Your Sound Card Works Perfectly

OK. Not really. I’m just switching over to Wordpress because I like it better than Tumblr for more “professional” blog things.

Go here to continue reading: Your Sound Card Works Perfectly: The Sequel

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We finally submitted our first game, Centrifeud, to the App Store! It feels weird to have worked really hard to get things finished and then wait for a week or so to get it approved to go live… I guess it’s time to think about marketing and promotion. I forgot we need to eat to be able to make games…

When working on Spyscraper, we had a grand total of ten people play test our game. Yep. Read that again. Ten. People. Out of those ten, one guy was awesome enough to get through all of the levels included in our alpha build. There are a lot of reasons for the small number of play-testers (and how far they got) and I don’t plan on going to go into all of them.

What you should get from the above poorly worded paragraph is that you should probably try to beat that number (ten, remember?) if you plan to succeed at making a good game. For our current game, we are hovering around the fifty or sixty mark and hope to find a few ways to recruit more than that for future projects (maybe double that number). I had hoped to get good data out of TestFlight, but it looks like we may just use it as a stability testing and build distribution tool, judging from the amount of feedback we got from the users that registered. Hands on, in person play testing seems to be the way to go.

We’ve been working hard to wrap up production and start promoting our new game, Centrifeud. We’re on target for a late March submission to the App Store and hopefully releasing in April. Before all that happens, I’m taking a well deserved vacation to visit family and friends in Puerto Rico.

If I told you that I’m just going to be on vacation while I’m here, that would be a huge lie. Yes, I’ll be going to the beach and try to be lazy for a bit (maybe even visit El Yunque), but the reality is that there’s too much work to do to get this game released.

Here’s the game plan for my PR 2012 Vacation Fest Don’t Work Maybe A Little Quest:

1. Marketing! Yay!
2. Game Jammin’ (we need new ideas for the next game, after all)
3. Unity / Corona SDK / Cocos2d evaluation!
4. Drink Medalla!

I’m getting ready to start on my first Unity test project (Pong, of course) as I type this. First thoughts… the interface is pretty.

I’m in the process of reading this book on game feel titled… erm… Game Feel. It’s pretty good so far, but I’ll try have a more comprehensive “review” when I’m done with it.

Here’s a link if you’re interested:

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Feel-Designers-Sensation-ebook/dp/B0048EJXP2/ref=ktr_rin_dp?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

Aaaaand, that’s how you end a six day blog drought. I promise I’ll be back with more insight when my team is out of crunch mode. :D

So, we’re about halfway through our current project (Centrifeud) and I think it’s safe to say that we’ve learned a few new things. The most obvious lesson learned is that we really need to stop thinking that it’s OK to make a game and an engine at the same time.

I make up half of the programming team at Secret Library. We’re experienced developers and our game development chops are decent enough that we could code up all the necessary frameworks to make a game and not break a sweat while doing so. Here’s the problem with that: We want to iterate on our ideas a bit faster and having to build all of these frameworks gets in the way of that. I can’t remember where I heard these kinds of tasks called “sidequests”, but that’s what they are.

Our primary goal is to make great games. Period. Our technology is not what is going to make us stand out in the indie game development community. What this means is that as soon as we wrap up our current project (we’re looking at mid March) we will be exploring third party solutions. I don’t really know what we’ll end up using, but I can say this: I look forward to a day when I don’t have to be knee deep in OpenGL / OpenAL / Cocoa Touch / etc. Making games should be about making games, not measuring your programming penis.

The following image is not relevant to the topic, but it’s my favorite pic of id from back in the day:

I was browsing through the Xbox LIVE Marketplace the other day and stumbled onto this gem:

For the mere price of 240 … erm … points? Anyway… for really cheap I got myself into a really cool Super Mario Bros. inspired platformer with some unique ideas thrown in. It looks like these guys have been at it for a while, so I decided to start exploring their back catalogue.

I highly recommend Big Bang Mini for the Nintendo DS (if you’ve got one). It has a very cool split screen mechanic that has you controlling your “ship” by dragging it around the bottom screen with the stylus and shooting fireworks by “swiping” (yep) to destroy enemies on the top screen. Fireworks that don’t connect explode into bullets that can harm you. It’s a neat way of allowing you to be as reckless as you can handle.

Here’s another moving pictures montage for your viewing pleasure:

These two games have made me start paying attention to what’s going on with Arkedo. They have apparently teamed up with SEGA for their next project:

Project Hell Yeah!

Let’s just say that I’m really intrigued. Arkedo, I wish you well and thanks for the really cool games you’ve made so far.