Wow time has flown

This is going to be somewhat of a short post....

It's been quite a while since I've had a moment to actually sit down and blog. Lots has happened this past year and none of it is game related. We had some major life occurrences in the family which pretty much sucked up all my time and energy. When that finally subsided I started to delve into gaming design and actually managed to get a group together to work on the Chifurs video game. We did a lot of prep work, art concepts and game design. Luckily for us we also went through a series of focus groups to test that our design would do well once we hit the market. That was really and truely an eye opener! The game was going to be an RTS game marketted to the Furry community. In the game players would be able to create a tribe of furs and play against other players in competition for land and survival. One of the first major hurdles we encountered is that the furry community is a very lax community. It's very hard to motivate them to do anything so it was a painstaking process to get them to login and fill out our questionaires. They wanted a completed project before they would answer questions, but we were leary to proceed without making sure we had a firm grasp of what would actually be desired. It took several months but finally I had enough data to make a decision...and that decision was in essence to scrap the project. I found out that furries as a whole do not like to spend money and would more than likely not even buy the game once it was released. Every single member of the 30-40 focus group members unanimously stated they expected the game for free and did not want to pay /any/ monthly charges. This did not bode well for the project as I could not see investing time and money into a project that had no projected returns.

At this point I partnered up with one of my friends to begin work on a new game called Nano Nano...this is a game system where players can build and customize chibi superhero characters in a game system similar to the Mutants and Masterminds open sourced rpg. With his aide the plan was to have him work out the game mechanics for the system while I coded and modeled for the game system. This didn't work well either as I could never get information back from him in a timely manner to proceed. I'd often wait weeks before we'd get together again and there would be one or two extra lines of work completed on his part. With that going nowhere I have taken the past few months to learn the core mechanics of the system and have extracted what I'm going to need to put it together. I've spent the better part of the past two weeks compiling the powers and skills into a tree system for player advancement. My focus for the new week or two is to establish which powers and abilities are no brainer code modifications and which will require massive upgrades to the codebase. It's my hope to release them in expansions as we progress the game and move onto a more involved system.

I don't have all the details yet as to how the gameplay will be the initial version will primarily be a sort of 'Every man for themself' superhero FPS. As I enable features and code it will progress into a more robust multiplayer (not mmo) system where players can download monthly adventure campaigns that can be either played by themselves or with a limited group of friends.

Well that didn't turn out as short as I thought it would....but that's what I have so far. Here are a few snapshots of some character designs that will be in game.