DreamFeel

I've decided to break a humongous catchup blog post into a few manageable chunks! First bringing us from January to the middle of Feb. :D

In January we finished The Lost, our WP7 haunted house game. I was happy with how it turned out, having made some small but nice changes to the gameplay during the holidays and bringing it back to a more arcade-y experience, closer to the original vision. Level design by Isabella Wang, audio by Cam Goold and the wonderful art was done by Rosie Henderson who is currently a cutting a trailer! Find more info and some pictures here.
Image by Pete AngstadtNext at the end of the month was bbbbb: Beep, Brrp, Bing, Bang, Bosh which three of us made for the Experimental Gameplay Project Dec/Jan Jam. The game was multiplayer rhythm game with gravity flipping. It was shown at the Stattbad Gallery in Berlin at the start of February which was really cool (that picture up there). I was a bit disappointed that the game was finished so close to the deadline and we didn't get the chance to playtest properly. The first time I did play it with a group, of fantastic indie designers at that, a week later there were some clear easy improvements that would have made it a lot more fun. We did however make a rather fiendish 1 player version of the game shortly afterward which works a lot better and should be out on XBLIG soon. Trailer sooner! I will also post my music to soundcloud for download!

In February I made the trip down to Cambridge for TigJam 6 which like last July was an enormous amount of fun. About 40 supremely talented game developers gathered to make lots of game in a weekend. I decided to take this opportunity to learn flash development and the flashpunk engine specifically; nothing like being the last person to the race! HTML5? Flash is actually quite easy and fun once you get over the small quirks. I still prefer to write in C# and use XNA, it's less limiting and I'm much more experienced, but a game in Flash just feels different. In a good way! The freedom of distribution of flash as opposed to XNA's cumbersome installer easily outweighs any disadvantages as well.

I got one small game done and lots of small prototypes. On Friday with XNA a space game where you use the gravity of planets to swing around the level and you eat stardust which creates generative piano music. This was a prototype for Space Whale which I will talk about in the next post. My first flash prototype featured an office worker platforming up an endless mountain, the camera dramatically zooming out as you got higher. The second game featured a little kid cycling through a pokemon inspired town with an original gameboy colour palette, this is the bare bones of an experiment in narrative I would like to get around to sometime.

I also had fantastic interviews about game design with Terry Cavanagh, who was the epitome of patience, and Alan Hazelden, aka Draknek, for University. At midnight in the freezing cold 20+ indie developers playing gigantic games of Ninja, T-Rex Ninja and every other possible variation was a highlight!