So, we finally have some real visible activity. A new site, a new look. The artist unveiled. Before I get back to the nitty-gritty, I just want to share again how excited I am to work with Mikaël.
He brings a visual quality to the game I could only dream of. This game is going to be cool not just from a technical standpoint, but also from the visual side of things. When I was looking for an artist, my only goal was to find someone with some talent who could bring his own style to the game. What I got instead is someone who can produce high quality artwork, has an artistic vision and holds a passion for great gameplay – a partner essentially. We are now working together to make sure the gameplay is as fun as possible. OK, enough gushing…for now.
On to some bad news. Well, bad news for me. Not you. Don’t worry. My laptop clonked out again last night. One second it’s fine, the next: poof – something shorted – the thing is dead. That’s less than two months after a new motherboard was put in. It shouldn’t impact our development, but holy crap is it annoying. Thank you nVidia for making an entire generation of worthless mobile GPUs. Let’s see how Dell handles this before I pile the abuse on them too.
One more thing: I want to give some mad props to some former co-workers from my days back at Criterion. Check out Hello Games. They are another small four-man indie studio who have just announced their first title (Joe Danger), and have scored a pretty sweet profile in this month’s Edge.
Work Done Last Week
I continued work on the demo. I’ve been trying out different level ideas, and trying them out. It’s a challenging process. We’ve got all the core gameplay in place, but we are missing some higher level logic support for triggering events, and tying everything together. This process is still tricky at times, and I’m finding myself very inefficient when I have to switch back and forth between coding and level design. This is definitely a challenge I have to address.
I keep trying to improve my tools and processes so that iterating over levels and logic changes is faster. I definitely need a better system in place.
We did some work getting the new site ready. That’s also been a drawn out process that has gone through many stages, but we are very happy with the results. I want to share a couple pics of some of the versions we went through. This is an earlier mockup from a friend when I asked him for a simple clean look. I quite liked this for its simplicity and clarity, but it lacked personality and friendliness. Here’s one of my passes loosely based on that look. Fantastic, right? Ok, it’s bad, but not that bad. Imagine it with the primary colors in bright blue (I’d share a screenshot, but it’s on the dead laptop). This is why you don’t let programmers do web design. Or at least this programmer.
Anyways, many thanks to Orioto (the new artist!), who whipped up something really aesthetically pleasing and in-tune with the atmosphere I am trying to convey with the company and with the game. And all this is just a start, we will keep improving on the site over time.
Finally, I’ve become a pro at CSS. And thank God for FireBug, it’s an absolute genius piece of software for web development. It saved me many hours of frustration.
Work Planned This Week
Still quite focused on the gameplay demo, getting new levels ready, testing and fixing bugs and adding better support. I’m wearing many hats right now; it’s another interesting challenge managing that balance.
October 3rd, 2009 - 12:21 pm
Sorry to hear about the laptop. Other than that, you guys seem to be Fired up! Ready to go!
Rooting for you, as always. D.