Som(a)niloquy

Flurry Friday Episode 6- Nov 18th: WUR Crunch Time

So I set out to shoot a video on game icon development and then tried the trial, tribulations and glory of game level design and balancing but when the team saw me coming they either ducked or just glared at me with that look of a bridezilla before the wedding day. Ok, I am overstating it a bit. The truth is we love this part of development. Everyone is functioning at their highest. Yes, it is a little tense at times but really we would not have it any other way. The game is almost ready to submit. The polish we have done in the last three weeks really shows.

This week we unveiled the game icon after taking your feedback on the poll both on Touch Arcade, FB and Google Plus. The results were a landslide for Laser. I guess you could call him the Ronald Reagan of wind up robots.

WUR has 28 levels that are now shiny, fun, exciting and balanced (at least as far as we can tell). Cross platform work has begun. We plan for you to be able to play it initially on iOS and then on all PC’s (tablets, desktops, netbooks such), general Android systems including the Amazon Fire.

So by next week we will have submitted the game to Apple and enjoying some turkey day festivities. Thanks again for joining us on the journey. We appreciated you help so much in choosing the icon. So with that we wish you a very good Thanksgiving. May your time with your friends and family be magical and enduring.

Part 2: Friday
by Chris Skaggs

So JB asked me to look this over and publish it when I thought it was ready… I thought I would add a bit. Today we’re all feeling a lot better, a lot more confident. Energy is high…aw heck, lets just shoot a second video…

Minecraft Moodiness

I was playing Minecraft with my son the other day and we were exploring a cave. As always there is the anxious advance-n-light process of posting torches around vacant spaces while you try to be prepared for a lurking creeper or skely. But at one point we turned a corner and found our first abandoned mineshaft…and I froze.

As a game designer I’m really interested in the craft of generating an emotional response in a game and it isn’t easy, especially if you want to do so in a non-manipulative way. So in this moment I was struck by a powerful sense of unspecified fear…an incredibly difficult emotion to generate. Way to go Notch!

One of the most visceral lizard-brain things I can think of is the “I thought I was alone” response. It’s what happens when you’re at home late and hear something go bump in the next room. Or when you’re just settling down to sleep on a camping trip and hear something that for all the world sounds like a twig breaking under someone’s foot. It’s exactly the same feeling I had watching Blair Witch Project at various moments like the discovery of the weird stick figures in the woods. It’s like a primordial survival response and finding torches I didn’t light really brought that gut response up like so much acid reflux.

This is game design at it’s best – way to go Mojang…though I’m sure you get that all the time.