One of the most enjoyable parts of developing ‘Best in Show Solitaire’ has been including my dog, Pepper and Zak’s dog, Marley into the game. Marley is sort of a standard, popular, and well-known breed (Black Lab) so the artist didn’t really have any problems with Marley. Here’s a few Marley Puppy pictures: Here’s a [...]
I have spent the past couple days working on the Pet Store. The Pet Store is where you can go to purchase upgrades for your dog, buy additional spares, or browse and purchase new dogs. The original concept art is above. — The coding for the shop is very simple – but tying all the [...]
I took some time to record some gameplay of our current build of Best In Show Solitaire. The gameplay shows off the Title Screen’s look and shows off some actual gameplay and flow of the game. This footage still comes from a game that is still in development. Still I think it shows off the [...]
Last time I really blogged about Best in Show Solitaire, I talked about the variety of backgrounds and how that was important for the game. It was great to conceive all the variety of locations in the game, but then I had to think about the overall game’s story and progression. The basic premise of [...]
Nothing beats getting a new phone. You wait and wait till that cell phone contract is up, so that you can get a great deal on whatever the hot new phone is at the Verizon Store. Well at the time my contract was up (Nov 2009), the 2 hot new phones at Verizon were the [...]
One of the really important things I decided early on was that I wanted to have good background variety. All of my locations had to fit into the dog motif (i.e. parks, lawns, etc) but having level after level of dog parks wouldn’t be very interesting for the player. So how could I add variety [...]
When I conceived the backgrounds, I knew that I wanted to maximize the artwork I was paying for and build in the ability to mix and match elements to form new unique permutations of the backgrounds. In order to accomplish this, I required that every background be dissected into 3 parts: the sky, backdrop, and [...]
While I was working on coding the gameplay and figuring out exactly what we needed for the User Interface, Jeff (our artist) started working on the backgrounds for all the different levels in the game. I had brainstormed a lot of great locations and gave Jeff the list. He started off by sketching out the [...]
From my sketch, Jeff turned around a pretty great initial HUD mockup: I had a problem with some of Jeff’s color choices for the bone bar and we went through a few iterations of the Undo button. Ultimately the items in the corner got a lot more space as well. I liked the consistent leather [...]
As Jeff worked on the dogs and cards, I started working with him to think about the Player interface and the level backgrounds as well. I took a current screenshot at the time (Feb 2010) and marked it up with elements that we needed for the player. Ultimately, we worked on the backgrounds first and [...]
