A Startling Lack of Banjos

Hello!

Thought I’d give a little progress report, just to reassure you all that I’m actually doing some work, and not just living the dizzying highlife that comes with having written a moderately successful freeware indie game a couple of years ago. I am living that highlife, I should add; it’s a whirlwind of caviar, champagne and society balls round our way, but I’ve also found the time to make some progress on Two.

I’m hard at work on level design at the moment: Here are a couple of screen captures! They’re both from the same area, very early in the game. This isn’t final art – I’m still fiddling with the look of the thing, but I think I’m getting pretty close now.

(click the images for full-size)

One last thing – would anyone be interested in me putting up some more in-depth posts about the nuts and bolts of game design? I find that stuff pretty hard to write, to be honest, but I’d quite like to give it a go, and I do have this nagging feeling that I should be making more use of this blog. I think I might give it a go.

Hello! I’ve dived back into work on Two, and I’ve made some pretty decent progress this week. Enough so that I’ve actually got something interesting to show you! Hooray!

I’ve gone and made a bit of a quick teaser trailer thing, showing a little bit of gameplay. It’s pretty much the most exciting thing ever released EVER.

So I suppose it’s time to actually explain what the game’s all about. Two is a puzzle platformer with a strong exploration aspect. It’s a game about being in two different places at the same time; you can switch between viewing each of the locations seperately, or crucially, both at the same time, superimposed on top of each other. By moving around in each world and carefully aligning the views, you can use objects in one world to get past obstacles in the other. And that’s basically it!

There’s a whole load of really interesting stuff I can do with that mechanic, but to ease people into the idea the video just shows the simplest puzzle I could think of. Two will start off pretty simple, but by the end it’ll hopefully be quite a brainteaser.

Hope you enjoy it!

What’s this I just drew? What could it mean?

IT IS A MYSTERY.

Hello all! I did an interview with Steve Cook at Quote Unquote about gamedev, which is up now for the whole world to read. In it I talk about the making of Small Worlds, get all ranty and preachy about art games, and try not to accidentally insult Gregory Weir. I think it’s a pretty good read, but possibly I might be biased. Read it and judge for yourself! It took me almost ten months to get around to answering his questions though, which has to be some kind of awful-at-answering-emails record. I am number one!

I also gave him a bunch of images from a few of the unfinished games scattered across my hard drives, and a piece of never-before-seen Small Worlds concept art, from the literally hundreds of thousands of pages of research and planning that went into that game. It’s like looking directly into my mind, only with less screaming and crying.

You can read the interview here.

Celebration time! My massive animation project is finished! More or less. But the three months of working 14 hour days 7 days a week are over, so I have my life back! Woooooo

Finally I can get back to gamedev – Two and Sentinel have been gathering dust for the last few months, and I’m excited about finishing them up and actually releasing something worthwhile for people to play, but I’m also really happy to have the time to actually play games again. I played Minecraft for the first time in about four months yesterday, I’ll briefly sum up my experience:

* What are all these extra status bars for? Food? That’s interesting.
* A village! Saves me having to make a house.
* Huh, food doesn’t seem to heal you any more. Oh right, health regenerates when you’ve filled up your food bar. Nice.
* Massive cave! Some sort of giant underground ravine, that’s new.
* Are those torches down there? And some sort of wooden structure?
* An abandoned mineshaft! Brilliant!
* I don’t remember spiders being blue.
* POISONED! OH NO
* Aha, a spider spawner. I SHALL DESTROY IT
* Oh right yeah I can’t instantly heal myself any more. ARGH SPIDERS STOP BITING ME
* DEAD

Next on my list are Bastion, the Stanley Parable, all those fanmade levels for VVVVVV, and I’ve ordered Xenoblade, which I’m very much looking forward to. Also, when I started my big animation project I abandoned poor Vin Diesel about to assault the Dark Athena for about the 19th time, I should probably go back and help him out. If I can stand the fact that all the dialogue seems to have been written by a very angry sexually frustrated 15 year old.

Anyway, gamedev: It’s all a bit overwhelming right now, and I’m not sure where I should start. Two is the shorter game, but Sentinel is further along. I just want to finish something as quickly as I can, maybe I should do a quick three-week game just to get back into the swing of things? or maybe I should work on the upgraded version of Rocket Storm? Choices!

It’s good to be back! Hooray!

So, the Playbook’s been released, and anyone who happens to own one can download and play Rocket Storm, completely for free! Hooray!

It’s been gathering a good few downloads – more than I thought it would, and overall the store reviews have been pretty positive. A lot of users have identified a bug with the ‘next wave’ banner though – occasionally it hangs around for longer than it should, obscuring the first couple of missiles and making the game harder than it needs to be. I actually fixed this bug a few days ago, but there’s a delay between submitting an update and it getting approved and posted up on the store. I have no idea how the machine handles updating, I hope it’s reasonably well automated.

The reason I don’t know how updating works is because I don’t actually own a Playbook. They aren’t released over here until June, so I made the game using an emulator – I’ve never even seen the actual device, let alone tested my game on one. So I’m in the slightly weird position that thousands of people have played the game, but I still have absolutely no idea whether it’s running at the right frame rate, or the touch controls work ok, or even whether the sound is working! Haha, it’s a complete mystery.

Anyway, There’s now a link on the right sidebar over there to Rocket Storm, which I intend to release on as many systems as I can just as soon as I can. Starting with Flash! You may consider this an official COMING SOON.

Speaking of other systems, my Android experiments have been largely successful, with working Android versions of Small Worlds and Fireflight up and running on my phone right now. They’re both not quite perfect – Fireflight is the best fit, although it’s not yet running at its full framerate. Small Worlds is completable, but has some issues: it occasionally goes completely, insanely wrong (gets confused about which world the player is on, so picks random images from them all), and seems to suffer a noticeable slowdown about one minute into each level. Also touch-screen platformer controls are tricky; I have yet to find a control scheme that isn’t a horrible compromise. Next on the conquerable platform list is iOS. Then, the world! Probably.

Obligatory non-game news: I made a little stop-motion comedy sketch thing that you can watch right now over at BBC Online! Yay! It is the very best work of animation you will ever see. Also, this film here that I made last year with Rathergood has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Animation category! Hooray, it is also the very best work of animation you will ever see. We’re actually up against Aardman in the same category though, so there’s absolutely no chance we’ll win. The Aardman film is really really very good. It is the very best animation you’ll ever oh forget it.

Anyway that’s it for now BYE!

You’ll no doubt be literally ecstatic to hear that I’ve managed to actually put some serious time into making Sentinel this week, despite a two-pronged time-stealing attack by actual paid work and that blasted game that’s doing the rounds involving blocks and crafting and mines.

I’ve been working flat out on it all week, and realised with a bit of a jolt today that it’s actually almost finished! Well, I mean, it’s playable, although I still have a bunch of rooms to make, and there’s no death sequence, and the save points don’t work.  And I still haven’t found any music for it, but these are all tiny things.  Trifles.  Oh, and I should probably get someone who’s not me to play it and let me know if it’s in any way fun.  Feels fun to me though – I’m normally pretty good at telling when something I’ve made is awful, and my ‘oh my god what have you done‘ sense isn’t tingling, which is pretty encouraging.

I suppose I should talk a bit about what the game is actually like.  Well, it’s a sort of shoot ‘em up exploration game based around the mechanics of an arena shooter – The player explores a single, large environment defeating enemies and upgrading their weapons until they’re strong enough to take on the big final challenge.  Structurally it’s a lot like the excellent recent indie game Herocore, but where normally in games like this you’d have bosses, here you have little microcosmic arena shooter challenges;  you enter a ‘boss’ room, the doors shut behind you, and you simply have to survive the subsequent three minutes of chaos.  Trust me, it’s fun.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of drawing for the game, want to see some pictures?  I THOUGHT AS MUCH.