The Death of a Doctor and the Birth of a Clone June 22, 2009 at 12:29 pm
The past few weeks have been a little crazy, which explains this multi-week post. There have been some changes in the design process, some interesting events, and a lot of people around here to get to know. So let’s begin:
First off, WhichDoctor is dead. Well, maybe not dead. More like in a catatonic state induced by some Haitian voodoo. I’m slightly disappointed by it, but to be honest, it was shaping up to be a big game. I never realized it, but making a scripted adventure game in Flash is actually really difficult and a very long process. I wasn’t even finished with all of the basic guts of the game (walking around the world, the healing dynamic, the amulet system), and I was feeling a bit burned by the whole thing. So, when Bob (the director of my project) told me that it didn’t fit into the concept of LFI, I wasn’t horribly opposed to the concept of putting it on the back burner. Apparently, the main goal of the LFI suite of games is to get players to constantly make decisions about faces, and the pacing of WhichDoctor didn’t allow for that in the least. So, onto the back burner it went.
In the interim, I’ve been playing around with the phenomenal Box2D engine for Flash. I love it when games have realistic physics, so I wanted my next concept to involve physics in some way. I had one idea that involved destroying buildings in a Terminator-esque universe, but that never really panned out. It mostly never panned out because in order to get the game to even fit with LFI, it needed to be big. After WhichDoctor’s failure, I really wanted to move into a more rapid process, which is why that project’s been backburnered.
After messing around with Box2D and a simple projectile launcher I wrote for the nameless physics project, I decided to try my hand at a Peggle clone. Development on that one has been much quicker than any of the previous games I’ve worked on, which I find makes the whole process much more fun. The rules have yet to be hammered out entirely, but the fact that I have art and something of a goal already in the game is really driving it along.
A few more exciting bits around the Center: several new hires came in last week! None of them are actually working on LFI, but it’s still nice to see new faces around the office. Also, we got some new gear, courtesy of the hospital: Wacom Intuos 4 tablets! These things are freaking hot. If I could use it to write code, I would. They’ve got programmable buttons, really nice pen tips for different textures, and a decent amount of screen space. I’m not sure if they’re going to improve my productivity, though, because I’m having so much fun playing around with mine!
And just in case you think I’ve just been messing around with it and doing nothing, here’s some art for you:
Oh, and one more thing: I’m working with my partner Salim to get these onto some of the big Flash game sites. Our first stop will probably be Kongregate, just because they have a cool stats API and they’re the only site that’s not blocked by CHOP’s nuclear-powered firewall. Any suggestions as to other sites we should look into?
