Milestone One?

With milestone one coming up next Friday all the groups are polishing up their first demo of their games to be presented.

Luckily, our project’s been ahead of schedule since the first week, and all we have left to finish is the placeholder audio and we’re ready to present!

Before milestone one finally hits we’ll be prepping to release a short demo of our game so far, including the first and second tutorial levels, and hopefully a third if time is allowed. Not all levels will be entirely polished and art will not be finalized, but we’re hoping to get it out early to get some open testing happening for the public.

The weekend will be used to prepare the installation of the audio for the game, optimizing it’s size and it’s length, while inputting the proper code to make the implementation easier.

Also, we’ve been using the drawing mechanic to make some interesting creations. Some have been put around the blog already, but I’ll repost them below here. Enjoy! Hopefully you can make something else great when we release the game itself.

Master Chief Rendition

This magician doesn't use wands!

Matt's Deadpool Rendition

Matt's Scorpion Rendition

Ankit's Clone Trooper

Ankit's a big Star Wars fan...

-Kramer, signing off.

ONLINE!

What’s that? Sketch Quest is live?

You don’t say!

Well hey here it is, our game up and ready for you to play!

http://www.kongregate.com/games/page52/sketch-quest

We’ll be uploading it to more portals throughout the day, but Kongregate was the first so we wanted to get it to you all first. Hope you like the latest build!

Kramer, out.

New Screenshots!

Courtesy of Carl Graves, prodigal artist-with-a-mouse, here are some more screen shots of the game.

VIDEO BLOOOGGGG!

Another video blog, and it’s here to stay! We hope you all enjoy, and don’t get mad when we spam the crap out of it until another one’s out.

Also, you should watch the second video blog before this one, if you haven’t already (and maybe still if you have.)

Kramer, out.

They Like Us… They Really Like Us!

Following a week-or-so hiatus from this blog, our group finally came back and provided some insight on the progress of the game (more still to come.) It turns out all of you really missed us, as we’ve had our highest numbers of site viewings since we initially started the blog. It’s nice to know that we haven’t quite jumped the shark yet.

For some reason (who knows why…) I guess I’ve sort of become the “blogger” of the class, and the people running blogs for each game come to me to ask for small tips here and there. Usually I would keep this to myself and brag under my breath when people walk by, but I think there may be some valuable tips in here.

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1. POST EVERYTHING. Most of you are reading this right now for this exact reason: I spam the shit out of this blog. Each time I make a new post, it’s on Facebook. I post it in groups, through the game’s page, and just on my home page in general. As much as people don’t like it, getting a daily notification on Facebook from me is what makes them read this blog.

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2. Have a routine. Although I’ve strayed from it a bit, I usually post updates from this blog at 10:00 AM every day, weekends with some exceptions. If there’s a milestone coming up, I may post less due to time constraints and, honestly, that there’s nothing new to talk about (it’s all polish.)

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3. Change it up. You see this? A list of things to do? Not that new for me, but videos and screenshots are. It’s not always a bad thing to have a reputation as an essay writer, because when you put up videos and screenshots people will flock to them.

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4. Modesty. Okay, maybe at this point I’m not practicing what I preach, but it’s important. A lot of the time people will read an opinionated blog and become insulted at the idea that the writers opinion is so convoluted. As long as you leave some shadow of a doubt in your own opinion people will keep reading. That being said, I could be completely wrong… I don’t know everything (see what I did there?)

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All in all, it’s important to just keep yourself consistent. With the hiatus we had it turned out to help us get a boost back in readers, but that’s not to say that taking a break is always a good thing. As long as you don’t completely forget about your blog, and keep in mind what your audience wants to read (and spam spam spam) everything will work out.

p.s. Ian stop posting all your updates right after mine. lol.

Kramer, out.

More Screenshots! No Video…

 

Video is on it’s way, but prior to it’s showing we’re going to give you a little more as far as screenshots go.

New Screenshots

Murder

Oh yes, murder. I know it’s a touchy subject, but it’s a completely necessary description of what happened last night.

We killed Alpha.

For those who haven’t been keeping up with this developer’s blog, Alpha is a milestone in a game project that is usually feature complete, but here is considered content complete (due to the short dev cycle.) We presented yesterday afternoon to a panel of instructors here at Vancouver Film School and had some great feedback on the game, made a few changes, and then presented to a larger group of industry professionals (our mentors.) They loved it, and I can tell you it feels damn good.

I’ll give you my thought process going into each presentation:

– Instructor presentation: “ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod….”

– Mentor presentation: “ohgodohgod….” (only twice that time, i was confident)

Each presentation was of course nerve racking, but I can tell you we definitely knew what we were doing going into the second presentation. We already knew what sort of feedback we were going to get back, and we knew what issues we had to fix already, so it seemed like the Q&A section was just going to be a replay of the earlier one from the instructors. We were pretty much right about that part, but what we didn’t expect was that they paid absolutely no attention to us during the presentation; they couldn’t keep their eyes off of the game we were demoing in front of them.

Some say that you don’t want the visuals of your presentation to overshadow the speaking portion, because then the audience doesn’t absorb the information. When you’re presenting a game however, I completely disagree. If you’re presenting a game and no one is paying any attention to what you’re saying, it’s because they can’t peel their eyes from the screen (where your game is.)

In other words, we killed Alpha, and it feels good. Expect some video features up possibly today, but definitely throughout the week.

Kramer, out.

Alpha Presentations

Hello all, we’re back!

It’s been some time since we’ve update this blog… frankly I’m sort of glad that we took the time away. We’ve spent the last two weeks, since updating, polishing the features of our game to hit Alpha strong. Tomorrow afternoon/night is our Alpha deadline and we’ve got some great progress to show.

Expect to see some short videos to show the game’s features in the next few days when they’re ready to be shown.

Some features to look forward to:

– New enemy designs
– Level art
– Weapon powers
– A SURPRISE!

Don’t kid yourself, surprises are not a feature, but a surprise feature shall be unveiled.

Kramer, out.

Less Than a Week

In a week’s time the game hits Alpha. Let’s talk about what exactly that means.

Alpha, in it’s purest form as far as game development is concerned, is feature complete. To be more accurate in terms of our own project, it’s a vertical slice: a portion of the game we’re going to present for final that has all the working features it needs. This vertical slice is what we plan on releasing to you, the public, to try out and give us some feedback.

Now, for what we’re planning to have in the game:

• A multitude of enemies from third-person talking crabs to self-motivating punching gloves.
• Melee, ranged, and throwing weapons each with their own special ad-ons and traits.
• Double-jumping and wall-jumping.
• Classic platforming puzzles and elements.
• Teleporters, man-cannons and other advanced platforming features.
• Three demo levels to play through, and a debug mode to fool around in.

All of these features will be included in the demo we release in the next week or two before we go into the Beta phase. We’re releasing the demo to have you, the public, test our game and give us feedback. If you’ve already played the game (unlikely) then feel free to resubmit some advice or ideas you have to improve the game on top of it’s already sturdy foundation. If you haven’t played it however, we’re going to be giving you access to a survey where you can give us the best possible feedback.

Also, until we work out the photo-sharing feature, feel free to screen capture your drawings from the game and put them up on our facebook page. If you haven’t already, “like” it here: http://on.fb.me/ruoiMP

Drawn  character examples:

Master Chief Rendition

This magician doesn't use wands!

Matt's Deadpool Rendition

Matt's Scorpion Rendition

Ankit's Clone Trooper

 

Ankit's a big Star Wars fan...

Master Chef