Mad Rantz

Wow, it has been too long since my last entry - one week. I have to get back on the horse with this blogging stuff, I’m letting it slide too much. I’ve just been crazy busy lately, and with spring coming on I know I soon will be outside many hours getting the lawn and landscaping in shape this year. So, basically, I’m screwed.

Lumpy Games has a new website!

We just put up our website now at Lumpy Games and I’m pretty happy with the result. While I am prototyping game design for our first game and Nic is working on more technical (risky) features for the game, it seemed prudent to put my wife (our resident web guru) to work on the company website. I decided that we should theme the site to correspond with the topic of our first title. If you see anything funky while viewing it please shoot me an email - I’d appreciate it.

A company website is one of those tasks that I have a hard time with. On the one hand, we need to focus on prototyping our first game and getting a head of steam. Putting up a website seems really low damned priority in comparison. On the other hand, there are good reasons to put one up. The first one that comes to mind is that it gives a sense of stability, not only for your team but for possible additions to your team. If you don’t have a team site and you’re talking to strangers about joining you to work for royalties (for instance), it’s a tough sell. The second reason is that it is a base of operations for the rest of your efforts. We have a site now that we can direct people to in order to get the latest info on our game, for example.

I’m not sure I’m going to theme Mad Rantz the same as the rest of the site, as it’s more of a personal blog than a company or designer blog. I do know that eventually we will have a design diary blog for the site, along with a newsletter. But first we need to knock out our prototype and solidify the game features before talking much publically about it.

Get yer prototyping on

I am very excited about this game idea, as it is deeper than the games I have worked on in the past. Prototyping is my favorite phase of game development, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I like to personally write the code during this phase, or at the very least get in there and tweak the hell out of things and add game features. I love trying out different things in the game and see what strikes me as fun. When I play around with small games like Bethellowed it’s very easy to try different mechanics. But when I think of games like SimCity or Civilization, I really wonder how long it too them to get those to a state where they said to themselves “Hey, we might have something here”.

I definitely adhere to the philosophy that iterative prototyping is the path to finding the fun in a game. You add in a basic mechanic or two and then layer on things until you get that “a-ha” moment. I imagine that SimCity and its peers were created similarly. As I look at the list of things to put in our prototype I am feeling a bit concerned about the path to the fun and how long it will take. We are shooting for an early May version of a fun, playable prototype with programmer art. That seems a little bit aggressive (see above re: lawn/landscaping), but I know that I personally work better under a deadline. Here’s hoping that the fun finds me as soon as possible!

I accidentally participated in the tenth edition of the GarageGames community event known as Game-in-a-day, or GiD. I say accidentally because I honestly wasn’t planning on doing any game dev work this weekend in order to catch up on some chores around the house. Sometime late Saturday night the bug bit me and I couldn’t help myself. I ended up putting in about twelve hours on Sunday, so I guess you could call this my Game-in-a-half-day (Gi1/2D).

I really wanted to put in a little bit more time on the bubble popper I was tinkering with recently. So I decided to put a little bit of UI work in (mad programmer art I say) and actually hook up scoring. The end result is a very unrefined version of what I envisioned the final gameplay would resemble, but I still find the click-click-clicking of it a little irrestible. I don’t buy bubble poppers usually, but I have to admit I like popping stuff like so many others out there.

Choosing my move

Popping away

Those buggers are coming hard

I need more tokens damnit!

Crap - this is end-game for sure

I didn’t get near as much done on this as I would have liked to. First, there’s no SFX at all. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Use your imagination. Second, T2D gives you all these cools particle effects and I managed to use none of that at all.

The most important thing I didn’t get working that I really wanted was a nice falling effect when the pieces collapse. I tried my damndest to get it to work, but I’m apparently not using T2D the way it was intended or T2D hates me. I could get it to look pretty good, but occasionally the damned thing would just act funky and I’d end up with pieces not lined up correctly. In the end, I pulled that code and instead just had it jump down all at once, so it’s not as smooth as it would have been. Ah well.

At any rate, this was a lot of fun, even though I was all by myself on this one. I’m hoping to involve the team in the next one, maybe with other people out there who are just interested in having some fun.

You can find the game I made right here. Hopefully that’s packaged up correctly and doesn’t bring down the T2D police on my head for accidentally including the editors or some other wackiness. If you run it and it looks a little funky, try setting the video options to what looks best for you. Enjoy!