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 [...]
Minima Time is the first time I’ve ever really done anything with Flash. The game is doing decent on portals and I hope that eventually I’ll earn enough in the advertising to pay for the 5 days I dedicated to making the game. Here’s some of my thoughts looking back on releasing this flash game: [...]
I am thrilled that our Scifi project, previously known as Project K, finally has a name. We held a poll and let blog readers vote and decide our game’s name. It was a pretty decisive victory for Astral Hunters as you can see above. One of the names I came up with got a pitiful [...]
If you’ve been following the blog at all, you know that we have been very indecisive on our game name and have struggled with a title (see part 1 and part 2). Some people have shared in our plight and frustration with naming our game, while a ton of others have offered suggestions (or jokes) [...]
It’s been a few weeks since we asked for help naming our scifi platforming game. Thank you to everyone who sent in or tweeted game ideas to us. Zak and I made a list of all the decent game name ideas and cut it down to our mutual top 7. You can vote for your [...]
First off, thank you to everyone who responded to the “Which HUD is Better Post.” I, the lowly programmer, spent some time this week laying out nearly all of the HUD information and toying with a few different designs. Ultimately, I ended up with the one above that is working really well in the game [...]
So above is a screenshot of Shadow Complex, please note the white overlay and slightly transparent HUD for health, weapon selected, ammo, etc. I like the simplicity and clean look of Shadow Complex’s HUD, but I am also drawn to the old school style HUD that sits at the top of the screen a la [...]
