10 Games.

I've read that you should make 10 games before you reach success in game development.
This isn't a strict value I'm guessing or any kind of hard and fast rule. However, I do feel that it's in a game developer's best interests to make as many games as possible. Partly to hone one's coding skills but mostly to understand what makes a game interesting and fun. It's also an important journey of self discovery, to understand one's talents and limitations.

I wrote many games on the spectrum, however none of them were what I would call "Finished" apart from the game I've listed here. Unfortunately, nothing remains of any of them, it was over 20 years ago. The rest of the games were for the PC platform and more recently for mobile devices..

So here's my list.

Treasure Caves

 ZX Spectrum. A platform game where you collect treasure in a scrolling maze like level to activate an exit which would appear after you'd collected enough treasure, all while avoiding traps and using teleports to move you to the next platform above. Perilous spike pits would plague your every fall.
The game included an editor where I would challenge a friend with a cunning level and he'd return the favour with an even more cunning level. This game was memorable to me because of the large levels, the large sprites. I had to write a Run Length Encoding compression system in Z80 (before I knew what RLE was) to fit the levels into memory. The game was fast and allowed for very devious traps. Even though the gameplay was simple, it was a lot of fun.

• Language: Z80 Assembler, Basic
• Status: Completed, Lost

SUOF: Subtle Use of Force

A vertically scrolling shooter where you must defeat an invading alien force using a previously mothballed fighter. You could collect weapons dropped from dead enemies, it had a variety of different aliens, each with their own abilities and tricks. There were also Bosses to defeat who also had their own patterns and abilities.

• Language: Borland C
• OS: PC MSDos. 
• Status: Completed - Unreleased

CHAOS: Battle of the Wizards - Remake.

A remake of the classic gameby Julian Gollop. Chaos pits 2 or more wizards against each-other in a last man standing battle to the death.
It was abandoned due to really difficult to track down issues in the code which would take a massive amount of work to fix. However the gameplay was faithful to the original with every spell and monster re-created.

• Language: VB6
• OS: Windows
• Status: Incomplete - Abandoned

GUNS: A DelphiX example. 

A turn based projectile warfare tank game where you control a squad of flying tanks who must fire at the opponents flying tanks on opposing mountain sides across a valley. AI behaviour aimed the turrets of the enemy tanks and raised shields. Limited fuel reserves and accurate aiming of the AI opponent meant that battles were usually quick and devastating -often needing quick reflexes and tactical uses of the shield. The terrain was fully destructible and this was the first game I'd written with a floating camera which worked independently of the player's control. It moved to focus on the selected tank and would also follow projectiles through the air to see where they landed - allowing the player to adjust their aim. All in real time. The game was published as a demonstration of how to make games using the DelphiX component set.

• Language: Object Pascal
• Framework: DelphiX
• OS: Windows
• Status: Completed - Released for free

Anomalous

 A rip in space has occurred following an unexpected situation during a science experiment trying to find a new source of energy to save our world from environmental disaster. The device causing the rip has fallen through the rift, it's up to  you to retrieve it before the earth and the alien world perishes. An entire story arc was planned involving alien civilizations and a civil war which would complicate your efforts.
It was a 2D platformer with skeletal animation - built from the ground up using a home grown engine called the CBCFoundation. An entire toolchain was developed to work alongside the engine including a level editor, skeletal animation editor and animator.
Unfortunately, a hard disk failure meant that I'd lost the source files for the majority of the art assets. It was an event which the project never recovered from.

• Language: Object Pascal.
• Framework: CBCFoundation, SDL
• OS: Windows, Linux
• Status: Incomplete - Abandoned due to hardware failure.

Lander

A variant on the old Lunar Lander game with a twist. You're in charge of a rocket which has to pickup and ferry spacemen from one part of the moon to another. Instead of using retro thrusters to control your descent, you have your main rocket which you must rotate around to move and slow down. Landing on the pad was tricky, you had to land at just the right speed and at the correct angle or Kaboom, however you could take some damage by hitting the mountains - making a horrible metal scraping sound as the rocket takes a pounding. I just couldn't get this game working as well as I wanted. The framerate suffered due to software rendering and the engine did not allow for the level of fidelity in the terrain I wanted.
I would later rebuild this in Unity as an example, however it wasn't as good or as much fun as I'd hoped and was ditched.

• Language: Object Pascal.
• Framework: CBCFoundation, SDL
• OS: Windows, Linux
• Status: Incomplete - Abandoned

Anomalous

A 3D version of Anomalous written using the Torque engine. This game was going to be the version of Anomalous it was meant to be. The earlier version being abandoned following a horrific hard drive failure. I created a lot of art assets however it seemed that no matter how many assets I created, I always needed more and the better I got at creating 3D assets, the worse my earlier work looked in comparison and my animation was horrible. Compared to professional offerings, I couldn't seem to compete. I needed to rethink this game. However I had a story fleshed out - just like the original attempt. It was just too big for a single person to build.

• Language: C++
• Engine: Torque Engine
• OS: Windows
• Status: Incomplete - Abandoned

Tetris

An example of how to build a tetris game, built in a weekend and offered on-line as an example. It was fully functional and surprisingly addictive, which I suppose goes to show how close I was to the original. It is an exercise that every game developer should do.

• Language: VB6
• OS: Windows
• Status: Complete - Released for free.

GUNS

A 3D version of GUNS written using the Torque engine. A fully 3D version of the original game complete with a story about aliens using the Earth as a kind of courtroom to settle petty disputes with squad based tank combat. The human race being powerless to stop them, but the aliens appear oblivious to their plight although seem to have no designs on taking over the world. Abandoned due to complexities with the Torque engine in making it do what was needed for this game and because 3D games need a lot of good art assets in order to look even nearly nice. It became obvious that alone I wouldn't be able to make this game no matter how much work I put into it.

• Language: C++ and TorqueScript
• Engine: Torque Engine.
• OS: Windows
• Status: Incomplete - Abandoned

GUNS:Reloaded.

A back to basics reboot of GUNS with the intent to turn it into a completed game for sale. As the original however with the inclusion of multiple environments, better AI, refuel dropships, different turrets, friendly AI behaviour, A roster of pilots and a plot involving rival factions who do battle on the earth as their chosen combat zone.It even had a tutorial. It was abandoned due to the realisation that the CBCFoundation's inability to use hardware rendering had made it effectively obsolete. I'd also come to the conclusion that it wasn't that much fun to play.

• Language: Object Pascal
• Framework: CBCFoundation, SDL
• OS: Windows, Linux
• Status: Incomplete - Abandoned

Crashblock

Control a person inside a game of Tetris. The person clambers and vaults over the blocks in the arena to get into positions and calls the blocks into position and rotates them. The blocks are held by a chain of increasing fragility - it will eventually snap sending the block crashing down. The player can also request the drop however in either case, it's best to be out of the way when they fall or you'll get squashed. Multiple levels, 4 environments, power-ups. Character graphics were captured from real-time video and roto-scoped. Winner of the Pascal Game Development group's 2007 competition. Published in 2008. This was the last game I wrote using the CBCFoundation and Pascal for that matter. The CBCFoundation's inability to handle hardware rendering without a massive upgrade almost killed it, but it was the advent of C# and pascal's descent into obscurity which finished it off.

• Language: Object Pascal
• Framework: CBCFoundation, SDL
• OS: Windows
• Status: Complete - Released for sale.

SUOF: Subtle Use of Force - Mobile

A conversion of the DOS based vertically scrolling shooter. I started it as an exercise in getting a mobile game developed, to understand the technical requirements as well as the development process. I hooked in the tilt controls to act as steering and on screen buttons for firing. Unfortunately, it was slow and clunky requiring far more work than I had time for at the time. It also ran differently on different phones. It served as a insightful prototyle.

• Language: Java
• OS: PC MSDos. 
• Status: Incomplete - Abandoned

Reversion Bureau

A science experiment has gone horribly wrong and you are called in to make it all better. Effectively a spiritual reboot of Anomalous. A platform puzzle game using live action footage captured against a greenscreen. Multiple characters and a story. This game is still in development but features physics as well as logical puzzles. A key feature of the game is that the main character does not resort to violence - instead solves problems using intelligence, the environment and science.

• Language: LUA
• Framework: MOAI
• OS: Windows, OSx, OUYA
• Status: In Progress

SchemeWars

Control a person inside a game of Galaga. The live action greenscreen captured person fires energy bolts from their hands at increasingly difficult waves of enemies. Complete with Boss creatures, all aliens have their own set of abilities and tricks. Completed and presented at an Insurance trade show.

• Language: LUA
• Framework: MOAI
• OS: Windows, OSx, OUYA
• Status: Complete - Released for Trade show.

ROO!

An endless runner where you have to rescue little Timmy from the well. Designed to be completely cross platform and created during a GameJam in January 2015. The game is notable for it's responsive controls, Spine animation and speed.The game was polished up over a period of 3 months and released on Android, OUYA and iOS.

• Language: C#
• Framework: Monogame
• OS: Android, iOS, OUYA, Windows
• Status: Complete - Released for sale.

Untitled Block Puzzle

We have a project on the go at the moment, which we'll announce shortly. The result of the second Songbird Creations Game Jam.

• Language: C#
• Framework: Monogame
• OS: Android, iOS
• Status: In Progress - Prototype

Waiting for Review and an Easter treat.

So last weekend was busy...

It was Easter, so therefore in the UK, we had Friday and Monday as national holidays. So we used this time to launch ROO on the OUYA and to prepare for the iOS release.

ROO is currently (as of the 9th of April) waiting for Review. This apparently could take a little time so we all have to be patient. It will be really nice though when it's released as we've done a load of work to make it look nice on the iPad and iPhone with that lovely Retina screen.

Preparation is key

Of all the stores we've released on, the App store is probably the most difficult to get going with. There are many aspects of the store which take some research in order to get right. Luckily for us, Dean knew what he was doing and was able to steer our wayward ship through any potential rocks to get us out to sea. It's also the 3rd time I've had to fill out a Tax form. As Songbird Creations is a Limited UK company, we don't pay US taxes (instead we pay UK taxes) but Uncle Sam needs to be reassured that we're not trying to get away with his money, so we fill in a W-8BEN form and sign it.

For the OUYA I had to print it, physically sign it, scan it and send it back to them. Amazon had a version online and a handy helper, which while was handy could have used a "We're a UK company, just fill it in for me" button like Google does. 

Confirmation is key

While Preparation was certainly important, I've never had to confirm as many things in my life as I did getting the more legal aspects of the store running. Phew, glad that part is over is all I can say.

Customization is key

Phones typically have a slimline aspect ratio some are 1080p others a variation of, however for a landscape game, you're typically looking at most of the action being towards the bottom of the screen, certainly for ROO this was the case. Pretty clouds, blue skies and mountains cover the top to middle and give the illusion of distance and speed while the foreground and character reside towards the bottom to ground the action. 

For the OUYA, we needed to move things up a little otherwise the player is bombarded with a TV image made entirely of sky, for iPad it was worse as the aspect ratio is different again.

So we had to work out how much space was required to keep ROO in pretty much the optimal place while filling the rest of the screen with interesting but not too distracting detail. We had to make some more graphics to place at the bottom of the level.

Once we we done however, it looked and played really nicely. We also had to add an Achievement Toast system to complement the Game Center achievements which you can see in this video.

Feedback is key

On Friday evening, I went out around Cambridge and introduced a few people to ROO, one of the bits of feedback was to do with the Perfect Landing / Resurrection system. It waited for 2 seconds after ROOs failure and used a perfect landing token to burst back into the game (basically a lives system) however it turned out that people were becoming frustrated with the way it was implemented. Often they would reappear only to hit a cactus, a rock or worse - fall directly into a ravine. So something had to be done because while funny, I don't want unhappy players. So now there's a system where you're prompted to tap the screen to reappear when you want to or wait the full 2 seconds. Play testing this feature made it obvious that it was the correct solution. It makes failure your own fault as opposed to the game punishing you randomly.

A Happy Easter

It was really nice to see ROO on the OUYA store so I documented it with a little video. So you can see me install ROO for the first time on the OUYA as well as see how to get those pesky perfect landings. Stick around to the end for a little discussion in difficulty, game dev principles and a personal message from me.



So there you have it. ROO is on the OUYA market as well as Google Play store and the Amazon App store and we're awaiting  our entry to the App store.

If you'd like to know more, why not follow me on twitter @thecacktus

Have fun.

The little console that could.

A little Kickstart!

Back in January of 2013, I was procrastinating on the Escapist Magazine website and I came across an incredibly good idea. A micro console which takes advantage of the recent surge in phone processing power and the Android Operating System; all combined within a tiny stylishly designed box which wouldn't look out of place next to the nicest TV. A full HD 1080p console from the outset with it's own games market with games which must be free to try.

Kickstarter had shaken up the games industry and it seemed that the reported stranglehold publishers had over the various software houses would be weakened and it would usher in a new age of the bedroom coder.

Well, that happened somewhat; The bedroom coder did emerge and a lot of them released games; and some of them were really good. Kickstarter became the go-to place to get funding for the more adventurous or ambitious. There were a few bad apples of course but the net feeling was positive. There are debates as to whether Kickstarter has been over saturated with games and that it's become more difficult to be noticed among the crowd, but that discussion is for another day.

Mr Schafer I presume?

Anyway, I'd been following the antics of the people at Double Fine and backed their kickstarter for the game which would later be known as Broken Age.

Their kickstarter went on to demolish their originally requested amount to the tune of $3.3 million dollars. The internet went bananas.

As part of the deal, they would document everything and the documentaries would turn out to be really insightful to watch. 

It reminded me that Game developers, those people who create these amazing experiences that we love are regular people with hopes and dreams. They weren't too dissimilar to me, they had the same drive and passion as I did - just better funding. 

A large dose of gasoline was poured onto my previously thought to be extinguished candle.

So with both DoubleFine and the OUYA breaking records on Kickstarter, it seemed like the perfect time to get back into games... and the OUYA seemed to be the perfect platform to release it on with it's almost guaranteed success and it's open - yet moderated - marketplace.

I missed the Kickstarter for the OUYA however I did pre-purchase one in January and it arrived in July while I was in the USA - I wouldn't be able to get my mitts on it for another 2 weeks. The plane didn't get home faster because of tail-winds, it was by the sheer force of my will! :-)

I remember being surprised at how small and shiny it was and how the controllers felt really nice and solid. It was simple enough to set up and with it's online market and free to play nature was instantly appealing. I soon found myself purchasing many games. 

The biggest question became, what kind of game do I want to write? Platformer? RPG? Adventure? The ideas flowed fast and strong and eventually I settled on the game currently known as the Reversion Bureau, a puzzle platformer - which has had 2 years of development time spent on it. However more on that game later. 

Fast forward to now.

It's April 2015 and we now have a game released on the Android platforms. It's not the Reversion Bureau, ( that game will come ). Instead, it's a cool little endless runner where a kangaroo named ROO! must race across the Australian outback to rescue his best friend Timmy from a well he fell into. 

We've already released it onto Google Play, Amazon App store and now (pending) the OUYA. On top of this, we're putting a lot of work into preparing for the iOS release, as well as a Windows Phone release.

The OUYA is still going in spite of 2 difficult years in the industry which saw the launch of the new XBox One, the WiiU and the Playstation 4. OUYA have altered the rules a little in response to that; games no longer have to be free to try as long as they have a video to show the gameplay. So we've released our game for a very small fee.

To get this far it has taken a lot of work covering many aspects of the game development process.

• Game Design
• Lots of coding
  
  
  
• Graphics creation
• Rigging and Animation
• Assets pipelines
• Music authoring
• Sound design
• Video editing
• Storefront management
• Device Testing
• Play Testing
• Focus Testing
• Project Management
• Marketing

If it seems like a lot of work, that's because it is. 

Most of it goes unnoticed as it's mostly not fun or glamorous. 

For instance, Project Management and Marketing are incredibly taxing to do correctly and are utterly vital if the project is to have any chance of commercial success - or even being released as a product. Each market place has it's own store-front with it's own way of handling things. Marketing is hard work, even for something you love. It often feels like climbing to the top of every building in the city so you can shout from the rooftops. Those with money or sense employ others to climb the buildings for them, or employ those already positioned to shout.

So here's what I'm hoping for: That the OUYA can fulfil it's promise, that games made independently by small teams can reach those who want to have some fun, kick back on the couch and play games on their TV made by people who care. 

But no matter what happens,

 I'm grateful for that glorious moment where the stars seemed to align, the rebirth of the bedroom coder and the infinite possibilities which they could bring.. that and flappy bird, mostly flappy bird :-)

A plug for the cool little box 

The OUYA is being sold online at http://shop.ouya.tv/ as well as on Amazon and in Target stores in the USA. If you don't have one already, you should pick one up. There's a lot to be said for the games available and playing with the controller is great.

A note to travelling executives:

The OUYA packs away nicely into a travel bag and given that most hotel TVs have a HDMI socket, and there's rarely anything on the TV anyway, it makes a great travel gaming system. Something else to do on those long business trips.

Also, a note to parents: 

There are no disks, so no expensive games to break or scratch or leave cluttered all over the place. Kids can start the game they want, they're mostly for free and those which aren't are inexpensive. It supports up to 4 controllers, it's cheaper than an XBox, a Playstation and a Wii and it's still totally worth the money.

Making a trailer

So we put a trailer together for ROO. It took a couple of days to do and was a lot of fun. But why is this news-worthy? Well, apart from the fact that Roo is a fun game and shouting about it increases the chances of someone else having some fun (which is always a good thing) - I actually used some new video editing techniques in putting the trailer together which might be interesting for some people to read about.

Putting a trailer together looks really simple - and ROO being a very simple game, appears that it should be a very easy thing to do. Well, in a way it was a lot easier than putting a trailer for perhaps a movie or a show. (I've not edited a movie or show trailer - but after editing the London Part Deux game jam video, I can only imagine the difficulty involved).

Even though ROO is a simple and fun game, it's not enough to just capture footage and slap it into a video. When you consider it, you have more time in-game to enjoy the everything the game has to offer but only a tiny amount of time in a trailer video to show the goods and hook a potential player.

Before I start, I'll admit - I'm not an expert (watching the trailer will attest to that) but as with most Indy developers, I don't have a marketing department (or a budget for that matter) to give the task to, who can spend their considerable skills and experience putting something amazing together.

Unfortunately, until Songbird-Creations becomes somewhat bigger, everything is in-house by those who wear many many hats.

So this Trailer, how was it made?

Well, just like any other task in game development, you need to have the right tools for the job. I'll be putting some articles together over the coming months describing the tools we use and why we use them. But for video editing, we use Adobe After Effects.

Now, Adobe After Effects is a professional level tool which can accomplish a devastatingly overwhelming number of things. It's so powerful that most people will only ever scratch the surface of its potential and it used to have a price tag to match - which was normally sidestepped by pirates - however, through some amazing vision, Adobe have licensed their entire suite of software on a subscription basis, so it's not expensive any more. So there's no longer any justification in pirating (to learn it) and you get the added bonus of Photoshop and Illustrator (amongst others) included too.

The trailer is broken down into 4 main sections.

• Introduction,
• Story hook
• Gameplay 
• Call to Action.

Introduction

The introduction shows our company logo and the Game's title. This is important to get right as it's the first thing the viewer sees. It has to get them interested enough to want to watch the rest. Viewers have a lot of content they can watch instead, so a video has to be worth it and someone making a video has to respect that time.

So I open up with the Songbird creations logo, some clouds and a Balloon. This is supposed to set up the viewer with the company signature and they follow the balloon towards the game's title when it appears. The balloon appears in the game in the distance. The balloon itself is from a game which was never completed which starred a cartoon version of my Wife, meaning that She's in every game I make in some way - kind-of like Stan Lee in all Marvel movies.

The screen then changes to show something similar to the in-game titles. All of this should only take a few seconds.

Story Hook

Then we need to get the viewer right into the story. ROO! has a very simple story where little Timmy has fallen down a well (again!) and it's up to Roo to get help. To do this, I wanted to have a scene I could move around in. This meant setting up a 3D scene so that I could have proper Parallax backgrounds to add a sense of depth to it. I could have done this by panning from left to right in a 2D scene, but it would have actually meant more work. After Effects has everything you need to manipulate a 3D scene; you can place cameras, manipulate them with dummy objects, alter their positions, rotations (and pretty much any property they have) all smoothly using key frames.

So I built the scene using real assets from the game and animated the camera to tell the story. 

Roo and Timmy are in the outback (although Timmy is never shown) Timmy sees a well, and falls in - the camera pans and zooms in on the well. Following the splash, the camera quickly pans to Roo who looks suitably concerned.

Cue the game!

Gameplay

This is the part where we let the potential player know what the game is all about, what to expect and why they should play the game. ROO! is a very simple game, it starts out easy enough and gets progressively more difficult as it becomes faster and have less time to react. Eventually the player will succumb as their reactions become less able to dodge the oncoming obstacles - ROO moves at a fair lick of speed when he gets going.

The game is a mobile game for the most part, so to get the footage, I recorded the PC version using Fraps and ran through the game many times. My hope was to get a high enough score to show the game running a breakneck speed as well as record some amusing failures. The resulting movie file was 7.8gb - I'd have to edit it... a lot.

Roo is a game which can't really be shown off in static images, they don't do it any justice so hopefully the video does the trick. I cut several failures back to back for laughs, then did a run as far as I could get. The entire section is about 50 seconds long and basically shows the game in it's entirety. It sounds a little sad when said like that, but it's strange how something so simple can keep people engrossed for so long.

At the end of the gameplay section, is the Noooo section which normally greets every failure.

Call to Action

A trailer is after-all a marketing video so there needs to be something which informs the potential customer where to go next to find out more and potentially buy the game. 

On this part of the video I wanted to show where the customer could get the game from - in this case the Google Play store as well as the Amazon App store. Later we'll have the App Store, Windows store and quite probably the OUYA market place. As these become available, we'll have to upload other videos - potentially replacing this one.

I didn't want to put a Coming Soon part on the video as I wanted it to be Factual, to 'close the deal' right now. When we're on the other stores, we'll be factual about that too.

The entire video is just short of 1:27 and is accompanied with the opening titles music for the game.

Although it is tricky, I tried to keep as much of the video in time with the music to keep them from feeling disconnected. I even make the Google Play and Amazon store logos dance to the music towards the end of the video.

As I said, putting a trailer together is Marketing, you have to try to get people interested in your product. Without marketing, a game is a fun programming exercise. If you want people to play your game, you need to let them know about it and a trailer is a good starting point.

Have fun

Roo's getting an update soon.

ROO has only been out for a week

and we're already getting a serious update ready. This isn't to fix bugs in the code, this is to improve the graphics.

ROO's graphics are nice and cute and simple, but compared to some other games out there, they could do with a bit of a refresh.

So we've given Roo a bit of an update with new textures all round. Even Roo himself has had the artist's brush with some nicer shading and even different facial expressions.

We've updated the way the ground looked because, the outback doesn't look that green - but it's also not a barren desert.

We haven't finished completely on the graphical update, there's still testing to do - we need to make sure that it looks good across a variety of form factors and resolutions.

Depending on testing, we should have this update ready for the weekend. So look out for that.

Before that though, You can still check out ROO on the Google play store and support us :-)

In other news...

Soon...

We submitted ROO to the Amazon App store today. So we should have ROO available on your Kindle Fire soon. This is exciting news as it opens an entirely different store front to us.

We may have to tweak a few things to get through their testing/approval process, so it may be that the Amazon build contains the new updates off the bat.

Finally, 

ROO is still as fun to play as it was when we first made it. This to me is a great sign, the game has a soul and this shows through in the gameplay.

Roo is on the loose.

Watch out everyone, there's a Roo on the loose.

So late last night, Dean and I released our endless runner game "ROO" to an unsuspecting Google Play store. The world held it's breath as the app went from pending to published and then continued to breath normally, as it had done previously - oblivious to the event which had occurred. Apparently it wasn't the world holding it's breath, it was us.

The next morning with the world much in the same state as it was the night before, I worked on a patch to correct some defects in the achievement award system and to fix a scenario where Roo could fall into a ravine and not die. I uploaded the patch, went to my phone to get the update and...  no update!

Eek! Google informed me on the screen that the update is pending and could take several hours; Which got me wondering.. what happens if the update is urgent? I'm guessing that this delay is partly down to whatever CDN system they have to support the world's app demands and partly as a measure to ensure that developers go through the alpha, beta and prod development cycles - only promoting to the next level when the testing merits it - which is fair enough.

Eventually, the update became available and I felt confident enough to tell people about the game. The last thing I wanted was that people downloaded the game to their device only to find that it didn't work for them. Thankfully it works well on everything it's come across so far.

After making the public announcement, the installs began to trickle in. Hopefully, this will enable us to put more time into the game later on because nothing tells a developer that their time is well spent updating something than happy customers telling them so.

We've had some feedback too about the game and the gameplay, all of it useful.

However I'm going to hold off implementing any feedback for the time being though, it's far too tempting to dive right in and make changes quickly without first considering how it will impact the game. It carries a massive risk of changing something which alters the fun. I could end up making it a less fun experience while trying to improve something.

So far the word is that the game is fun and addictive, I'm going to leave it there.. and in any case, someone's getting close to beating my score - I can't have that now can I? :-D

Good old Roo! Click his little face to get the game :-)

Update...

We're released an update to ROO, it fixes a couple of problems we found after we published.

The achievements were not being properly awarded and it was possible to make ROO fall forever without changing the game state.

Still, the update is pending now, so hopefully within the next few hours, it'll be ready.

And We're up! Roo is Live... the world goes crazy

Roo is on the play store.

It's been a lot of work, and I wager that there'll be more work ahead once the public get their hands on the game; but it's live on the Google Play store.

From that Friday evening where we didn't even have a concept to finished and published game has been a journey of surprises. Some good, some less so - but all of them part of the learning experience.

You can check out ROO on the Google play store go buy it for £1 and support us :-)

So what's next? 

Well, we're going to see how ROO! is received and if it gets any traction, ROO may get some more love - if it gets a lot of interest, we may even make a sequel. One thing is for sure though, we'll be making more games this year.

We have another game jam coming up this month. Just like last time, we have no idea what the concept will be; Only this time around, we have another programmer and a graphical designer.

The other programmer is also a certified pilot and the artist works in fashion - so it should be an interesting mixture.



My best score is around 1700 meters. If you can get further than that, I'd love to hear about it.
I'll be putting a video up on Youtube soon, stay tuned.