I finally started twitting a few weeks back (follow me here). I plan to keep it focused heavily on game dev and the games industry, and light on the personal side, but we’ll see how that goes. I have been a long-time observer of the twitter phenomenon going through the standard phases (oblivious, confused, intrigued, fascinated and hooked). I think on a global level, Twitter is an amazing idea with far reaching impact. In fact, I could get very philosophical analyzing its social impact , but I’ll save that for another day.
On a more practical level, it is a great tool for marketing, raising product awareness, and interacting directly with your customers, fans or people with shared interests. And I’m still only scratching the surface. It’s another channel for developers (indie or not) to easily and effectively interact with their fan base. It’s another form of permissive marketing. I plan to make good use of it.
Work Done Last Week
I added another gameplay action. We changed how some of the basic actions affect your “health”. Basically, each major action will cost the player a certain amount of resources. This leads to a much more structured approach to the gameplay, and we can now build carefully balanced puzzles.
I fixed that terribly annoying bug (after hours of searching). At least I know that the majority of my simulation code is solid. I also did some more minor gameplay tweaks, but nothing major. We’re experimenting with user-controlled camera zoom.
After a couple weeks of investigation, I’ve decided to hold off on the Joomla stuff for the new site, and just use WordPress (like the current site). I’m familiar with WordPress, and I was going to integrate it with Joomla anyways. The integration looks like a pain in the ass. Plus, how complex is my site really going to be. I don’t know why I tend to complicate my life sometimes. If WordPress is good enough for a company like Doublesix, it will be fine for us. It’s served me well up to now.
Work Planned This Week
We are adding a checkpoint system to the game/editor. We need this for a couple reasons. The game itself is going to require some trial and error on the part of the user. Whichever way we break down the levels, they will still be a set of puzzles. Rather than force the player to restart the level each time he fails, we want a mechanism that allows the player to quickly undo his last set of actions and re-attempt the challenge. We don’t want the trial-and-error to be frustrating. Now, we’re not going to have a complex time-rewinding system like Braid or Prince of Persia, but we will put in place a system to quickly jump back through different saved states with (hopefully) no loading.
We will also benefit from this system when setting up levels. It is inconvenient to have to traverse the entire level each time we want to test a small change in a section.
Following from the above gameplay change, we’ve now settled on a few basic actions for the game, and we only have one of those still left to implement: picking up and carrying objects. If the checkpoint work doesn’t run too long, we will get started on this last core action this week. Once that’s in place, we can begin to really start building the first levels of the game.
August 5th, 2009 - 8:04 pm
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