling a sleep at the keyboard again (which I’m going to use as my excuse for any spelling mistakes and mindless ramblings that I may have done in this post), so I’m calling it a night now (I am getting old after all).  Of course, if you have any questions feel free to add your comments and I’ll be more then happy to reply back.

So have a good week and I hope to see you next week

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Shuffle Blocks, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | No Comments »

17/01/2009 by admin.

Hello again,

  I hope you are all well.

Well this week has been a bit of a stop / start week for me.  The day job has been pretty busy this week and then I’ve been getting call outs from family members to sort out their computers.  It can be a real pain sometimes been the computer geek of the family.

On the bright side, I finally got my nice new copy of LightWave installed and working Thursday night.  So I spent the whole night and a fair bit of the following morning playing with it.  The hair plug in is great fun and I seem to be getting the hang of it pretty quickly and the speed increase from the old version is huge.  Saying that, I’ve spent about 4 hours tonight trying to get the monster to render out again, I don’t know what I did, but I kept causing LightWave to crash every time single time I rendered the hair.  I got it sorted in the end, but I’m been really careful now as I don’t want to lose my work =)

Weekending 16/1/09

Lucky Seven:

  When I have been able to work on the game, I’ve mainly been doing the menu gf/x for the Quest Mode level selection and lots of little 2D animations and icons for it.

  You know the stuff that you don’t think twice about until you have to do it.  It’s actually a lot harder to do icons (well meaningful icons) then I expected and to be honest I’m not sure I’ve totally succeeded.  For example I’ve got to do an icon where you can match the same coloured blocks, which sounds simple enough, but when you only have a 32 by 32 pixel square to work in and you can’t use text.  It’s a lot harder then you think.  I’ve ended up doing an animation where you see a group of three red blocks been selected and then removed and replaced by a set of yellow blocks, which are then selected and replaced by a group of red blocks and the animation is replaced.

  I’ve also been playing with my nice new copy of LightWave and the fun hair plugin for it so I can finish off the new monster from last week.  I’ll attach a picture of it so you can see what it looks like.

  I’m still not totally sure about the colour for it, but it’s basically there and it just needs a bit of tweaking to get it right and I need to finish off the textures for the finger nails and the eyes.

  Isaac has been busy getting all the underlining structure for the Quest Mode scoring system sorted out so that each level will have its own personal best score for each players profile and the total overall score for the player.

  I’m not sure if I’ve really talked about the Quest Mode before with you, but I’ll give you a quick explanation about it now (sorry if I’ve already talked before abut this).

  The idea behind the Quest Mode part of the game is that we have come up with lots of various ways to play the game and to try to cram all the different variations into just a single mode would just confuse the player and that would hurt the overall fun of the game as it’s really important to gently let the player get use to the basic game flow of the game before you start throwing all the different elements into it.  At the same time I don’t want lots of different game mode selections for the player to pick from when they first start the game as I think that could be just as confusing for the player.  I know myself from other programs when you have 10+ options to choose from, you don’t know which one to pick and if you find one you really like, will you be able to find it again?

  So the Quest Mode is our way of gently adding new features slowly and separately to the game so you can get the idea of the new feature by itself all nicely self-contained, so you understand it.  It also allows us to explain the basic game to you in the first couple of levels as a kind of tutorial so you are making progress through the game as you are learning the basics.  The game is easy to play, but it’s still best to explain it so everyone starts out with the same information.  The way the Quest Mode works is that once you clear a level, it will unlock the other levels around it so there should always be another level for the player to play if you are stuck on a level.  At the moment we have room for over 100 levels and we can always add more levels if we need to.  This style of layout also allows us so much freedom in adding new features such as achievements that the player can actually see on the map and go after but, must clear the levels to get that achievement.  We can also unlock game modes (which can be played straight from the main menu) when certain levels have been completed, so after a certain style of game play has been shown off (puzzle style levels for example), that mode can then be played straight from the menu. 

  So basically, it’s just a really neat way of been able to combine everything into a nice neat package which allows us to add new features all the way through the production cycle of the game as and when we need to without too much extra work on our part and we have a much better idea of when to release new modes for the player, which will feel like an added achievement for the player because you have earned the right to play it.  The only down side is that it’s going to be a lot of work grading all the levels so we can place them on the map in the correct position as it’s possible for the player to go off in a totally different direction then what we would expect.

  Tommy is now starting to go through the sound effect list for both the games and it’s a pretty big list to be honest and I know there’s going to be a lot more that we didn’t think about.

I think that’s it for this week, as it’s getting really late and I’ve got to be back up again in just under 4 hours, but you have any questions, suggestions or comments, please feel free and get in touch.

So have a good week and I hope to see you next week

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | 1 Comment »

10/01/2009 by admin.

Hello,

  Happy New Year!!

I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year.  My Christmas was good, but the New Year bit has been a real pain so far, loads of things have gone wrong so far.  You name it, it’s gone wrong, from the normal stuff, such as choppy Internet connection to things just breaking such as my DVD player not been able to play normal DVD’s now, breaking my computer chair (I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself there, but thanks to my cat like reflexives and my fat ass I’m I live to tell the tale), bricking my MP3 player and my LightWave (the 3D software I use) is playing up (well it’s not playing up, but the old version I have doesn’t do hair / fur very well (but the new version does)), so that’s costing me a small fortune to upgrade (which is a good excuse as I’ve been wanting to get the latest version for ages).  So not a great start to the New Year.  On the bright side, Newtec, the company that makes LightWave have an excellent service depart and I can’t fault them at all.  So if you are after a cheap (for 3D software at least) 3D all in one package, have a look at LightWave.  I’ve always liked using LightWave and the service is fantastic from them (sorry that sounded a bit like an advert, but it’s not I just really like the software).

  With it been the holidays, there’s not been a lot done on the game projects to be honest, well, considering it’s been almost 3 weeks, but the Christmas period is a time to spend with family and friends after all, eating lots of chocolate, mince pies and even more chocolates!!!

Weekending 8/1/09

Lucky Seven:

  To be honest, I can’t remember all the things I have done on Lucky Seven during the holidays (I can’t even blame it on drinking because I didn’t get drunk this year (I really need to start making lists, could be a New Year resolution for me)), but the main thing that springs to mind is that I made another monster for the game and got it all animated ready to render out as soon as I get my new copy of LightWave (been told it’s coming on Tuesday).  It’s a cross between a bear and a rabbit.  So it’s got a big fat body with rabbit feet and rabbit ears (it looks better then it sounds, honest).  My wife says it looks like me, I think that’s because of the man boobs I gave it, but I still can’t work out if that was a complement from her or not (if in doubt, I always take it as a complement, it saves a lot sulking and no one like to see a fat man cry *Grin* ).

  Isaac has been putting the finishing touches to the slime attack and added the new gf/x for that which looks a lot nicer now.  He’s also been doing a bit of optimization to make sure everything is running as quick as possible and I need to do a few things as well to help him with that.  Not hard work on my part, just a bit dull, but you can almost turn your brain off and just get on with it.

Shuffle Blocks:

  Tommy has been working on a couple of tunes for the game and Dave has been investigating a possible engine so we can port the game over to the iPhone, mobiles and PDA’s

I think that’s it for now to be honest.  It’s a bit shorter then normal, but that’s because of the holidays and my current destructive nature I’ve seemed to have picked up since the New Year, but it will be back to normal again next week (fingers crossed).

So have a good week and I’ll be posting some pictures next week of the monster and maybe some other bits and bobs.

Thanks and I hope to see you next week,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Shuffle Blocks, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | No Comments »