I had meetings yesterday and a pretty busy day at work and I also have another project I am working on, which started as a final-year project a student was doing. She needed someone to help out with programming and we got in contact and I loved the project and we really both felt like we would want to work together, so with limited time I committed. The project is a old school point-and-click type adventure game, set in a Stockholm suburb where the main character is a 115 years old lady and how she is looking back at her life. The game's graphics are almost completely done with dolls and animated using traditional stop-motion. I encourage you to have a look at instagram and tumblr.
So I am still spending time on this project and will do so for some time still. We have a very open environment and we use deadlines and things like that more as a motivation when needed rather then a measurement of success. We work in the broad sense and I find that it works pretty well. I have however gotten a bit behind on the last level which is what I am currently implementing, so we are discussing where to put a deadline in order to put some pressure on it so that it will finish.
When I say that we work broad it's a concept I've kind of come to love. Basically I got some super-basic none-animated resources in a layered image. That image serves as the resource for all graphics and while animation and building is done I use only hand-drawn doodles representing the graphics, but still implement the functionality. So once I have the current level done we actually have the full game working, not done but working. And this is something I really like, and I would argue it is teh way to build games. I mean graphics, animation, sounds and much other things are completely disconnected from the game play. So you could do most any game with basic shapes really if you have a solid vision and when the game is mostly done you could replace all basic shapes with real resources and tweaking to complete the game. I believe that this is a great way to work, pretty related to the basic ideas from test driven development, specifically the idea that you put anything you are about to do into a problem or question, then you solve or answer that then you can measure how well it fit the description and how well it solves the problem or answers the question. So I am saying that when using a basic shape instead of real graphics you first of all may focus on making it work as intended, and when creating the resources and implement them you already have the problems to solve at hand.
Anyhow, busy day and I guess I will be a bit occupied in the near future with all of it, I am however intending to blog anyhow, and I am constantly working on business plan and if there is any more time I would love to get the hat done which turned in to a web-application to be used in
which the simple idea which also is the basic idea behind what I want to do with my business: communication and magic! The hat is a way to communicate more or less anything to us and also a way to influence decisions as it connects to the project systems so it can even be used to place orders which is monitored and it's highly possible that they will end up in the backlog. This also means that the backlog has to have some public visibility so that it becomes easier for anyone to actually participate in a meaningful way. This is all about balance of course, I mean I still want some secrets and the element of surprise and still I want to involve the fans on a level where I give them a tool to actually write tickets(!), how does that add up? Well it actually aligns quite nicely and I believe that the audience is super ready for it. Where I think that the general interest in the development is pretty big.Actually I will stop this post now as I feel I am starting to talk about a lot of different concepts delving deeper into them and I believe this is well enough to chew for now.
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