shelled, sploidz, pow, and misc

A new milestone for Shelled arrived! The game is fully network playable and bug free to boot. Great job to Gary Preston and Andreas Kirsch for their solid code. This past month spent bug-fixing and network-completing was time well spent. I am looking forward to some great multiplayer games ahead!

After seeing Adam deGrandis's particle effects in a recent blog, I contacted him to spruce up Shelled's effects, a task which he tackled in style - cartoon style. Cheers for the new effects, those explosive turtle shells are packing a great punch. Adam is of course available for hire for your custom art needs.

The next changes ahead for Shelled include splitting the game into the Shelled and Pods of War branches, adding "Scorch-like" gameplay to Shelled, and user playtesting the result. Christmas release? I hope!





Sploidz is now up on the GarageGames' TGB demos page. In total, it's been getting about 100 downloads a week which is more than I would have guessed. It's slated to be up on download.com this week, which should increase downloads yet.





A new logo for Pods of War has been finalized, the only art planned. We were going for a heavy metal influenced look as POW is fast-action for the hardcore. It's "heavy metal" meets "casual game logo." In any case, we iterated this logo through the process and this was the end product.





I'm judging for IGF this year, and it's started. It's a great inside view on a festival I want to myself one day enter. The emphasis is on innovation over excellence, though both are important. A simple yet effective measurement for my own games: Are they of excellent quality? Are they innovative enough to stand out? I look forward to playing some great indie games - and playing them first!





Last week I lost my job. It was system engineering support in the b2b credit information industry. No specific reason was cited, they just said I "didn't seem into it." Can't imagine why :) I needed this job to get Shelled done, and Shelled is now close to done, so the job accomplished what it needed to.





The GG Community Weekend is coming up and I'll have the latest build of Shelled available in the show-off area for those few that are going. Hopefully we can get a good LAN game going Saturday night, if the board games don't take over. See you all there!