General Thoughts
Making this game was certainly more difficult than I expected. Coding by itself was actually the easiest task thanks to XNA, but undoubtedly the greatest challenge was to iterate over the core mechanic until the game felt solid and fun to play. As I said in an old blog post, my objective with this […]
Author Archives: Gabriele
SPFT: Postmortem
June 12, 2008 – 7:17 pm
Super Pond Fighter Turbo Enhanced
June 12, 2008 – 4:12 pm
I pretty much addressed most if not all the issues that Aaron brought up in the crit. You can get the updated version of the game here.
Here’s a detailed list of the changes in the new release
* The font in the think bubbles is bigger and more readable
* The think bubble persists longer and it […]
Super Pond Fighter Turbo Final
June 5, 2008 – 1:28 pm
These past two days were truly an artistic challenge for me. I spend a ridiculous amount of hours in Photoshop, Illustrator, 3d Studio Max and other apps and I produced almost 1 GIG of assets! I tried many different art styles for the game ranging from real pictures of ponds to sunsets, CG stuff and hand-drawings. Yet […]
SPFT: Pill Showcase
June 3, 2008 – 5:28 am
The game is now complete and I need to do more tweaks and work on the art. I will detail my progress better in a future post today. In this post I am going to showcase all the pills that you can use in game. I recorded this video on a stable build that does not have the new […]
Think Bubble Class
May 30, 2008 – 5:03 am
It is my turn to post some useful code for everyone. I created a class that makes it very easy to visualize “think bubbles” containing text. Here is an example
I did all the calculations, so that the bubble is very easy to resize and position. I used this image to compute the ratios
The origin of […]
SPFT: Progress
May 29, 2008 – 10:57 pm
Art
* I added some graphics to several elements in game that were still showing solid colors.
* I did some research on the art and I created a bunch of assets in Photoshop to see how it would look. My goal would be to go for a cartoony style. As I did for the sounds assets I would like to create […]
SPFT: Progress
May 27, 2008 – 1:22 pm
Game Design
After my playtest last week, I made a couple of iterations to improve my core mechanic. Of course I did not make radical changes, but I tried to alter the gameplay, so that it is more fun and less repetitive. One important metaphor that guided this process was the play matrix that we discussed […]
SPFT: Playtest 1
May 20, 2008 – 1:18 pm
PRELIMINARY TEST
Over the weekend I did a preliminary playtest with my sisters. Their comments were:
It is hard to now which frog belongs to the player
The way the frog jumps and uses its tongue is satisfying
The controls feel right
The environment feels too small
I addressed these issues by:
identifying the frog’s player with a moving arrow
making the frogs smaller
PLAYTEST […]
SPFT: Sound Inventory
May 15, 2008 – 2:21 pm
Soundtrack (optional)
* Intro music
* Main game music
* End Game Tune
Sound FX
* Sound when cycling pills
* Aiming sound
* Charging shot sound
* Throwing sound
* Thump sound when pill falls
* One sound for each frog behavior (I not still sure how many I’ll end up putting in the game)
* Burp sound when frog eats pill
SPFT: New Design Explained
May 14, 2008 – 11:44 pm
As I explained in my previous post, I struggled quite a bit over the past weekend to fix my broken core mechanic. Yet after a lot of research and after experimenting with a couple of different ideas, I suddenly had the inspiration that I needed! I think I now have a good solid game design that […]