Keeping busy around the lab

About time for another .plan update, hope everyone has been doing well!

For those of you who don't read Make It Big in Games, Jeff Tunnell's industry blog, he posted a great article today about the "iterative design process" we are using over at Push Button Labs. The article is called "The Art of Backing Off". In the article he discusses one of our projects, a flash RTS we have been prototyping and how we started big and ended small:

Quote:As a producer you have to be open to reducing your expectations. Your customers only know what the end result is, not what you were thinking anywhere along the development process. I think it is always best to start with an idea that has a lot of room for expansion, then cut it back as development progresses.

- From The Art of Backing Off

I thought it would be cool to back up Jeff's story with a blog post of my own over on my website. The blog post contains a few images by both Todd Pickens and myself) that accompany what Jeff says about the various stages of the Flash RTS concept in his article.


Post-GG life has been busy, VERY busy actually! At the new shop we have a ton of cool things going on, and I am pumped for when we pull back the curtain on a lot of those things this winter. We recently put up our placeholder website, although there is not a lot of info there except for the basics most of you already know.


Sean Sullivan and Rick Overman have just put OnePress Community into it's first round of private testing. OPC is an extremely cool product which has been a blast to work on, and I think will help a lot of people. Not a lot has been said about OPC, but I don't want to jump the gun and steal any thunder of Sean or Rick's, so I'll leave that to another .plan from one of them. :)


In other news, Adam Larson and Ben Garney have been rocking out on the Push Button Engine and we expect to make a lot of progress on that this winter.

It's been extremely fun to work on so many different projects with the dudes around PBL. While I can't share much of what's been going on, rest assured I've been very productive lately. Since August, I've put out 15-20 pieces of concept work, about 10 pieces of functional game "prototype" art, and created 8 websites (among other things I've done a little contract work, a bunch of identity and branding, and other such things). I don't think anyone blogged about it, but a fun fact is we ended up renting out the lower floor of our old digs, the previous GarageGames office! It's kind of fun to be back in the place where we all started (well... half of us at least!).

In other news, I finished building the yurt that I blogged about recently! It was a pretty crazy process form start to finish, but we got it done. It's a 30' ft Pacific Yurt, and we even took the extra step to get it approved and up to code by Lane County, which was a huge, but necessary, pain in the ass. I need to finish some plumbing and wiring over the next two weeks, than I hope to be moved in! More photos can be found here, although oddly enough no picture of the finished product (woops, guess I was just too tired).


Hope to post more news from indie life and Push Button Labs soon!