Net Books, Starting up a business and more Solitaire Siege.

19/04/2009 by admin.

Hello everyone,

  Hope you are all well and happy.

  Well it’s finally a nice sunny day here, bit cold, but there’s a nice clear blue sky overhead and I’m stuck inside working away at the computer =)  It’s been a bit of a hit and miss week for me this week.  I made the mistake of going out shopping with my sister on Easter Monday because she wanted a computer chair.  The one she wanted was in PC World and they only had the display model left, which she got after waiting around for a while for them to find all the other bits.  It then took another 20 minutes for them to find the thing that takes the security disc of the chair so we could take it home.  After getting it home, I had to set it up for her (it’s a gaming style chair with speakers in (which I though was horrible, but my sister found to be really comfy)) and I find out that it’s broken (the display and speakers don’t work), so we take it back and have to hang around again to get a refund.  Anyway to cut a long story short, we went to another few computer shops looking and I’m getting so fed up, I’m losing the will to live.  Any way we end up in Comet (a big electrical store in the UK) and I leave my sister to go off looking while I started to look at the Net Books.  Yeah, I ended up buying a little 8.9” Toshiba Net Book.  I had a memory stick with the latest builds of the games on and I was trying then on the display models and the games all rang really well on them so I though that it would be nice if I ever have to give any presentations of the games to be able to show people them running on a low spec Net Book.  I really like the Net Books to be honest, I can fit it in the top part of my rucksack with a USB DVD writer and all the cables without any problems, and it’s also really light and just really neat.  It’s like using a semi-high end lap top from 2005, just a lot smaller and neater.

  I also went to a Enterprise Business Show which gave me lot’s of useful information about setting up my own business so that everything is above board and I know I’m not breaking any laws or not paying any taxes I should be paying.  There was also a few talks / seminars which where interesting to listen to.  A lot didn’t really relate to setting up a small games studio, but it was still interesting and it’s nice to know that what I’m doing seems to be the correct way of going about it all and everyone I talked to seem to think I had a good chance of succeeding (especially after showing them the current build of Lucky 7), but it’s still a huge mind field of forms and stuff I need to fill in.

Weekending 19/04/09

Solitaire Siege:

  From a project front, it’s been a really good week for us.  Solitaire Siege is really coming along now.  The combo system is almost complete (just the reward system to finish on it) and nearly all the bugs are gone now.  I’ve just finished the graphics for two possible ways on how we are going to deal will the player picking up too many special cards.  At the moment, you are limited to four of each type of card (weapon Cards and Mercenary Cards) and there going to come a time when the player is going to be able to pick up another card, but not have the space in the deck for it.  So we have to allow the player to either just remove the card (so the player can still continue), use the new card straight away or give the player the chance to use one of the existing cards to free up some space.  It’s not a big deal, but it is an important element to think about.

  Another feature that Isaac has just added to the game and to be honest I wasn’t sure about when he told me about it is that the invading clone army will shoot back at you if you miss an available card.  It works really well and really makes the player concentrate when playing the game a lot more.  The reason I wasn’t sure about adding it was if a player had a strategy which would involve leaving a card free, but I can’t think of a reason for doing that.

  I’ve also been working on the comic strip idea for the game advertising, which I’ll show off next week all been well (I’m on call out next week so I can’t be sure what time I’ll have free and I normally go to bed a bit earlier just in case I do get called out on a night time / early morning), but the first idea is almost done.

  At the moment a lot of my time is taken up play testing the new builds to make sure that there’s no bugs, it’s good fun, but it makes it hard to get any work done when your playing the game for 10 minutes and the next time you look, two hours have past and it’s time for bed.

  I’m still waiting to get my development license from Apple which may hold things up a bit as we need to know that the game will run okay on the actual iPhone and iPod touch (it works fine on the simulator, but that’s not the real hardware).

  I’ve also updated the web site banner from the Shuffle Blocks logo to the new Solitaire Siege logo and I changed the colour scheme to match as well.  I’m not sure if the banner is a bit too busy or not, but it okay for now.

  I think that’s everything for today, I’m sure there’s other stuff that I’ve done for Solitaire Siege but I can’t for the life of me remember what (old age is really starting to take it’s toll on me now) 

Have a great week and I hope to see you next week.

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

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