It’s been a busy few months working on these new games, but they’re coming together nicely and will be ready to show off soon (maybe at GDC!).
Lycette Bros. secured some investment funding from Film Victoria’s Digital Media Fund, to produce some prototype games, and this is a sneak peak.
Mark and I came up with the ideas and designed the gameplay and visual design, Ben developed the games and of course helped refine any usability and gameplay issues. Brent and Ben have also implemented some of the aspects of the escapeFactory API along the way.
Skate Dude and BMX Dude are the big brothers of Snow Dude, but with more tricks, levels and global leaderboards – as requested.
Steam Pilot is a game of skill where you navigate yourself above the rooftops in the fastest time possible, not so easy when your craft is a steam powered balloon with mechanical feet!
I started on “Mole – The Quest for the Terracore Gem” last october. Chris (the designer) and I worked hard on a prototype that we got out in about three weeks. We submitted that to the Muse games contest as well as the GDAA indie game contest at GCAP 2009.
Originally we were slated to do an iPhone release in mid December 2009, but since we got picked as a finalist for the GDAA Indie game contest, we decided to focus on polishing a desktop version that we could show off at the conference. This paid off huge in terms of really good gameplay additions as well as some invaluable data collected watching people play the game at GCAP. We took all of that information and updated the gameplay to make it even better and also spent a few weeks getting it running on the iPhone. After a good bit of external beta in mid January, we released it to the app store in early Feb.
Unfortunately somewhere in the final frenzy to get the game out the door one of the meta data files got overwritten with an older version. We built that into the version 1.0 release and pushed it to the store.
UNfortunately that little thing caused the game to go looking for some resources that no longer existed at the end of a level and was causing crashes. I hate crashes. As soon as we found out about the crashing bug we pulled the app from the store and pushed up a fixed binary. We had some great help from some of the touch arcade forum regulars who notified us of the bug right away, so thanks to them we were able to pull it so quickly and get the fix out straight away!
Although the initial app was approved in about 2 days, the fix took about a week to get through the process (still way faster than last year, so: yay Apple!).
In any case, Mole is out now, and we have had a great response to it.
Just a few weeks after I started dev on Mole, I was approached by Tin Man Games to take over the Gamebook Adventure development.
This turned out to be a much larger job than I had originally anticipated and it took about a month longer than we had hoped. However, the final product is really great. The time we spent to make sure the game was polished and performed well really paid off. There are a few bugs in this first release and we are working on a fix for them right now.
We have had some good press coverage for GA:
Next up! We are looking to finish a handful smaller more casual titles that we have had in production for awhile now, SkateDude and BMXDude are at the top of this list as well as a couple new games called ‘Steam Pilot’ and ‘Gooey’ that I will post about later.
and writing a Choose Your Own Adventure iPhone game for the GA series.
Of course, through all of this, I have found plenty of time to play some new games.
The iPhone Sol Free Baker’s Game seems to continue its hold on me. I don’t know why, other than the fact that it has the strategic yet mindless quality necessary for my longer-lasting game affairs.
Canabalt was doing it for me for a while, but I’m sort of over it by now. It’s a little too monotonous to continue to hold my attention.
I’ve been reading the Gamebook Adventures’ An Assassin in Orlandes (programmed by our own Ben B.). I’m really digging the well-written story lines and how they’ve optimized the choose your own adventure reading experience by adding features you could only get on the iPhone. For example, if you encounter a locked door and your path hasn’t brought you through finding the key, it’s literally locked and you can’t choose that path. Very cool.
I also recently downloaded Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee onto our PS3. I played it a bit when it was first out, so I’ve been poking around in it. The whole thing is undeniably cute, and maybe I’ll spend a little time trying to crack this one.
But for right now, it’s Mole all the way. This game also has that elusive mix of mindless strategy and I find myself sucked into playing it often. Plus it was programmed Ben B. and the music was composed by Brent L, both escFactory boys.
If you take from this that I’m a casual gamer, you would be correct. But I have been playing video games since I was a kid. And, since I have your attention, and I’ve discovered that many of my favorite old games have videos on YouTube, I’d like to reminisce… come on, you kids at least owe grandma that!
My dad let me play his Atari when I was a kid. Outlaw was my favorite.
Yeah… that was pretty much all it was. But it is important to keep in mind that I was little… like four years old. And Night Driver was way beyond me. That paddle controller, I feel that they use the term “controller” loosely, was impossible for me to use.
As I got older and my dad gave away the Atari (I’m still miffed at him about that) I graduated up to computer games. Apogee was my best friend and with titles like Duke Nukem
and my absolute favorite of all time
Commander Keen, which I followed all the way from version 1
through “Keen Dreams” which I think is sorta version 4.5
And, by the way, yes I am totally a fan of Commander Keen on Facebook.
I also remember my sister and I taking turns playing Laura Bow. I don’t really remember too much about it other than getting really creeped out at ghosts rising from the dead in the cemetery, but really, how can you not love a game when you can get naked and things like this can happen to you:
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