Interstellar Tortoise

3.11.09

Frag. I am not sure whether or not to keep this whole dynamic music thing. It’s a fair amount of extra work, it doesn’t always sound as good as something planned out, it only saves a little bit of space, and the melody sections still get repetitive after a little while… And it broke my sound effects slider.

Also I would need to keep the music inside the file as opposed to an external directory. And this bloats the size of the working file considerably and makes it unpleasant to do just about any development. Oy.

I just don’t know. I guess I will put aside the sound for a while and just focus on visual art and gameplay issues.

BTW – I just started playing Super Metroid again – and I am just floored by what a fantastic opening sequence that game has. Possibly the best in video game history.

3.6.09

Okay. It will be okay. I was thinking that I may have to throw out this whole dynamic music thing due to a conflict with the sound effects. Here is the gist of the problem: I have separate volume sliders for music and for special effects, but for some reason the SFX volume was overriding the music volume – so if your sound effects were up but the music was down low, the music would suddenly become super loud (on every click).

I am sure I could figure out the problem if I dedicated enough time to it, but don’t want to get hung up on this issue. I was starting to think to scrub the whole dynamic sound thing… But I think that I will actually make all music and effects volume go on one slider (at least for now).

Out of the two features, having dynamic music generation is FAR more interesting. It could even be thought of as a USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

So I guess the SFX slider is going out the window. Maybe I’ll be able to resurrect it later on.

3.4.09

AAAAAaaaah frustration!!

My code for the dynamic music works, but when I dropped it into the game, it caused all sorts of bugs and anomalies. What’s more, the working file is much bigger – so it takes longer to do ANYTHING in game.

I may have to wipe clean all of the temporary music code and rewrite it from scratch. Grrrr!

I'm grumpy!

2.27.09

My friend Sass is going to be doing voice over (VO) for the main speaking part. I asked her to do it over 6 months ago and she has been asking whether that is still going to happen. That made me start to look into VO a little bit. I REALLY REALLY want to include VO if I can manage the file space.

So… I started to do some tests to see what I’m working with. It looks like having external MP3 or WAV files would actually make the overall size of the game bigger. A bit of a shock for me. The best way to use audio in terms of space seems to be to import the audio into Flash as wav file. For some reason if you import an mp3 the size is considerably larger. Another shock. Weird. Good… but weird. This should be really good because it allows the game file to be an entirely stand alone file with no external linking.

It appears that it gets shrunk down to roughly 2k per second. My goal is to have each all of the audio (music + VO) in under 3 MBs – a very tall order. We will have to see…

We’ve just had our first interview!

Read interview here

(2.24.09)

Haven’t actually gotten down to balance and refinement for the Prequel game – I decided to start looking into sound recording and have allowed myself to get totally sidetracked down that direction for a while. I bought a program called ‘Mixcraft’ which lets me plug my guitar right into the computer and record with almost no setup at all. It is all addictively immediate.

I also figured out how to write a series of scripts that dynamically draws music loop tracks randomly from a set. This will allow me to have quasi-random music generation. This is exciting for two reasons: 1. From a relatively small set of music samples, the music will play with a LOT of variations. This will (hopefully) keep the music from getting stale for the avid player.

2. This will help to keep music file sizes much smaller than they would be if a finished mix of the same length was recorded using traditional linear music tracks.

Unfortunately, I believe that this whole excursion has bounced me a bit off focus. Not sure whether it was worth it or not yet. We will see.

(2.4.09)

Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve recorded my progress. All is going extremely well. The Art for the prequel is almost finished. Almost all of the rooms and the Display has been updated with prettier graphics.

The Display looks SO much better! My brother played the game before I updated the display and completely missed the fact the player has a limited number of moves – so I made that number huge and called it ‘Life’ so that It would be more easily understood. I also had it sit in a heart graphic to match the hearts that are picked up as PowerUps. I’ve also revamped the map so that it works really nicely – very similar to the newer castlevania games.

All of the sequential gameplay is put down and works (more or less) and I am really getting down to balance and refinement for the Prequel game. Then I will still need to make the entire full game.

12.15.08

I got the story roughed out for Game Mini. Figured out the main incentive for players to progress and started implementing it. Sigh. Now I’m not even working on the final game anymore. Am I getting farther from my goal? I guess that it will feel good to have something finished and see what it’s like to release something.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just be crying in the closet for a couple hours.

Just kidding.

Kind of.

12.2.08

Well, maybe Christopher Lloyd doesn’t need roads, but I figured that I need them in the game pretty ‘friggin badly. I made the navigational arrows invisible until you roll over them, which works pretty well overall. It makes the space far cleaner and more aesthetic – unfortunately it also makes it harder to tell WHERE to go.

So my solution has been a path that goes through the game - a visual cue as to which directions are available to move in. It is absolutely AMAZING what a big difference that makes in terms of understanding the navigation.

(12.1.08)

Shifted my overall focus slightly. I had been working fully focused on the game up until now – but now I’ve started to consider what marketing I plan(s) to pursue. I knew from the start that I would need to put at least as much energy into marketing as I would into development. Most developers HATE this, but I think that what I’ve been reading is actually pretty interesting.

So I put up some Art on Redbubble.com and DeviantArt.com to see what it’s like having a product, and trying to sell. I’ve also been more consciensious about updating my blog

( www.crispyinspiration.blogspot.com ). It’s hard to get traffic! It serves as a really good test pad for traffic building ideas.

[Disregard -- the blog has been moved to my personal website -- www.dansilber.com ]

It had been my thought for quite a while to have some version of the game available for free – maybe the first level or something like that, which would serve as my primary marketing tool. I still think that idea is sound, but I’ve evolved the concept a bit.

I now intend to have the free version be a stand-alone full storied (albeit small) game. I plan to put some ads up in-game and offer it to AS MANY WEBSITES/PORTALS as possible (it is vector and can resize to any format). My thought is that if it is a fully polished game, widely published – it will get a lot of traffic and I can monetize on a bit of the traffic. At the same time I will be generating buzz/interest/market for the full pay version of the game.

I will here on out refer to this mini game as Game Mini and the full multi-leveled version as the Main game. Okay?