Dev Journal 02: Analysis & Start Up

Hello again and welcome to Dev Journal Numbers Dos!

On my previous post I’ve talked about what gave us the idea to start working on this new project as well a briefly talked about why we decided to work on it. I’ll go over a little in depth on what we did to conclude our decision as well as what we did to further expand the simple game idea.

So, after we had a potential idea for a game we headed over to the iOS and Android markets to search if the game has already been made. This won’t discourage us from making the game if we find a similar game, what we’ll do is compare the features and gameplay of that game, then we look into how we can still make a unique game, but, to our luck there isn’t a game in either App Market that’s similar to ours. Great News for us, now we started downloading games that are similar in style and gameplay to gather ideas and see what’s popular amongst players and what specific features are found in all of them.

This step took a while as we had to play them to get ideas and understand the feel of the game. Some of them forced us to create accounts (something I really despise on games, this FORCED account creation thing) and other “Free” games had annoying ads for every menu navigation as well as pop ups that make you accidentally tap on the ad. I’m not mentioning the games we played now because you’d get an idea of what we’re developing. I’ll leave that for later once we unveiled our game.

After nearly filling out our phones with games, we concluded that our planned game is unique and have enough gameplay mechanics to stand out amongst others.

Since our game can be played on paper, we took a couple of our friends and show them the game. We demo the game from its basic gameplay as well as conditions and objectives that we added to vary the gameplay and we received mostly positive feedback. This is a puzzle game so, of course, it’s not appealing to everyone.

I have to say that when I saw enjoyment on our test players while playing the game we’re creating it gave me a sense of accomplishment and it’s the best feeling ever, so, me and my brother knew we were up to something.

So, with all this information about the game, we’re now moving into the “design” of the game. And that is something I’ll leave for the next Journal Entry.

Gotta be honest, I’m getting a little tired of writing the word “Game”, I’ll look at the thesaurus and find an alternative for it.

FINAL NOTES:  I know I said I was going to write about the “setup” of the game, but, I wrote a lot about our progress on how we tested the game and how we got to the Design phase that I just had to device the Journal Entry. Sorry for the misleading Subject. I won’t write the subject on the next Journal Entry unless I know for sure what I’m going to write about. I write this Journal as I work on the game throughout 2 weeks, I edit them just so they make more sense and it’s a LOT of text to go through.

This Journal is still something I’m working on and see what style suits me best so, gimme some time as I find my best style. I’ll try keeping ‘em short as well as informative.

Thanks for reading, as always, if you want to keep up with my Journal Entry or other update, follow us on Facebook or Twitter. See you all next time!!

- GerLuNiMa

Dev Journal 01: Cardboard Project 2016

Welcome to my second attempt at creating a Development journal. We’ve started a new Game project that is going well, so I want to document the progress and share it here in our blog.

Before I start talking about our new project, I want to make clear that our previous project is not cancelled, we just shelved it. It was too ambitious and we didn’t had the knowledge to implement many of the features we wanted to add in the game. One part in the game that I personally didn’t manage to work in the game were the animations of sprites and window transitions. The timings were off and static, it just didn’t look good. We don’t want to half-ass the development of the game so we decided to shelve the project and work on something else that will help us gain the experience needed. Enter the new Game Project which we’ll call “Cardboard”… for now.

Our new project “Cardboard”, like our previous Project, is a puzzle game. The idea was brought in by my brother LuiGiNiMa. During a downtime at work he started doodling on paper and playing some pencil paper type of games until he remembered a game he used to play back in high school. He showed the game to me and a couple of friends and we all enjoyed it, the challenge it offered and how easy was to understand were the key points on why we ended up liking it. So, ideas of expanding the game mechanics and make it into a Mobile App started. After bouncing ideas back and forth for a few hours, we ended up with enough content to actually proceed with the development of the game.

I know I haven’t said much about what the game is actually about, but, until I make an actual playable demo, I won’t say much. Just know, it’s a game you can play on paper, only we are going to expand the game even further when moving it into mobile.

With the Concept in mind we looked at the tools we need and we ended up with the same toolset as our previous project. So far the project Cardboard has been simple to program, it doesn’t require much animation or visuals and the main mechanics were simple to implement. We’re developing a Mobile Game using Abobe AIR, programmed with the IDE Flash Develop, we’re using the framework Axelite to handle the game mechanics and all the visual assets are done using Adobe Flash CS6. Links for each tool can be found here:

• Flash Develop: http://www.flashdevelop.org/
• Axel: http://axel.io/
• Flash: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash.html?promoid=KFOHS

Refer to my previous Journal Entry for a little more info about why we chose these tools: Dev Journal 01: Intro and Tools.

We're aiming to have this game available first for Newgrounds, then Android and finally iOS. These plans can change depending on the development process

So, now that you have an idea of the game and know the tools we’ll use, we can move onto the next step, which is the setup. Which will be on the next Journal Entry. I know I’ve said this before on my previous Journal Entry, but, we’ve had good progress with this game and I’m certain I can document the progress all the way to the publish day.

If you want to keep updated with these Development Journal, you can follow me on Facebook or Twitter. We also post weekly content like drawings, webcomics and podcasts.

Thanks for reading! See you all next time!

- GerLuNiMa