9 months ago
2014-3-9
Status update.
Games
Even the Ocean
Progress going well. “Slowly but surely”. In the past month we went to Indiecade where we quickly verified the game still stands as interesting to players in the way we were hoping: the game does not play as “difficult” (as desired), but instead conveys to the player this sense of there being a variety of ways to make it through rooms based on energy level, with health/damage seeming very interchangeable.
Recent big things that I can talk about have been putting in actual game dialogue, as well as more pretty-final sprites and actual tiling of levels with final tilesets. As always, it’s hard to say when something is “final”, but in my experience, the first pass over something with final assets tends to be pretty final - some aspects change during revisions, but most first-draft stuff stays. It’s entirely possible that’s not the best way to work, but it seems to work fine for us.
secret game
This has been done for a while and will release as a part of something. It’s more of a practice tiny-game that I made which I wanted to stay as abstract, and it is. I’d like to do more like it in the future.
various other ideas
There are other projects in the works, though nothing concrete and existing enough to merit talking about publicly quite yet.
Music
Music for Games
Music has been fine for Even the Ocean, approximately going at the pace that areas are worked on - getting ahead of myself too much doesn’t seem to work that well.
I did a track for a game mush worked on, and was going to do some music for another Braingale member but that project is on hold.
Live Music
Slow, but I spent parts of last month and January using ableton live to make some short songs, which was pretty fun. Now I just need to suck it up and pay for it since my trial ran out. I’m still not really sure how to approach structuring a live show, or even what genre of music to lean towards writing, but I think I should just pick something and go with it…speaking of that, I’ve been trying to finish a track I started 4 months ago with the ‘seanhoganok’ project … the track is okay in parts but I can’t really figure out how to make it come together but I might just put in some more work and finish it anyways. Questions I’ve been having are like “something people will dance to?” it seems fun to make it easy for people to dance, even though I don’t enjoy dancing myself. Or something that I find interesting myself on a thematic level? Should I try singing? Etc.
It’s getting warmer in Chicago so that will make life easier with transportation if I did a show…just need 30 minutes of music, somehow.
Etc.
Last month I moved out of Hyde Park (finally) to a new apartment. Lots of bullshit fees: you have to pay a fee to move in, and to move out, and are required to schedule “elevator time” even if you don’t need it, and you have to give them a security deposit for that as well!
But the new apartment I’m at is nice and near some nice restaurants and…well, will be much nicer when spring actually comes in Chicago and we’re not sitting here being barraged by neverending below-freezing days.
Going to GDC next(next) week? Tue-Sat. I sort of don’t want to go because I’m tired, but it should be fun, probably, though I’d rather work…
Trying to think of things to write on this tumblr blog. Not really sure what. Anodyne postmortem? ha!
