Game Geek Speak

Yay!

So here’s what I’ve been slaving away on, trying to talk about it without talking about it. Well, the cat’s outta the bag.

I made this game to enter into the MochiAds Walk of Fame contest. It has a moderate amount of polish, but the level design was rushed and so is a lot weaker than I’d like (but the boss fight definitely is fun). Well, I learned a lot in the process, at least, even if I don’t win anything.

UPDATE 2: It seems the MochiCrypt wrapper was causing some problems with my Flex app, but all seems well now. Please let me know if you have any issues starting the game after the ad shows.

UPDATE: We’ve had a few reports of the game not working beyond the ad screen. If you get this, please let me know. I’d like to get an idea of how widespread this is and what common factors might contribute to it. Please mention your OS and web browser. Thanks!

The Pain, the Agony, the Fun

This has possibly been one of the hardest months of my life. I’ve suffered and toiled and shunned my family, the holidays, and my personal hygiene to get this game out the door. In a month. That still flabbergasts me. How did I make this in a single month?! I don’t even know. But it’s a month that I can’t really remember much about. Yeah, I didn’t sleep or eat very often.

Of course, a large chunk of the core engine was already completed. Things like the component system, game states, rendering pipeline, and other nuts and bolts. But there was no editor at all, and there was no game logic at all, no art, no levels, no plan beyond an old design doc that seems like it can be made into a nice little trilogy of games.

What we have so far is not the best it could be. I mean, we cranked out these levels in a matter of a few days, literally. But we’ll be updating it over time, building, and eventually it’s going to be pretty dang cool. And then we’ll make another one!

The Team

I recruited my very talented wife to help me build levels, and without her help I would never have hit the deadline or had this version out by now. *bows in gratitude and wonderment* Jamie rules!!! No, wait.

My thanks is endless to her. For most levels, I laid out the major elements, then she went along and tirelessly and always without complaining added details and her own creative touches. And a few of the levels coming up are her creations entirely. She quickly learned to use the editor fluently, despite its clunky nature. We’ve had a good time working on it together.

And of course, how could we leave out the man behind the visuals? Greg is really excessively good at this kind of art, so the game looks good even though he cranked out the stuff in maybe two days. Three cheers for Greg and his pixels of beauty!!!

The Future

Now that my blood pressure is starting to come back to normal, I can relax a little (catch up on Heroes, play someone else’s games, actually talk to my kids!) and spend more time and thought on the level progression and narrative. There is a story there, but I didn’t have any time to convey it, really. Updates will fix that, though.

I really, really like this kind of development. Make a little game, release, update, repeat. Now if I can earn some money on this, that would be icing on the cake.

I’ll post more later, but for now I have to sleep for about 14 hours straight in order to catch up. Ta-ta!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.