Game and company progress

Well, this must be the smallest gap between blog posts in my time on garagegames, and the fact that I am making more progress in less time probably has something to do with it ;)

Game-related

After a lot of but's and what's, I have decided to quit my work on the brickbreaker game. The game was progressing nicely, but I realised that I didn't want my first game to be a mindless, one-out-of-thousand breakout clone that I didn't even enjoy making. The engine and all of the art was released to the Gamemaker community, and hopefully someone will be able to use it. Oh well... Pretty happy right now that I decided to start on two projects at the same time :) My other game, a mazegame with the typical "Collect stuff->get to the exit" formula is making progress. I have most of the gameplay finished, and I have also finally decided on how the game should be themed.



No, not linux.

Pinguins. Everybody loves pinguins. They look funny and live on the north pole, and on the north pole, we've got ice. You don't walk on ice, you slide on ice, until you hit a object and stop (anyone who has seen me ice skating will agree with this). And, that is also the mechanic of my mazegame. Ta-daaa! It took me a lot of brain storming before settling on this, for some time I was also leaning towards making the game about a gold miner, about flying saucers etc... But none of them really fit the game mechanic which I have developed, but using pinguins feels spot on.

Of course, there is a problem with this. I am not a game art person. I consider myself fairly skillful in general use of photoshop, and for shiny static stuff, but as soon as I come to making real animated graphics, I am lost. In other words, I will need to contract an artist for the title rather soon, since most of the gameplay is finished. I spent yesterday and the day before that finishing off most of the menu-related stuff, only some options and such left to fix. I used Silkjades nice placeholder art for the menu, which will work for now.

Company-related

And it's not really a company, I just enjoy calling it one. I have owned the domain funkylabs.com for almost a year, and the last weeks I have felt increasingly frustrated about the name. It's not really the game-company I want to launch my first title with, and therefore I have decided to put Funkylabs away. I have been working around a new one for some time now, and the work on the website, logo and presentation is starting to come together. I am feeling really happy about this, and I am looking forward to launch the website in approx. a couple of weeks - the game will still have main priority though.

Sorry, no images this time. My maze game still has the same dreadful art I used when I first created the protoype, so there is really nothing to show there. Hopefully, there will be soon :)