State House

Yesterday Vermont held an open house for game developers at the state capital. It was part of a larger effort to show the local government that 1. we exist and 2. that development is a really great way to bring money into Vermont (and have it stay there) as well a way to keep some of the "young people" in Vermont.

And while Burlington is a great booming college town, there is a pretty serious age gap between the college aged crowd and new parents. After graduating students, especially in the technology field, are leaving the state for better opportunities.

So for about five hours we joined the rest of the Vermont game development community (all three of them) and showed off some of the projects we have been working on. Hopefully our presence there helped to balance out the public opinion that has been recently surfacing about the content and affect of video games.

Closed Beta is Live!

Sent out all of the invites and actually started a game with one of our testers. I know about the scroll button problem already, but other than that seems to be going well. Need to have more maps uploaded so that I can build in the functionality for "Pages" of map's when players are searching/sorting.

Laid out our plans for the next few weeks, our deadline is March 1st for this competition at Cambridge. So the art changes are going to hopefully be the big seller. We have a rough idea of how its going to look and the major challenge for me is creating a new tile flipping animation. The way it works currently is amazingly simple, all done in code so its going to be a pretty big shift.

Second Wind

Our presentation at JDK, coupled with the change that an art style brings has kinda given me a second wind on the project. Not that I was getting bored, but it was beginning to feel overwhelming the number of tasks that lay ahead in getting Overflow to a viable position. And what this change in art style, or theme if you will, does it just gives me a little bit of breathing space from the project.

For those who really like the current aesthetic, have no fear, I'll probably put in a button to change the theme back over to the original, however like I said last week, change is coming.

I spent the weekend thinking about passive animations, stuff that would go on in the background, or when something for the board to do while its not being played in addition to coding new types of tile flipping animations. I'll post a video of some of them later today and you all can let me know what you think.

Reevaluation

Gathering these outside perspectives has been great, it has allowed me to view Overflow in a very different light and helped to identify some of its major failings. Its single largest problem is that that game is not memorable.

There is no unifying theme besides something i might call simple or even vaguely modern. To make it distinct we need to, in the words of an art professor i knew, push it until it nearly breaks. So in the coming weeks we will be investigating multiple different art styles. The core of the game and its strategy elements will remain the same, but I remain convinced that Overflow needs a new coat of paint.

Ironing

Still figuring out those pesky online bugs. The big one yesterday was having all games handle having players surrender when it was not their turn. Also put in a generic error message screen which tells that user if there was an error in connecting and pulling down data instead of simply getting stuck in a loop of retrying.

What is happening now is me just sitting down, playing, seeing what breaks and fixing the issues one step at a time. On track though for a closed beta hopefully by tomorrow if i can iron out the major connection kinks.

Outside Perspectives

Went to Champlain yesterday and talked to some professor's, showed them the games, its changes and talked about what I'm kinda planning for the future. I do this once a month usually, and its a great way to take a step back and view the whole picture.

So after we finish (still hunting down bugs) the online update, at least to the point where we can send it out in a closed beta, I'm going to take some time to re-evaluate everything, nothing (besides the core code) is sacred and could always be overhauled in some fashion.

The biggest things on the table is the need for a better feedback system, to reward the player for making a good move, for locking down the board, and the art style. While I personally enjoy the really clean, modern style we have developed, it doesn't stand to be something that will be remembered by players. There is no personality to it, no real theme. Stuff to think over.

 

Bug Hunting

Got invites in yesterday and then preceded to start tracking down and squishing some bugs. Discovered that you could join/quick join your own games! So put a stop to that pretty quickly. The other big buggy thing that was happening was when two games were played/saved simultaneously. The game id's were not getting saved correctly, resulting in moves in game 1 being played in game 2. It was all the fault of a global variable, was able to fix it yesterday.

Should be able to go into closed beta pretty soon, realized that we need to put in some kind of reporting system where players, or us, can flag inappropriate content or names. With user generated content that is just the reality of the situation.

Got scrolling to work in the iPad version as well, did it the cheap way by putting buttons in that control the scroll. Will eventually get a smooth scroll in, but that code base that would help me do that had way too many variables for me to struggle through. I'll come back to it at some point.