Character art collage
Green Lights, Fancy Art and Soundscapes
It’s been a very exciting few days at DMG HQ! If your unaware, we took the audacious step to put Graveyard Baby Hospital up on the new Steam Greenlight service!
Check out our Greenlight Page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93885416
For those not in the know, Greenlight is Steam’s new system of letting the community decide what games get put onto the Steam store. Even without the game being finished we decided to put it up!
To say the first day was rough is an understatement! I likened it to opening a door and being covered in a torrent of piranha filled water…and you can’t swim, and your scared of fish! But that’s the internet for you. I’ll be honest, perhaps we did jump in two quick with only an old gameplay video and a couple of character images but I had to make a decision. I think I made the right one too! Saved ourselves $100!
The most amazing thing, even after the crap comments, which have now levelled off and things are getting beter now that we refined out pitch and added some more info, is that the game has been seen by nearly 7000 different people. I’ll put that in words for better impact:
SEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE.
That’s insane! And it get’s bigger everyday! We couldn’t have bought publicity like that if we’d bought a publicity making machine! So yeah, it’s pretty amazing. What else is good is that 31 people so far have “favourited” our game. Essentially it’s like following I think, which is nice.
I think it’s going to be a long haul with Greenlight, one which may not come to anything, but it’s been nothing but positive so far.
In other news.
Olympia is creating some fancy new artwork. Not just game assets but some new PR images. I’m not going to ruin the surprise, we’ll put that stuff up later when it’s finished, but the poster is amazing! Just you wait!
Also we’re speaking with a chap about getting some properly good music and sounds!
All in all it’s looking good, we’ve stepping up development in all sectors and should have some sweet updates in the next couple of weeks!
~Kieran
Deadlines, dates and IGF
Hello all, Kieran here.
We’ve decided to be really smart or really stupid and give ourselves a deadline of sorts to get GBH finished. That date just happens to coincide with the Independant Games Festival competition’s main closing date! What a happy coincidence!
October 17th, seems pretty far away but I know first hand jsut how quickly deadlines can come up so we’re shifting things up a gear development wise and gettign on with this!
On that note, I’ve had a pretty productive morning working on the level transitions and sorting out our cutscene player. Might do a UI framework next…cause that’s always fun!
Anyway, that’s just a quick update to let you know what is going on. So, IGF, hopefullyy we’ll be knocking it out of the park in 2 months time 😀
The Long Haul
At times it feels like progress on GBH is a bit slow, and it doesn’t help that it only took 48 hours to make the original version, but annoying as this is it does reinforce something I’ve been thinking about for a while. A lot of people out there in internet land are full of good advice about working to support yourself while you develop games in your spare time, and in principle I don’t disagree with this, I do however think it is worth pointing out that this is often easier said than done. Personally I find it difficult to settle down to code after a 12 hour shift at work, and would doubt the honesty (or perhaps sanity) of anyone who claims otherwise. Finally on this topic, if anyone’s reading this and thinking I’m just not dedicated enough, well boo sucks to you.
Back to the game, and in spite of my slightly negative tone above things are actually starting to pick up. Olympia’s producing some amazing artwork that really captures the feel that I wanted for the games, Gianni’s making a start on integrating sound and is going to head of into the wilds of Irvine with a microphone to record some original sound effects. Kieran is settling down to code some level management stuff, while I try to resist the temptation to rewrite the entire thing from scratch (a common problem I face, especially in C# where I am constantly learning new features of the language). What I am actually doing however is tackling the problem of back-buffer sizes and the title safe area on the Xbox, along with trying to decide on a native resolution for the game. This is in some ways quite dull, and doesn’t necessarily make for a good topic for a blog, tackling topics such as this however do bring a sense of reality to the idea that we are going to release this game to other people and expect them to spend money on it. No-one would deny that working on fancy graphics or new gameplay ideas is the most enjoyable part of the development process, but for me it is the details that are there to improve the user experience for people I may never even meet that make me feel (perhaps for the first time) that what I am working on may be more than a self-indulgence.
Speaking of fancy graphics, I am also looking at a method for applying normal-mapped lighting with attenuation from multiple light sources to a 2D sprite, which if we can get to work, would be really cool. “All” it takes is for Olympia to provide us with a depth map texture for each sprite which could be a lot of extra work so this is definitely on the “would be cool but we can live without it” list.
Level 2
A few new exciting updates to bring you from the world of Deep and Meaningful Games Ltd. This past few weeks we’ve been working on both the coding of GBH and have some great new concept art to show off too! If you’ve been keeping up on our Facebook page you’ll have already seen these.
On the Code Front
As Keith explained a few weeks ago, the old GBH code was a horrible 2am hackfest so it had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Work on this side of things has been going well, Keith has done a lot of work getting this stuff done and it’s nearly sorted.
Aside from the rebuild we’re now starting work on new features and additions to old features. Starting with our level and gameplay flow and moving on to the wonders of cutscenes.
The Arts
Olympia has been working away creating character sketches and the concept art. We’ve now got what seems to be an actual art style to game, which is exciting to see! We’ve now got character art for Nurse, Digger and some initial ideas for our secondary characters. I’ve uploaded a little collage I made using all my art skills below. Once we get the character sketches sorted then we can move on to sprite sheets and other actual game objects.
As we go forward in the coming weeks we’ll be adding new features, sorting out bugs and creating more lovely twisted art.
Level 1
After some discussion with the rest of the technical team, we decided that it may be better to build a new version of the game from scratch, rather than try to extend the Game Jam version. This was for two reasons. Firstly the SGJ version was written under circumstances where we were constantly cutting corners and the phrase “It’ll do for now” was constantly being heard, this is fine for a Game Jam, but not really a good start for something that has to pass the peer review process and actually work properly. The second, and for me most important, reason is that although the game is written using XNA, its very clearly written by a group of C++ programmers, who have failed to fully embrace the ease of use of C#. Over the last week or so as I have been redesigning the underlying framework for the game I have been consistently surprised by the simplicity of things such as events, and the usefulness of stuff like Services. We are making a concious effort as a team to fully embrace the differences between C# and C++ and we hope that this will ensure that the end product will be the best that it can be. The initial framework is nearly planned out, and will be distributed to the rest of the team either later today or first thing tomorrow, and then development can begin in earnest.
Lists and more Lists…
This past few days has mostly been about design and project management. Beloved project management, how enjoyable you are.
It’s actually not been too bad because I’ve just being using simple spreadsheets instead of some ridiculous piece of software (I’m looking at you teamworkPM!). So we have Design, Programming and Art.
Oh, speaking of Art, we’ve found ourselves a fantastic artist to make GBH totally awesome. Her name is Olympia, and our team is now complete!
Remember to like our Facebook page for GBH and follow us on twitter, @GBHGame
Welcome
Welcome to the very first post from deep and meaningful games. We’ve set this site up to give us an on-line presence where we can keep everyone up to date with what we’re working on. At the moment we’re working on our first full game (Graveyard Baby Hospital) which we’re hoping to release some time around august 2012, It’s an XNA title and will be targeted at XBLIG, although we will probably add a WP7 version after that. For further info on the game just click on it’s page and take a look.
Deep and Meaningful Games 