As of Monday 2nd of May 2016 I have started working for the company Curve Fever!
Running a company on your own is very, very hard so I decided to get some more experience by taking on the job at this company.
I will keep the website up for personal projects, but will not continue the buisness part of The Last Beaver (for as far there was any).
This due to my contract with Curve Fever as well as a the lack of time from my side.
The past week or so I’ve been working on a new tool called PixelCubes.
It allows me to create 3d models build up from cubes (basicly a voxel editor).
I’ve made it so I can use it when making the next game, but also as an exercise/learning process.
As could be seen in the previous post the game is about pumps and gathering resources.
More info on the game-design will follow in a upcoming post after I’m done creating the tool.
The art-style will be a pixelated with a (probably) fixed topdown or isometric view.
Although don’t pin me on this since things might change when I see things in-action.
The first two months have been rough as a start-up. My plans to be able to create small games – one each 1-2 weeks – have proven to be too optimistic. It takes a lot of time to build a propper product and release it when there are other things to work on as well (website, buisness related stuff). Therefor I am going to change the direction a bit in terms of how I want to approach the next projects I’ll work on.
The time I’m going to give myself for each project will increase. I think a more managable time would be 1 month per game. This includes all the phases from concept to release on various platforms.
My aim with making the next few games is to learn new things (such as Facebook integration, multiplayer, etc). Each learning needs propper attention so I’ll only have one new thing for every project.
A good thing is that the website is up and running to my likings which allows me to create web-content with more ease, thus saving me time.
A lot of things have happend in the past few weeks. I've been working on the game alot and noticed that I still stick to my old habbits of being a perfectionist. Although I did spend time working on base systems (such as pooling, time management) which can be reused for later projects.
The current state of the game is close to what I wanted it to be. On of the main things I wanted to add - the ship selection/setup function - is working perfectly which was a big part of the concept. There might not be a lot of different parts to choose from but it is a good display of what can be done. I still have things I'd like to see improved and changed but for now I'll leave it as it is. On the gamepage you can find more details on the game, media and links to download and play the game.
A small update on how the development of the first game is going.
So far I've been pretty happy with the way things go. I haven't really been able to keep on track with my pre-planned schedule but that doesn't bother me as much as I though. The first day was pretty solid but too short for me to do all the gameplay programming. I also still wanted to find the fun part of the game which only really came up yesterday (day 3). So far I've mostly been working on getting the gameplay as much fun as possible as well as enabling myself to test out different things faster.
The concept changed somewhat from the one that I posted before. A fun part about game-development is that you can (and should) listen to what your game needs. I added shooting and removed the LAZOR-cutting part from the concept. It just didn't feel fun to only be able to destroy stuff with your lazer and it was also terribly difficult to do so.
Instead the game is now fun due to the difficulty there is because you still control two ships... Which can shoot... But only if the other is not shooting and the lazer is not interrupted by an obstacle.
According to the planning I made before day 3 would be about content and levels. I tried to approach the game with levels/waves but that just didn't feel easy enough to make so I abandoned that idea quickly and switch to endless-random gameplay. This might change but for now it feels fun.
Content wise there is still a lot of things I want to make, especially more types of ships, turrets, bullets and enemies. The good thing about this is that they are really easy to make and test so I'll probably focus on some of the should-have's before continuing with those.
The picture shows how the game looks at this point. I used some art from games I made before and changed them a bit to fit their needs for this game. It's not super fancy but I like the style so far.
Tomorrow will be UI, sound and hopefully some more should-have features.
