Starting to get things back on track around here. We’ve been a bit quiet, but things have been bubbling beneath the surface. We’ve got two small projects in the works (Slime Wars & Star Stuff) and a larger project (Puzzle Force Go!) still simmering on that semi-permanent back burner. GDC was a blast and ideas for new projects were had. Music? Puns? Gratuitous clicking? A genre none of us have any experience creating/marketing? Sounds like a success right out the gate! And after too many fumbled replies to “what are you working on now?”, I’ve decided that I really need to polish up the Puzzle Force Go! prototype as a proof of concept. It would be perfect in a 4P cabinet in the Indie section at MAGfest next year. Continue reading

As the artist on my team, the morning after LD submission means my mind is a jumble of old sketches, pixels, and keyframes.  Let me puke it all up in a post so I can remember what I did! Theme to sketch to artwork Our team had so many great ideas for this theme.  Haunted carnival ride, kraken, reverse tomagotchi.  My favorite non-developed idea was the player controlling a vacuum cleaner that chases a dog around the room trying to scare it…anyway. Once we decided on a multiplayer fighting game Monsters…BRAWL! with monster costumes, the ideas rolled in.  I wanted some recognizable monsters but also some that didn’t exist yet (See: moar googly eyes please). Here’s what the transition looked like from my brains to paper to the computer box (left). Now that I had some dudes (dudettes actually.  The skeleton has a little extra rib…so it’s a lady!), I had to pick a style?  Well, I made a paper cutout style and then ended up hating it.  Too flat?  Too poop?  Yes. Very poop.  So I went back and looked at some old Disney animation backgrounds and Samurai Jack backgrounds and got inspired to do 2.5 D…err…or like 2.25 D if ya wanna get specific.   Major breakthrough: Using the tools I know For the characters, I did the outlines in Illustrator and the animating in After Effects.   Yeah, after effects.  Don’t you judge me, I’ll be whatever I wanna do.   In LD 32 I used a new program and ended up nearly setting my computer on fire.  With hate.  So this time I did what I knew and felt like sunshine and puppies.  Some LD’s are for experimenting.  It’s a great place to do that.  But some LD’s are for polishing the skills you already have.  That was gonna be my LD, the one where I don’t almost Carrie everyone on my team.  I have red hair, I’m already susceptible to Carriing. But man, I do wish I’d gotten time to do the Lovecraft cultist costume.  So many tentacles….which…is weird to get excited about.  Uh, anyway, finished artwork! Idle, Run, Hit, Jump, Fall, Dash…for 3.5 characters, this was the most I’d gotten done in any Jam.  If After Effects was a person, a sexy sexy person, I would hug them.  And give them candy and kisses.  Don’t tell my husband.  Crap…he’s on my dev team. The Post-it box (See: a sticker reward board for adults) It came around to Sunday and, for the first time in maybe possibly ever during a Jam, I felt like I had everything we needed to publish a bare bones game.  How did this happen?  On the second day, early, we all sat down and took out freaking post its and wrote every last damn thing down that we needed.  Not a trello board, not an excel sheet. Neon pink freaking post-its.  And when you finished something you move it to the other persons board (for me, to the programmers’ board) or to … Continue reading

We’ve been working our butts off on Ludum Dare this weekend again.  It’s quite fun, of course and I’m very happy with our progress so far.  I think we’re farther along than we realize and I’m pretty excited about what we can do this time.  There is an update here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/08/22/deedly-boppers-are-best/ that Jodi posted.  Hopefully I’ll be streaming some tomorrow because why not?  There’s something about making games that makes me want to share everything I do with the world sometimes. I guess I should go to bed now. Continue reading

Today we had another workday and I managed to get a good bit done today on the project we are trying to get done for football season (we don’t want to reveal too much yet).  Even got the chance to add in a couple of “nice to have” features.  I don’t have a lot to report, other than the fact that I failed numerous times today to take into account things that start at 0 instead of 1 (I’m looking at you, instance_find() function in GML).  That’s just bad programming on my part.  But I did get a lot done and I’m liking this project as it’s beginning to shape up.  Micha also did some work on Soul Shepherds (really, it’s actually coming soon!), but I’ll let him post on that if he chooses to. Continue reading

I just thought I’d put up a real post, so we’d have something here. Micha and I just finished up an afternoon of work at B&N.  He has been working on getting Soul Shepherds ready for Ouya release and cleaning up a lot of the bad code and trash left in there from our working too quickly before.  You know, doing that last 10% of game development that is so frustrating to complete (because there’s just so little payoff).  I, on the other hand, was working on the more fun part of putting together a rough prototype for another game we’re trying to get together (hopefully before football season starts).  I believe I reached the point today where the group has to make decisions and start actually “designing” the game, but at least we know it’s doable and have a good base to start with.  I actually tried to follow good practices and kept things organized, so that should help a lot.  Games that have regular “ticks” make that much easier, I’ve discovered.  Hopefully we won’t have to refactor this one much at all to build on it.   And now I’m off to do my “real” work. Continue reading