So once again we are making progress slowly. With the need to complete assignments for school, and bashing out a quick experimental game with our flash framework why wouldn’t it be.
The last month has probably been the hardest month for us. Juggling a constant bombardment of new topics in our courses, in our development process, and barely any time to do much more else.
Now that we think about it, we haven’t really talked about who “us” is!
As it’s stands at the moment Redefinition Games is made 2 official people, with several others who we often work with on their own stuff.
The person who does most of the writing at the moment is Alex. Who’s currently studying a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Studies and has previously studied an Advanced Diploma in Game Development (Arts). He is often referred to as “One of THOSE people” which more accurately translates to meaning he’s a Technical Artist. He does pretty much all the programming for Redefinition Games at the moment, for both games and this website. He also creates 3D art.
The other person is Elise, who is studying a Bachelor of Communications, learning about marketing, advertisement and story writing for various medias. She is the resident story writer and 2D artist.
We both love games, making and playing them. And we to hope create games that aren’t just one of those every day games everyone plays and passionate game developers hate. We’ve spent the last 2 years developing games and heavily researching all aspects of what we need to do to make it all happen. We’ve been doing it quietly and out of sight, intentionally avoiding to much attention, at least for the moment…
So that is “us”. Hopefully that should help clear up any confusion about “us” at least for the moment. Any new people we get on board will introduce on our blog from now on.
But aside from all that has been going on we managed to squeeze out a game amongst that chaos. And that is Chance, which we learnt a lot from. Although not a fantastic game a lot went on to get it to where it is.
So what went on within that week of development.
Chance was one of those games we were experimenting with a while ago with our Flash framework. It was roughly 4 days of just putting something simple together. However the result of the left us with a game that felt like it needed something more to make it feel more like a game rather then a pointless game of entering random doors with out making it too complex. We wanted to was to keep it simple, without adding loadings of features.
Until recently it was something that was never going to see the light of day. But thanks to an email from MochiGames and telling us about one of there competitions, we realized that the rules for that competition could really fit with Chance. So we spent a good week fixing up the code and art to something a little more pleasant to look at. We also integrated the Mochi Api into it to handle leader-boards and player scoring. We also added achievements just to see how it worked as a “why the hell not”. It was also great opportunity to see how much revenue would be generated with a simple game. As it stands it’s 500 players has earnt us $0.50!
Initially Chance was uploaded with Keyboard support only. Eventually thanks to some feedback about not being able to “press space” on a phone, I added mouse and touch controls. Majority of that was a porting exercise, re-writing our existing AI framework in C# for Unity to Actionscript, specifically the Pathfinding (AStar) and AI Graph generation. This was used to let us calculate a path from the player to the user touch or cursor clicked position, to which the player would follow.
This whole experiences was pretty much a hack of code and art. Doing things we wouldn’t usually do in order to get the game to react the way we needed it to. Also the art was quite a mess, adding stacks of individual images rather then packing them into a nice sprite sheet. The need to finish overwrote anything that you would consider “good practice” which was actually a liberating experience. After spending a lot of time in design lately, hammering something out just felt damn good.
The result of all that was Chance. Not the greatest game in the world, certainly could of used more. But at least a debut to the MNDCrp Framework and a great learning experience to a service we hadn’t used before.
But that’s enough for now.
We will say one last thing, and that is we finally have a MAYA LICENSE! We’re not going to make any promises but you may want to expect 3D art appearing. Maybe, you’ll find out!
Good morning to every and I hope you all have a great day!
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