Where have the Devs been?
Hey everyone, it been too long since Matt and I have made a post!
Things have been very busy for us since Christmas. Once we got our hands on the Film Victoria grant money we spent some time liaising with some people form the marketing company Surprise Attack to figure out exactly what we were going to try to get them to do for us to try to make Puzzle Puppets as successful as possible. After a few talks with the Surprise Attack guys we decided it would be for the best if we aimed to release a Windows Phone 7 and a Windows Phone 8 version of the game at the same time. Now, this seems like a solid plan but Matt and I have to eat occasionally and we are obligated to use the money received from Film Vic only for marketing our game. Luckily Matt and I have a few contacts at other game companies and were able to find ourselves some work with Wicked Witch Software for four days a week so that we could live a little while working on the Windows Phone 8 version of Puzzle Puppets in our time off.
This was fantastic for Matt and I as we got to work on something different, which we hadn’t done in a while, and see people other than one another every day for a change and generally had a really good time. Unfortunately for Puzzle Puppets, Wicked Witch were completing there own game during this time; meaning the crunch was on and everyone was doing long hours which meant that we sometimes ended up doing 5 or 6 day weeks instead of 4 days and on the days where we could work on Puzzle Puppets we were exhausted and work was much slower than usual. (This isn’t all that uncommon in the video game industry, especially for studios working towards their publisher’s deadlines).
Eventually Wicked Witch got to the point where they no longer needed us around as badly and we went back to working exclusively on Puzzle Puppets. Matt adding more content and me working on the Windows Phone 8 port as well as some extra tweaks and small additions that we had been wanting to make for a while. If you have been following our past Devlogs you may remember that I had started porting Puzzle Puppets into the Unity game engine, this approach has been abandoned for now since Unity’s 2D capabilities were lacking at best and my knowledge of Unity (or lack there of) meant that progress had been quite slow. Instead, for the WP8 port I’ve been using the still in development Windows Phone 8 version of the Monogame code library which has meant that, once I figured out a few bugs and quirks with the library, the port has been fairly fast. As of this writing the two versions of Puzzle Puppets are coded and just waiting on a few last additions to the content before we can send the whole thing off to Microsoft for approval. YAY!
Aside from the serious break we took working for Wicked Witch, Matt and I have also found time to get together with some of our friends and enter a Game Jam to create a game for the Oculus Rift virtual reality device. If you’re not familiar with the Oculus, it’s basically what the virtual reality headsets from the late 90’s should have been but never were. Matt got his hands on one of the Development Kits earlier this year so we took the opportunity to participate in the recent 3 week long jam and if you happen to have access to an Oculus Rift we heartily recommend you give our entry Bigzilla a try as well as the other great entries. While we are extremely happy with the game demo we put out at the end of the jam we do regret that we didn’t get to spend the entire three weeks working on it to make it as good as it could be; in reality we only really worked on the game properly and as a group for three DAYS.
Aside from the catch up I’d like to take this opportunity to mention the changes I’ve made to the discussion section of this website. Since I’ve been getting bombarded with discussion posts that need to be approved that have almost all been generated by spam bots, discussion threads will now be closed automatically after 30 days of an article being posted.
Well if you’ve come this far into the article well done for persistence! With any luck we will be posting here more often again with fewer walls of text and will soon have some concrete news about the release of Puzzle Puppets! Until next time guys, stay awesome!
