5 Hours of Particle Effects

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I’ve been working on The Cube (remember him? He’d clump about the arena not really doing much but being kinda cool).

Well The Cube has gotten a little smaller and had a facelift. He’s also learnt a new trick - Stay still too long and he might just charge straight at you. All that tumbling around? That’s just so he can line you up for a smashing.

Anyway 5 hours ago that attack looked like this:



I promise you he’s moving at a fair lick in that screenshot.

Read on to find out how it went on for 5 hours.

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The Cutting Room Floor

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All ideas are not created equal. If you follow me on Twitter you will be privy to the more detailed aspects of Waves development and will have seen lots of screenshots of stuff that is in development and in some cases been cut from the game.

I thought I’d share some of them with everybody else along with why they might have ended up on the cutting room floor. This is a bit like the Deleted Scenes part of a DVD.

If you want up to the minute updates on what I’m working on then you should really follow me on Twitter.

The Sniper

Owly Images

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Communication Breakdown

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Women will be acutely aware of this phenomena but men do not follow instructions. I’d argue that this is because the male mind is hard wired to problem solve, we get a big kick out it. This means that when faced with a new toy the last thing we will ever do is read a manual.

It would be disingenuous of me to say that “Gamers” also do not follow instruction. For example there are a great deal of female gamers who in my experience will pour over the manual for a game before they even install it. Gamers are also very good at following tutorials because they are a form of interactive feedback loop.

The “How to Play” screen is the Indie games equivalent of a manual. They are incredibly important but they never get read by the majority of players.

Let’s play Geometry Wars 2 (This isn’t me playing FYI).

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Not yet. But nearly.

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So I pretty much figured 1000 followers by the 6th wasn’t going to happen. However I was amazed by the number of followers I did in fact gain and mostly the amount of coverage and positive comments that appeared around the net as a result.

The demo will be released.

Just not today.

The problem is that the IndieDB competition pretty much came out of left field and left me nowhere near enough time to turn Waves into a viable public demo (mostly due to the additional UI work required). I was able to scrape the game together into something I could send to the judges but I wouldn’t feel right releasing the game in it’s current state as a demo for the public (The most important judges of all).

My current problem is that my Flash trial has run out and this being my first indie game I don’t have enough cash on hand to pay for a license. Not that paying for a license would magically make me a good UI designer or capable of achieving anything better than “Functional” in appearance.

I’m hoping to improve the UI in the next week or so but the demo may have to wait until after Christmas depending on how things pan out.

There is also the fact that when I was writing the “How To Play” for the judges I even started to confuse myself so I need to do something about that as well.

Extra special thanks go out to the 50 or so people who followed me on Twitter and to everybody who joined the Facebook page and subscribed on Youtube.

Anyway here are some screenshots of various bits for you to entertain yourself with.


Waves Demo. Maybe. Possibly.

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So Waves is being made using UDK and it turns out that Epic are doing a promotional thing with IndieDB specifically for UDK games.

Now if you aren’t up to date with the UDK indie scene I’ll go over it for you. It’s got more in common with a modding community than a games development one. That is to say that more weapon renders get released to the public than evidence of actual gameplay so I’m in with a shot for this competition.

Now the problem is this: It requires that entrants release a public demo. They’ll accept private demos for the judging phase but if you win you have to release a public demo. This sucks as it would force me to release a demo of a game that I know isn’t finished and not in a state I consider ready for public consumption*.

So here is what we’re going to do. If you really want to play a buggy, unfinished unbalanced and 100% Work-in-Progress game that hasn’t even reached what I consider to be alpha yet then you need to let me know.

The best way is to follow @squidinabox on twitter.

If I hit 1000 followers by Monday the 6th then I will release a public demo of Waves that shows off essentially the first 3 minutes of the game in score attack mode. That’s basically up to the big cube boss. Defeat him and the round will end.

Essentially this:

In the final game Score Attack would just keep going until you run out of lives and there are going to be Time Attack, Practice and Challenge (aka levels, about 20 of them at least) modes in the full game with more enemies and some new mechanics.

If I don’t hit 1000 followers by Monday… well maybe. If you’re good.

* Yes I know it looks finished but believe me it isn’t.

Knowing what “Done” looks like

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It’s important to know what “Done” looks like. It’s a phrase one of my friends uses when talking about programming.

So far the development of Waves has been in what I would consider a pre-production phase. I know that alot of people think it looks finished because it’s graphically very polished but the reality is that while I could release what I have now to the world I wouldn’t be proud of the result. It’s not done yet.

I’ve actually spent the last few weeks figuring out what “Done” looks like and I now have a list of everything I need to do to ensure that I can hit it.

It’s a big list and as I work through the tasks it will only get bigger. That’s just how lists work.

This at last means that I am confident about what will actually be in Waves when it gets released for the first time since I started. If I had sat down at the start and designed an Arena Shooter then what I designed would not be what Waves has become and this would be bad. It would be far more generic and much less interesting. I’d be ticking off genre tropes on a list rather than finding out what works and why some things are fun and others aren’t.

Waves won’t be coming out this year. I’m confident of this. With only about 6 weeks left in the year to realistically get anything done it means that the first beta version won’t happen until sometime in January next year at the earliest.

Sadly the part that is going to take the longest time is as always going to be the GUI. I hate doing the GUI so if you happen to be an amazing (and cheap!) Flash designer then you might be able to help with that. Feel free to get in touch if that’s the case.

It’s a good feeling knowing what “Done” looks like.

Biscuit Fuelled

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Last week I applied for a development grant from the lovely people at RockPaperShotgun.com and was lucky enough to be chosen to receive a Biscuit.

Today that Biscuit arrived.

I must say that on seeing Quinns child like scrawl on the envelope I was overcome with joy. At last! Funding!

 

It turns out I was extra lucky and had been sent not one but TWO biscuits. This is a special day indeed.

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September Round-up - New Video

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Hello! I must apologise for being late but there was a cat outside and I got distracted.

It’s been a while since we’ve done this hasn’t it? It feels like only yesterday but somehow it’s been over four months. Amazing.

While I like to think that you come to these events for the amazing conversation and my winning personality I suspect you’re really only here for the latest Videogram of Waves. Well if that’s the case I may as well get it out of the way early.

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