Jolly Rover boarding the Mac App Store!

I tell you, people have been hounding (oh mercy) me about this for months! So a few weeks ago after getting back from GDC I began the journey of getting Jolly Rover on the Mac App Store, and lo and behold it’s releasing there in all its award winning glory on April 15th! So, if you’ve been waiting specifically for me to stop being a jerk about it and put the game on the Mac App Store, your wait is (almost) over!

In all honesty, there were several hoops to be jumped through – it wasn’t just a matter of submitting it and waiting for approval; but Apple, to their credit, have been really helpful getting me through those hoops, and people that know me know I like to bitch and moan when things don’t work! So, maybe I’ll come around to the Apple camp someday, maybe. If Jolly Rover sells well there you can bet I’ll have a few Apple-branded flags to wave!

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Goodbye 800×600

Jolly Rover was developed at 800×600 resolution, which was to ensure maximum compatibility with systems on PC and Mac. Moving onto MacGuffin’s Curse I thought it made sense to support this resolution as well, but we’re currently maintaining 4 resolutions on the game (480×320, 960×640, 800×600, 1024×768), which this takes time and I was really questioning the relevance of the 800×600 resolution. I’ve got a laptop that’s 5 years old and even it supports 1280×800, and it was cheap then! So moving foward in 2011 I think it’s about time we said goodbye to the 800×600 resolution, we’ve had some good times.

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Tools vs Development

It’s no doubt that good tools can help the game development process. This is why we chose Unity, this is why we bought Sprite Manager 2, EZ GUI, and EZ Game Saver, because we wanted to have good tools to make the development process easier, which inevitably gives us more precious time in which to polish our game.

Now, it often occurs that sometimes you can’t buy the tool you need anywhere, so what do you do? You either have to make your own, or decide whether you can live without it. Sometimes you can take a convenience hit to save yourself time developing the tool. But is it quicker to do things manually, or a slightly longer way rather than make a tool to help you? It seems like a straightforward answer – make the tools you need – but it can be a tough call, especially when your resources are spread as thinly as ours are.

Continue reading

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DIY Press

Well, what do you know! DIY Gamer, from the media we met during GDC, has done a short writeup on MacGuffin’s Curse! Unfortunately their site seems to be having a bit of technical trouble, so here’s some nice quotes tracked down from Google Cache instead:

On the game:

From the pre-alpha build we saw using placeholder sprites (mainly from Jolly Rover), the game is a series of push-puzzles where MacGuffin must move batteries into power outlets to open doors and reveal treasure. MacGuffin will be sent on missions by his landlord and battle the puzzles set forth by the main villain who has locked down the city.

On the art style:

The most striking aspect of this new game from Brawsome is the fantastic comic-style. Their artist has created wonderful characters that feel unique and interesting from all sides. The game’s story is told through portrait cut-scenes that are beautifully hand-painted. The game’s developers claim the style is so unique because they pulled the artist from outside of the games industry, thus bringing in a fresh perspective. From the early portrait work and concepts, they’re absolutely right. The new style in the game is great.

We appreciate the positive press, and hope to have more to show soon!

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Gameplay – A Game’s DNA

We’ve gotten back into the swing of things after our trip from GDC, and it has been a busy but productive week. Just take a look at the image below, which, as I’m sure you know, is a work in progress and does not represent the final game:

So yeah! Check that out! Pretty cool, huh?

What do you mean, nothing’s changed? I guess I’ll have to explain why this image is so cool then. As you can see, there are three test batteries, as well as white block on the top which represents the slot the battery is supposed to go onto (it’ll be more clear when it has proper art). Put the battery onto the slot, and the door to the left gets power, so you can open it. There are also four different pads which allow you to transform between Lucas and his Wolf persona (two of them only do one-way transformations). Why is this all so cool? This room, right now, basically contains the primordial soup of our gameplay! It’s our mechanic in its most primitive form.

You see, while it seems pretty simple, a few minor changes make things a bit trickier. Only the Wolf is strong enough to push the battery around. And when active, the door will only respond to Lucas’ touch on the hand scanner (which you will see on the proper door art). So, you can only solve the puzzle by using both characters! The next step, of course, is to do what puzzles do best, and complicate matters further by adding obstacles. And oh boy do we have those. However, we wouldn’t want to give away everything. But it’s great that we’ve got this functionality, because from here, we can start doing more fun and complex things.

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Understanding Tiles

Back from GDC! However, as is typical when you get back from a trip, work didn’t really start happening until Thursday, when we had a meeting about art style, or more specifically, animation, tilesets, and our plans for cutscenes. Seeing as the most detailed work has been done on tilesets, I’ll talk about those.

As we’re making a top-down game, one of the tricky things to get right is perspective. If you go back and look at a top-down Zelda game (or any top-down game, really), you’ll notice that the perspectives are all over the place. In a single room of a dungeon, you’ll see that the walls are leaning inward, characters have kind of got a 45 degree view when looked from front or back, but walk absolute left or right, some objects are birds-eye view, while others are completely out of proportion to anything else. The closer you look at it, the more “wrong” it all seems. But! When you play it as a game, it all comes together.

So you have to get that balance between getting perspective correct, but not at the expense of the player not understanding what they’re supposed to be doing, or whether they can interact with an object. This image is early and does not represent the final game! Now, let’s have a look at it:

Here, there are some important things to take into account:

  • The battery here has been drawn top-down. But, could you figure out what it was if I hadn’t told you? Probably not.
  • Those windows have light spilling in, which is cool. But to transform, you need to stand in the moonlight. If you were a player, you might think that standing in those light shafts would work too.
  • Speaking of the windows, they’re probably not the best wall decoration, as when you move into the next room, you’ll see that there was a wall next to it!
  • There’s more stuff that we’re aware of too, but these are just a few points. The tough thing is making sure the art looks nice, but not at the expense of confusing the player.

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    Oh, What a Weekend

    Well, GDC has finished for the week, sending our collective marble back to the apartment for an exciting weekend involving high fructose corn syrup and clam chowder. We certainly can’t argue that it wasn’t productive. Well, we can, but I suppose we’d be lying a bit, because it was. Amongst the press we got to meet were the folks from Macworld and Touch Arcade, who each did a small piece on us, so thanks for that guys. We’re looking forward to getting back home though, because despite what our family and friends think when we say “overseas trip”, we didn’t spend our time riding the cable car and purchasing Golden Gate Bridge magnets.

    The trip home starts again soon, and then when we get back, we attempt to recover from jetlag and dive back into the swirly whirlpool of development. Thanks again to all the great people we met at GDC, whether it be press, publisher, or those awesome DigiPen students who played “Guess what country we’re from” with us so sportingly (hint: the answer was Australia).

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    GDC Jitterbugs

    In less than 48 hours Ben and I will be on a plane to GDC! Which bugs me because I can’t work on MacGuffin and no-one will do my job while I’m away – wah! But I SUPPOSE GDC is important too.

    It’s shaping up to be another one of those big GDC’s too, check out our calendar:

    This will be my 3rd GDC, and will be as packed as the rest for certain, one day I promise myself I’ll just go to GDC to go to the awesome talks and have fun at the parties, but that’s for a time when… gee, I dunno… Anyway it’s going to be big!

    I’ve been working on a neat conversation system in Unity that will allow us to do some very cool things with your standard 2D portrait-based conversation system common to many of your favourite RPG’s. Also a nice string system that allows us to edit all conversations in Excel rather than some horrible XML data file, should make localisation a snap too!

    And now for what you’ve all come here for… cool new art! We’ve been getting a TON of very cool art in this week, and some AWESOME music tracks. You’ll have to wait for the music tracks, but let’s see about art. Oh! Check this guy out!

    So who is this unsavoury character, and what is his relationship to Lucas? Watch this space closely to find out more!

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    Advance Screening

    While in the midst of packing, design, programming and lining up interviews, we decided that we had too much free time, and had a chat to Jason Hill of The Age’s Screen Play about MacGuffin’s Curse. We talk a little about the game’s origin and influences, amongst other things. Have a gander and you’ll probably find some stuff about Jolly Rover in there too.

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    Visual Arts

    Another week has gone by, and of course, more progress has been made. Stuff like room-to-room transitions, object pushing and collision have gone into the game (as well as some basic UI tests and functionality) but unfortunately, this is never really exciting to show. Our artists have been working hard on the look of the characters, and we’re mighty pleased on how they’re turning out. So rather than waffle on like I normally do, here’s a picture of Lucas when he’s transformed into his wolf form:

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