DreamFeel

I think it would be nice to make this a bi-monthly feature on the state of my current games, yay! You can find the first one here. I should have a video of my exploits over the last 12 months up soon as well.

First of all  Space Whale: Whale From Outer Space!
Space Whale is a gravity based, Katamari Damacy inspired game of eating and growing and eating and blowing up which creates music as you play (loops triggered by planets and notes played by eating). A psychedelic explosion of colour and fish (and giant space mammals).

The student prototype was finished in May and it came together nicely in the final month. When you focus on what is cool about a game and simplify, simplify, simplify the design, you can easily fix the core and improve what is broken. Expect a trailer in the next couple days.

Vikings!
This is my final semester student project on which I am working with nine other students as the game designer. A tower defense game whereupon you must defend the Scottish Highlands from seaborne invaders! The concept was given to us to work from, to emulate developer client relations, but we have moved it into some interesting directions with the art direction and the mehanic of boats beaching along the coast.

We very nearly have a very crude prototype we can start to refine, and this should be the really enjoyable bit of development.

Will you call me when you get there?

Formerly Glimpse and by the end probably a completely different name! A 2D Mario Galaxy inspired platformer with a unique cut-out graphic style about bubble universes, pareidolia and searching.

Outside of the the student project this is the main focus with my free time, and recently ported it from DX10 to DX9. It's great to be able to work on it again. The goal now is to replace the placeholder assets - I'm working with artist Emily Green which has been a pleasure -, provide more structure, polish and give it a bit more thematic depth.

The world is procedural at the moment, so I plan on designing some more interesting levels for it. I'm also experimenting with different takes on a narrative to provide counterpoint to the game, but as I want these to be fairly discreet I fear it's much too wordy so far. Perhaps VO is the answer.

I had hoped to finish it by the end of this week, but it looks like it will take my spare time for the rest of the Summer now.

A Sea of RootsFormely Isis, another experiment in the tension between play and music creation, with a taste of astronomy. Completes the trifecta of space inspired games. Quite a bit of development in early May, but there are few tricky things to implement. I need to get to better grips with PD for the sound and nail the visuals and narrative too. Most of all though I felt like concentrating on a project with someone else one that was more quickly accomplishable, namely: 'Will you call me...'. Definitely excited to return to this before too long, hopefully in August.

Shoe\
This is a mystery project from 'Secret Lunch' in pre-production. It will be a busy week for it and hopefully more may be revealed in the coming months. Otherwise this will probably be the only time it's ever mentioned and it deserves more!

If a previously mentioned game isn't referenced in one of these posts, then there has been no noteworthy updates since last time. It is disappointing that so much remains unfinished let alone unreleased, but everything is slowly making its way through development. I'm really excited to knock these out one by one.

Paul