I’m back at last and there’s lots of news.

19/07/2009 by admin.

Hello,

  I’m back!!  Sorry for not blogging the last couple of weeks, but I’ve had my head down working hard on the games, trying to get everything finished up as much as possible.

  Nearly all the work has been aimed at getting our games onto the iPhone and iPod, which to be honest isn’t that hard as I always designed the games with just the mouse been used for all the control system (I did this because when ever I watched my Dad play on his computer, he would never touch the keyboard (often it would be left on the floor of his computer desk)).  So the games are not too difficult to transfer across and the only thing to really think about was the reduced screen size on the iPhone / iPod (320×480 screen size compared to at the very least 640×480 on the PC and MAC).  So some clever redesign work was needed for some of the games, but not that much.

  I’m also on Twitter by the way (http://twitter.com/BadBumble) if you want to follow me and this way there’s less chance of missing out on some of the stuff I’ve done during the weeks and if you want to ask me any questions, just twitter me (it also makes me feel like I’ve got lots of friends and important =))

  I’ve also been playing around with Unity MAC and iPhone versions and it seems really, really nice.  I was able to get a little 3D rolling ball game prototype done featuring a character that looks a fair bit like Homer Simpson running around a 3D city / maze in a couple of hours.  So when the dust finally settles done, I’m going to have a really good go at Unity and see what sort of game I can come up with.

 

 Speaking of iPhone games, I’ve been playing a lot of games just lately on my iPhone.  Off the top of my head I can recommend the following:

Rope’n’Fly ($1):

It’s a Spider Man style game where you swing from building, to building and try not to smash into the ground.  Theres also a lite version available.

Moon Drop ($1):

Another simple little game that get’s really active.  Try to land the astronauts on the Moon base by pressing near them, to deflect their flight/landing path.

Draw Racer ($1):

The idea is to draw your driving path around a race track and then your car will follow it.  You just have to make sure you don’t draw to fast or you will slide of around corners.  Simple, but fun game.

Glpha (Free):

It’s a clone of Joust by Williams.  It’s a nice smooth and fast version of the game and its free!

Jetman (Free):

For some reason I’ve played this game for ages and I have no idea why.  Basically you just fly down a corridor dodging objects.  Your only control is a single button to fire your jetpac.  Graphics are simple, but it’s smooth enough and I played it for hours on and off.  I would never buy it, but for free, give it a try.

Star Trigon ($1):

A Namco game where you jump from planet to planet trying to capture little aliens.  Simple, fun little game.  Not sure if this was a special sale price or not, but I wouldn’t pay much more for it.

Harbor Master ($1):

I’ve played this game a LOT.  You have to draw paths for the incoming ships, so that they can dock safely in to harbour.  The new update includes a new island that has pirates.

BaseBall Slugger ($1):

This was on sale or else I would never have bought it and I would have missed out on a great little game.  Basically you just have to hit the ball out of the stadium as many times as possible and every time you miss the ball or you cause a foul, you lose one of your ten lives.  Sounds dull (I know, it’s rounders), but it plays really well and is nicely polished.

 

Weekending 19/07/09

Solitaire Siege:

  Well there’s been loads of new things going on with Solitaire Siege.  It’s almost finished now and I’m expecting it to be ready to send to Apple next week all been well.  There’s been lots of little set backs over the last 3 weeks from not been able to get iTGB to build the game correctly (that took a whole week to fix in it self),  too getting the loading times down to a half decent level, where at the moment it now loads on my iPhone in under 12 seconds and it’s even quicker on my iPod.  Isaac has it now so that it automatically saves the game after every level, so it’s nice and easy to quit out of the game if needed and come back in again later, which is always nice for a portable game.

  At the moment, there’s about two bugs left to catch and Isaac is busy optimizing the game to get some more speed out of the game and I’m expecting a new build later today from him.

  We are still adding little polishing touches to the game, simply because as your play testing it, you start to think of new stuff to add or that may improve things slightly, so you try it and if it works then that’s great, and if it doesn’t you take it back out again.  So when you finally get a chance to play the game for yourselves, it should be a nice, solid game which is nice and smooth to play.

 

GoGo Digger (iPhone/iPod):

  There’s been a fair bit of work been done on GoGo Digger as well in the past couple of weeks.  It’s just been me doing the designs for the game (it’s going to be a much improved version of the PC & MAC version) and I’ve got the basic graphical design down now and I’ve just finished building the barrel copter you fly when you go to different level.  Below are a few mock up screens of the iPhone/iPod version, they are all using in game graphics but are what I’ve knocked up in Photoshop just to give me a better idea of how to do everything on the iPhone/iPod.  So don’t be too surprised if the finished game appears slightly different.

 

  There’s actually a fair few new additions that I have planned for the game and it will be interesting to see how well everything plays out with the game, but I’m making sure that the overall style of the game is not effected by these new features as I think the game itself is ideal for the iPhone/iPod and after all the current version of this game came out on mobile phones anyway (the very original version I made came out on the Amiga, written in AMOS almost 20 years ago).

 

Lucky 7 (iPhone/iPod):

  I’m taking a slightly different approach with the iPhone/iPod version of Lucky 7 as the desktop version have a much bigger screen, I’ve had to play around a bit with the game for the iPhone/iPod.  The basic game play is still the same, but due to the nature of the iPhone/iPod, I’ve made it more of an arcade style of game (at least for the main game mode) as I personally think when you play games on mobile devices, you want quick, short games that you can play while waiting in line in a queue, but they should have lots of replay value to the games as well.  The picture is a mock up for me to work out the screen layout, it’s using the in game gf/x’s so it will look the same when it’s released, but the actual layout could change depending on how well everything plays out.

  As long as we can keep the speed of the game going on the iPhone, it will be a great game to play and there’s been a couple of games that have just come out recently that have come pretty close to the style of game that is Lucky 7, so I would like to get this game out before anyone else does.  Wouldn’t want anyone to think I was copying someone else’s ideas.

  You may also notice that the games have a graphical connection through out all the games in that they all have Star Balls and Land Mines.  This is just simply because I want the player to be able to play any of our games and knock basically what these things will do.  It’s the same kind of thing as Nintendo has done with the Mario games.  You know that collecting a mushroom is going to cause you to grow in size, and if it’s good enough for Nintendo, then it’s good enough for me =)

 

  Right, I’ve got to get back to work now as there’s lots, and lots of stuff for me to do and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter if you want up to the minute updates and just to ask me stuff and please feel free to give any feed back you may have about any of this.

 

Take care,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

http://twitter.com/BadBumble

 

 

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

Unity ROCKS and loading time problems with Solitaire Siege

14/06/2009 by admin.

Hello,

  I hope you are all having a good week.

It’s going to be a really quick blog today I’m afraid as I feel really ill at the moment and I think I’m going to go straight to bed for an early night and try to shake it off.

  It’s been a fairly poor week all round this week I’m afraid.  The best part of this week is that I’ve been playing around with a new engine called Unity (www.unity3d.com) and it’s great.  I’ve already bought the Main part of it and I’m looking at the iPhone add for it now.  After using the Torque iTGB, I wasn’t expecting that much from Unity to be honest seeing as TGB is basically as simple as you can get (or so I assumed), but Unity is 1000 times better from what I can see.  Within 20 minutes I had a large textured terrain covered with trees and grass that blows in the wind and I was able to run around it.  All this with just watching a couple of little videos of the site to get me started.

  I spent yesterday trying out the iPhone module for it and that is also really, really nice as well.  Some of the demos are really impressive and you can even try the iPhone game without even sending it to the iPhone, you just use the iPhone to control the game and the MAC sends a (reduced size, but then enlarged so it looks a bit blocky) video feed back to the iPhone, which is really handy for when you want to try the control system out without having to constantly build the app in Unity / Xcode.

  So I’m really thinking now that once the games I have planned for the iPhone using iTGB are done, I’m going to move over to Unity for doing iPhone stuff at least.  I’m still going to be using TGB for Lucky 7 as that game is almost finished and it would be daft to not finish it as it’s a smart, fun game.

  Also, Unity allows you to build your games for the web, so don’t be to surprised if in the future, you start to see some little test games popping up on here.

 

Weekending 14/06/09

Solitaire Siege:

  I’ve spent what seems like most of this week trying to get Solitaire Siege to load up quickly.  I’ve spent about 3-4 days on this so far and I’ve got it down from around about 100 seconds, down to about 42 - 43 seconds, which is still way, way too long.  It should be loading up in under 20 seconds.  I’ve tried everything I can think of from converting as much of the gf/x as possible from PNG files to PVR files which knock the size down and can be used straight away by the iPhone / iPod with out having to mess around with them like it does with PNG files.  The down side is they can look really bad on clean / cartoon images (which is most of my graphics in the game).  If you have ever compressed a SPG file down real low, then that’s the same kind of effect you’ll get with PVRs.  It’s fine for photos, but not for nice, clean 2D sprites.  This took 2 days to do and it didn’t make any difference to the loading times, so I’m going to change them back.

  I’ve got a video of the game in action now, but I still need to look into how to convert it for YouTube.

 

Shuffle Blocks:

  Dave is back on course for doing the XBOX port of the code again and I’ve done a little bit more on the gf/x side of things, but with been on call this week, I’ve been going to bed early in case I get called out during the night, which really eats into your time during the week, but saying that, I’ve almost finished updating the gf/x now.  Just a few more renders to do.

  There was one problem we had this week of trying to convert the new font over for the game.  Dave spent almost two days trying to get it to go in and the fault was because I had a couple of characters slightly higher then the others, so it wouldn’t import correctly.  It’s amazing how such a stupid little things like that can cause such a huge problem =/

 

Well I’m afraid that’s it from me for this week as I really need to go to bed now as I’m ready to drop, so I hope you have a good week and I’ll see you next week.

 

Take care,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

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

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

Posted in Solitaire Siege, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | No Comments »

If music be the food of love…

04/04/2009 by admin.

Hello again,

  Hope you are enjoying your weekend.

  Just a quick update to let you all know that I’ve updated the Solitaire Siege and Lucky 7 pages with some sample tunes from the games.

  There’s seven tunes for Lucky 7 (I had to do seven with a title like that) and there’s two samples for the music from Solitaire Siege.  I really recommend that you download them and give them a try as they are really, really nice.  I’ve cut the music down to around the 60 second mark on most of the tunes and reduced the bit rate down to 96 bit (I think, I’m not an audio guy) so try to save some space, but the actual in games tune sound a lot better and clearer then these samples, but it will give you a really good indication of the quality of the games we are going for.

  Of course all music is copyrighted by Thomas Renshaw and used with permission.

So what are you waiting for, go to www.badbumble.com and to the relevant game page and give your ears a treat!

  Please do leave any comments you may have here as I’m sure Tommy would like to know your option (as would the rest of the team).

 

Thanks and enjoy the rest of your weekend,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Solitaire Siege, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | No Comments »

Zombie leg and Solitaire Siege

20/03/2009 by admin.

Hello everyone,

  Sorry again for not updating the blog lately, but I’m still all over the place with my dodgy leg.  At the moment it looks like a zombie has been sucking at it (there’s a big 6 inch oval / circle shape on the back of my leg with no skin on it and it’s all shades of red, yellow and green (and it’s a bit crusty)) and it is really painful.  I’ve also got a swollen ankle as well.  I’m really having some great look at the moment.

  I now understand why the Eskimo’s have so many words for snow.  By the time I left Canada, I must have had at least 14 words for snow and they where ALL swear words.  It was funny coming home as one of the drivers on the Grey Hound was new to the route and got lost a couple of times =)

  Here are a couple of pictures I took while I was in Canada.

 

  Because of the leg trouble I’ve not been able to really work on the games that much to be honest as I need to have my leg raised all the time and that prevents me from working at the desk (it’s hard to concentrate when every 10-20 mins you get a shooting pain in your legs).  I have been doing stuff on my laptop, but the way I have to sit means I can’t really use the mouse / tablet very well, so I’ve been doing art just using the keyboard in Photoshop (painting pixel by pixel), it kind of reminds me of how I used to do art on the Commodore 64 and Spectrum 48K (yes I’m old).  So my graphical style has changed from what is needed for Lucky 7 and Shuffle Blocks, so I can’t do anything for them.

  So I’ve come up with a nice little game for the iPhone which I’ve talked Isaac and Tommy in to doing with me.  It’s based on a card game (a Solitaire style game), but I’ve got lot’s of extras features for the game that really make the game a lot more friendly and fun to play.  Isaac already had the basic card game written (pure luck), but has started to re-write it has it was an early project he did and his programming skill have improved greatly.  The game is going to be called “Solitaire Siege” and I hope should be finished before the end of next month (it would be a lot sooner, but because of my leg, I can only work for so long before it starts to really hurt).  The current build is only about 25% done and already it’s really good fun to play and there’s no real extras in the game at the moment and if this game does well, we are going to do an updated version of GoGo Digger for the iPhone as well.

  I don’t want to jinx this game, so I’m going to hold back for a week or two before I start to release any screen shots of the game.  I guess a card game isn’t the most interesting game to look at, but it already plays really well and it will only get better and if it does well, then I’m sure we will convert it across to the PC and MAC.

 

 

Weekending 20/3/09

Lucky Seven:

  I’m afraid for the short term, every one is waiting on me as I’m holding everyone up for new gf/x, but everything should be back up and running again in a month, at the latest.  Sorry everyone for that.

 

Shuffle Blocks:

  I had another e-mail of Dave just this morning, he’s just about got everything re-written now so it’s totally modular now so we can plug new stuff into it with out any knock on effects and it’s all nicely done so we can port the code over to other things

 

  Well that’s it really for me this week unless you want me to go on talking about my zombie leg (and I’m sure you don’t want that), so I’m hoping things will be back to normal again for next week in regards to the blog (sorry again for the delay in posting).  So I hope you have a good week and I’ll see you soon.

 

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

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

Holiday from hell.

03/03/2009 by admin.

Hello everyone,

  Sorry everyone for not updating the blog lately, but I’ve been really ill while I’ve been in Canada.  The first full week, I got a huge cold and was laid up in bed.  The second week, my leg swelled up like a balloon and I ended spending four nights in hospital and then having to go back to the hospital every eight hours for over a week to get IV’s to help the infection.  So it’s not been the best holiday ever, but at least I got to spend some time with my wife, even if I was in a lot of pain for most of it.  The $8,000 medical bill has really knocked any shine off the holiday, but I’m hoping my travel insurance will cover it all, but the way my luck is going at the moment, I’m not holding my breath.  It really makes me happy to have the National Health Service in the UK.

  So as you can imagine, I’ve not been able to do anything work wise, but every one else has =)

 

 

Weekending 02/3/09

Lucky Seven:

  Isaac has been knocking up a lot more puzzles for the puzzle mode of Lucky 7 and generally just tidying things up a bit.

 

Shuffle Blocks:

  I’ve had a couple of e-mails from Dave and he now has everything set up into a truly modular frame work so everything is now re-useable and things can be added / removed as needed.  I need to re-jig some of the gf/x for the game, but there should be something show able by the end of the month (fingers crossed)

 

Right, I need to start packing again as I’m travelling back tomorrow to England so I’ve got 40 hours of non-stop travelling to look forward to.

 

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

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

Oh Canada…..

07/02/2009 by admin.

Hello everyone,

  I know I’m a day late and I’m sorry for that, but it’s been none stop for me.  It’s going to be a really short blog I’m afraid as I’ve still got some jet lag and I need to get some sleep before the wife comes home.

  I’m currently in North Canada at the moment visiting my beautiful wife (been married almost 18 months, but only been together for a week) for a month and it’s really, really cold at the moment.  Yesterday it was minus 29 (I’ve never been so cold in all my life, it’s like living in a fridge) and me been a bit stupid went out for a walk.  To be fair, as long as everything is covered up, it’s not too bad, but any bit of flesh that is showing gets hit hard by the cold, I couldn’t feel any of my chins due to the cold, but luckily everything else was covered up so it wasn’t too bad (there’s some places where you just can’t afford the chance of frost bite).  I admit that I looked a bit simple (most people would say retarded,) with my hat with the big flaps that tie under your chin to keep your ears warm and my big thick gloves to keep the cold out, but it kept me warm and I look pretty simple at the best of times anyway, so it’s not a big loss to be fair.

  I just find it funny that as I was leaving the UK, there’s a huge media storm about the bad weather there and it’s nothing compared to the weather here and the locals just tell you to wait till it drops to below -40 and life just carries on as normal.

  I got my iMAC at the weekend and got that all set up, so I’m just about ready to start on iPhone stuff.  

 

Weekending 07/2/09

Lucky Seven:

  Isaac is feeling a lot better now and is back at work on Lucky 7 and is working on the foundation for the puzzle mode of the game and tidying up a few other bits and bobs.

 

  For the other stuff, well to be honest, I’ve got about 220 e-mails to read through what with me spending 2 days travelling and the rest of the days trying to catch up with loss of sleep, but next week will be make to normal again I hope as I should be able to work during the day time while my wife is at work.

 

Right it’s time I was off as I need to get a couple of hours sleep and I’ll up date the blog with some photos of the snow covered area here as it looks really nice here.

 

So have a good week and I’ll update every one soon,

 

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

Posted in Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll | 3 Comments »

It can gets expensive if you don’t read the small print =/

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 »

Lucky 7 Quest Mode mock up screen, wall papers and sleepy ramblings.

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 »

New monster picture, Quest Mode and Lightwave

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 »