Round 2 + Updates

A busy few weeks: two-week game prototypes, new mobile releases, a Flox port for GameMaker, and a fresh start at BizDojo.

Round 2 + Updates This update should really have come a bit sooner, but it's been a busy few weeks. Since we sat down to try our hand at 2 week games we have achieved far more than we expected, all while moving into a new office! (also we got a Twitter account finally!) First week @BizDojo, loving it! Great workspace, great people, embarrassing photo's: One Legged Crab (@oneleggedcrab) July 15, 2014 Moar Apps! First up is that while most of the games we are creating are only prototypes, a couple have been lucky enough to receive a bit of polish and are now up on the app stores. They are: Take Off – a game where you guide a little rocket ship through space, aiming to teach kids about our solar system. Available on Google Play and Apple's App Store. Pogosheep – you're a sheep on a pogo-stick, a tricky game with a pseudo-NZ twist. Available on Google Play + just about every other Android store out there. Coming to iOS very soon. We've created a number of other games too, most of which can be played on our new website, others are slowly being added. While we've been creating these prototypes + the website, we have also been working on a port of the fantastic Flox AS3 SDK to GameMaker: Studio. Flox is an all in one back-end service that we have used for Proleague (and now Pogosheep) that makes saving complex data a breeze and GameMaker is Ryan's tool of choice for prototyping with just the right balance of simplicity to power. We can highly recommend both YoYoGames and Gamua, these companies and their respective projects are awesome! Um.. guys, you promised? So prototypes, prototypes, prototypes but weren't we going to review/refine our process after each round too? Well yes and certainly we would have liked to do more of this but we have managed two discussions. The first was about three weeks ago, right in the middle of some crazy development and mostly it was to try and decide on whether or not we had a project that made us excited enough to commit a year or so to it. We decided at that time that we hadn't found it yet… The latest review happened Tuesday this week, we spent a long time discussing whether or not we thought it was actually possible for us to find a larger project while prototyping these smaller games. The first thing we had to clarify was what exactly a larger project would look like for us, we agreed on the following: What kind of game? We decided to keep this quite vague and that led to us deciding on the player experience rather than game specifics. The game will be competitive, a game that rewards players for better/faster decision making and strategy, certainly reactionary skill will be important but the focus is the strategy. The game would also require some kind of building from the player, Minecraft and the Real-Time-Strategy paradigm were cited here of examples where players can express themselves both creatively and strategically. What kind of scope? Even with a prototype to give us confidence in our game design, we don't want another project as big as Proleague to swamp us again. We like the idea of a six month project, it sounds both manageable and big enough that we can really throw in some real depth. We'd call this a small to medium project: however from our game description, it sounds like we are leaning towards an RTS of some kind, we certainly can't make that in six months! This will be an interesting challenge, trying to boil down some larger games into something really focussed and unique, similar to how Greed Corp did with Turn-Based-Strategy. What platform? A number of the prototypes that we've done so far have been mobile focussed, in-fact every release so far has been on a mobile store. When we were discussing a larger project, we came to the point of whether or not it suited the mobile audience. This was a big point of discussion, the only likely alternative being Steam. We've had a number of people tell us recently that Steam Greenlight is the way to go, but that's not necessarily true wh…

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