Well internet, yet again I have to write a grovelling post apologising
for being late!
I promised a game for you before Christmas and also we were
going to hold a game jam and make yet another game and it’s now 2013 and neither
of those things has happened… which technically makes me twice the liar. So
what happened?
The short answer: Christmas
The long version…
Firstly there’s the Connect 4 game I’ve been working on
since October: I did genuinely have it completely finished about a month
ago. Then, just before launch, I decided
to get my missus to play test it... She
beat the AI 8-0 without breaking a sweat :-|
Watching that happen made me realise something: in the single player game, difficulty is
everything!
The AI I had written was pretty simplistic and didn’t offer
much of a challenge. As a result of that
she found it boring as hell despite the fact that she was winning.
So therefore, all the time I’d poured in to animations,
sound & music, etc. was wasted, I mean: who gives a shit if a boring game is
presented well – it’s still boring…
Since then I’ve completely gutted the AI and rebuilt it from
scratch, I made it lot cleverer (in the rematch my wife couldn’t beat it once)…
then realised that I’d hit the same problem from the other end (i.e. I have to
let you guys win sometimes!) So now I’m concentrating on making it more dynamic. In the end I’m hoping it’ll be dynamic so
that it changes and gets harder to beat as the matches progress.
I’m not going to make any promises for release as I keep
breaking them – but I’m just doing this final balancing now so let’s settle on ‘soon’
Game Jam:
Well we did indeed hold the jam and it was awesome. We spent
a day locked up at Rich & Ads house working on a new project from
scratch. As well as consuming large
quantities of beer and pizza we put together a rough design, art assets, a
sound track and a from-scratch game engine in a single session!
So where’s the game?
Well we didn’t get enough done before ran out of time. After much discussion we decided that we’d be
better waiting until it’s coherent and playable rather than just releasing
something half baked.
The objective of the jam was always more about being a good
learning experience anyway, so as far as I’m concerned I think it was a huge
success!
I’ll leave you with proof of the above in the form of some pictures
of the crew hard at work :-)
Happy New Year!
Adam getting his mac on:
Mungy being all artistic n' shit
