development

Def visual tests

by  • June 10, 2013 • 1 Comment

The last few weeks I’ve been working on a post-compo version of my tower defensish LD48 game “Def”. Apart from fixing the obvious balance and stalemate issues that pretty much everyone discovered in the ‘survival mode’ after the deadline (thanks for all the screenshots !), I’m adding a campaign mode with some story elements. It’s shaping up to be pretty awesome so far :)

Shooter range diffuse, below transparent grid.

Shooter range diffuse, below transparent grid.

Shooter range transparent, above diffuse grid.

Shooter range transparent, above diffuse grid.

Shooter range transparent, BELOW transparent grid.

Shooter range transparent, BELOW transparent grid.

 

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culture, essays, game design, Uncategorized

A response to Cargo Cult Nostalgia

by  • April 30, 2013 • 8 Comments

A response to “Cargo Cult Nostalgia” by Peter Silk (maker of the amusing nautical exploration game “The Wager”). You should read that article first (edit: and be sure to read Peter’s comments below), else this probably won’t make any sense.

I essentially agree that the Cargo Cultists might be sometimes fooled by the feeling of nostalgia and focus on the ‘trappings’ as a proxy for the real attributes that they enjoy in a game. But I also think it’s unfair to dismiss all their requests as driven by purely ‘nostalgia endorphins’. Some of these requests no doubt come from their dissatisfaction with design decisions taken for many modern point-and-click adventures that aim to broaden their target market and as a result fail to satisfy a certain type of player.

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games, releases

Raxen’s Run : postmortem of my March #1GAM pew pew game

by  • April 10, 2013 • 0 Comments

This post is some reflection and navel gazing regarding my One Game a Month game, Raxen’s Run. Just want to play the game ? It’s here on Kongregate and here using Native Client for Chrome (Linux FTW!).

Raxen's Run

Raxen’s Run being all glowy & stuff.

 

It’s essentially an on-rails score attack shooter. It can be finished (without giving away too much, in under 10 minutes play time), but it gets hard. It appears that as of the time of writing (10-Apr-2013), no one has beaten the last sector yet.

Kongregate

I decided early in the project this would be my first experiment with Kongregate. Could a simple but (hopefully) amusing Unity game without a massive art asset budget capture the attention of players enough to make some ad revenue ? Like ANY ad revenue ?  Read more →

OUYA

Chomper Deluxe submitted to OUYA marketplace

by  • March 20, 2013 • 0 Comments

I just uploaded Chomper Deluxe to the #OUYA marketplace (yay!). It’s sitting at “Verifying APK” at the moment (hmmm…). I suppose that’s a good thing, since I assume that they might be doing a little malware scanning, or at bare minimum trying to catch broken uploads before they go out to review.

I presume that at some point soon that will change to “Verified” so that I can press the “Submit for Review” button …

Update: It finally finished verifying, after about 8~12 hours. I’m guessing the pipeline went down and someone in San Francisco was asleep when I submitted.

I presume there will be no issues in the review – it seems to comply with all of their fairly reasonable guidelines as far as I can see. I look forward to seeing you all beat my highscores on the 28th / 29th / 30th / whenever your OUYA arrives in the mail :)