I am extremely resistant to change and anything that reflects ongoing documentation but I have to concede that Trello has been a valuable tool for organising workflow and generally being used as a living GDD.

(We didn’t even get paid to plug it!)

Rats are known for their keen elizabethan fashion sense as well as their fondness for videogame villainy. I wonder if adding a codpiece to our red barrels will make them less cliche?

Shakey is now fully realised in 3D form. He’s textured in a very simple way (the model itself defines areas where I just slap on large swathes of bold colour). In combination with toony / high contrast lights I think it’s going to look quite effective (though not quite as unique as when we first started playing with it as a look)

Just about ready to start building a protagonist for the game and we’re sticking with old Shakespeare for our first hero. When people ask me why I’ve portrayed Britain’s most beloved and well known playwright as a gun toting rebel with neon pink shades and golden codpiece I always say the same thing “Because he’s Bard”

(No-one has ever asked me that question)

So that Flappy Bird thing happened in early 2014 and we, along with a million other developers, downed tools for a week and thought “can we write a simple, yet awesome, one button game in a week?”

“Space Flange” was conceived, here’s our initial design:

And we did, we made a game called Orbit – this is how it looked in about two days:

Another week of polish and the finished game started to look like this:

We were pretty happy with the core mechanic – simple but really tough to master gameplay, play sessions were maybe 60 seconds long, seemed like the sweet spot for a mobile game. We showed it to a few friends, even got it in front of some Apple people who said they liked the look of it. We decided against ads and iaps, so thought we’d put it out for 69p, see what happened. Answer – not a lot, we had a total of 29 sales.

We moved on, but always felt that it had been a total failure – money aside, only a couple dozen people got to see the game. And though it took a week to write, a few more weeks had gone into polishing, tweaking, marketing assets, you know how it goes. So we kept talking about putting it out again, on Google as well as Apple. And for free – no IAPs and no Ads, they just totally messed with the one-more-quick-game-flow of the experience. And you need a LOT of downloads before you make money, right? So … let’s just put it out, with a small “buy the devs a coffee” button, and see what happens.

More detail on our product page here : http://www.mewestudios.com/ovoid

More info to follow!

Starting to flesh out our first level. Some (very “bish bosh”) research into Hamlet has led me to this rough small village/wooden graveyard concept. Naturally I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to interpret the word Hamlet in this way. The plants and flowers are direct references to those used symbolically in the play. (Which really helps to add a splash of colour thankfully)

I think its primary themes are going to be corruption and madness (which will boil down to status effects like poison/confusion). The odd butterfly ear thing is another enemy concept referencing how Claudius poisons King Hamlet, this is especially pleasing to me because it’s also then an indirect reference to the awesome animator Jan Svankmajer (who’s name I evidently can’t spell without the internet)

Here’s some early concept work on some (weird) enemy designs. We’re aiming to build this new title as a simple one level demo initially. So these badboys and girls have all emerged from our initial player character of Shakespeare.

It started with the idea of basing the level around “Hamlet” and being the tedious pun obsessive I am that naturally led to anthropomorphic animal characters (or in this specific case, actors wearing large animal head masks)

It has begun.  The next adventure in our twin stick shooter journey.