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…
There is an old Spanish saying, “You can’t have more bed-bugs than a blanket-full”. We are not even sure what that means but we sure feel like we have our share of bugs as we near launch for Wind Up Robots. In any final stages of a game project it sure seems like you can. We are bug hunting and often fixing one bug can lead to several more. The trick is to keep looking. A tendency as we hunt has also been to add in cool things that we either had wanted originally or have thought of late in the game. But we have to ship and ship is what we do. Chris and Gavin took a moment late last night to discuss this stage for this weeks Flurry Friday Update. See our past updates as well to view more of our development process. Have a great Veterans Day and here is a shout out to all the service men and women that have endured wars for our countries sake. Thank you for sacrificing and fighting for us. We are so grateful for what you did.
Posted 6 months, 1 week ago at 9:22 am. Add a comment
We are getting so close to Wind Up Robots (WUR) going out the door and onto the app stores. With any game the final polish happens in the last 5% of game development. WUR is no different. The game has become so much more in just the past three weeks as the team has tackled some performance issues as well as added some of the details we have wanted all along. In this update Chris Skaggs interviews most of the WUR team form programing to art. Take a look behind the scenes. (And just to let you know you can get a glimpse of what WUR looks like).
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 6:02 pm. Add a comment
The last session of CGDC this year was a roundtable discussion that opened with Mark Soderwall’s observation that where faith-laden works had made real headway in movies and books, when it came to games Christian content had scored a “big Goose Egg.” Now to be fair, Mark’s assertion was not accepted by all the members as accurate but I certainly agree that from the purely ‘sales=success’ metric used in basically any other conversation on a game’s success then we ought to be candid in saying that even the best-selling Christian games have come far, far short of secular games we’d call hits…but perhaps that’s a’changing.
Hexify recently released their hit Facebook game Journey of Moses as the first Bible-based game on the platform – and its success has been self-evident. A whole raft of articles have been written in both religious outlets like the Christian Post but also secular sites including CNN, Inside Social Games, and One News Now. But press coverage is one thing – what’s really impressive is the game’s track record. On October 4th Hexify released some ground breaking news:
I had the chance to have an informal interview with Brent Dusing* of Hexify to discuss some of the less-publicized aspects of the game. His insights should be of interest to anyone thinking about adding religious content to their video games but it should be of particular interest to the folks who want to add God to the game and ALSO make a profit.
This has been a week of rediscovering some of the games we love to play. We would like to say that we are regularly involved in all of the game communities we love. Busyness sets in though and many of those interactions fall to the side. These past two weeks we have been revisiting forums and communities. As always as we re-engaged we also get to see the great games other developers are making. Chris mentions a few of our favorites in this weeks update.
Gavin and I (Gavin gets the glory though since it was his idea) are launching a new blog/news feature called Flurry Friday at Soma where we will share ideas to give our community a consistent update on what we are seeing as cool or useful in the game development world .
The name Gavin picked is a variation of other feature Friday’s like Bungies. The Flurry part comes from my personal brand name John Flurry. I think it fits here too since that name for me is all about how creativity hits us.
1 a: a gust of wind b: a brief light snowfall
2 a: a brief period of commotion or excitement
This week we are furiously pushing toward beta for Wind Up Robots (WUR). Check out the episode and if you have any questions please leave them here or ask us on Twitter and Facebook.
Last here are a few things we would love from you:
1. Let us know what you would like to see in the Flurry Friday videos and updates.
2. Watch for feedback posts. The first one will be our TouchArcade Forum post where we will be asking for ideas for the WUR logo/button art. If you don’t know, Rovio chose red for their Angry Birds logo since there were few red icons on the store at the time. These are the kinds of things we are seeking from your feedaback.
3. On a side note our twin company Code-Monkeys is running a competition with gw-en.com for Bok Choy Boy Game. Post oyu high scores to win a t-shirt.
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.
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:59 am. Add a comment
We’re in the middle of a fantastic but unexpected experience. We were planning on running a promo for our iOS version of Bok Choy Boy with OpenFeint this week but due to some unforeseen complications we had to change horses at he last minute and we swapped G:Into The Rain into the slot. Even though G is over 2 years old now (which is like 407 in app years) the game popped up out of the ranking basement and rose to a high of #23 in puzzles, #38 in arcade and #143 in all games.
Look – I know those aren’t like astronomical numbers, but without any real effort or preparation on our part and a last-miunte promo with OF the game proved to still have legs and we continue to get great reviews from folks who are discovering it for the first time.
The conventional wisdom in the app world seems to be that an app’s shelf life is something like 3-months if you’re lucky. But I think the most compelling lesson of the Angry Birds saga is that they had a hit and then they stuck with it instead of moving on to something else. Perhaps one of the most powerful but generally overlooked aspects of the long-tail economy is the persistence of a product and the ongoing ability for new users to find your game, share it, and become new fans. We certainly never expected G to keep on living the way it has but it’s the app that just wont die…and we kinda like it that way.
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:37 am. Add a comment
I have about eight blog posts I wan to make coming out of the Intel Elements 2011 Conference, most of them positive. BUt one of these seems pretty time sensitive and I want to be part of the conversation out here so I’m going to do this now even if it’s only half baked.
Whoever is in charge – you cannot use the name Tizen – it’s about the worst possible marketing move possible at this moment. Instead – call it MeeGo5 – and you’ll be celebrated instead of mocked.
The other day, Soren Johnsen posted a tweet that really caught my interest. He said
“The next console generation will be won by whoever understands why the Xbox Indie Games Channel did not become the iOS App Store.’
This is true in so many ways.
The iOS App store has enjoyed an unparalleled level of success since it launched a few years back largely because it managed to hit a golden combination of approachability by both developers and consumers, while simultaneously lifting the best to the top through a natural feeling review system. For the first time Joe Schmoe could take his idea, build it himself and publish it to millions of potential customers, all from his living room. Customers had access to hundreds of thousands of apps at their fingertips, instantly, anytime and anywhere, for an affordable price.
