The Unintended news and moving around + Masters of Doom

Bujaka bujaka!

So. I have no officially moved and working from the new apartment. I had to get rid of my old desk and buy a new one so officially I did not work on anything from home during the last couple of weeks.

Reason for getting a new table was to save some room. I wanted to try and put my piano under the desk somehow, so I bought a desk that can be raised a bit to appropriate level.
It's a bit of a dominating part of the room but it kinda works.. sort of.

Anyway now I'm finally back to working on Unintended and a lot of things happening in the game development news.

First off, it seems Valve is removing the Greenlight program and replacing it with a more expensive but totally uncurated version called Direct.

I think it's a step towards the right direction. I don't quite see why would they just not hire a small team to curate the games and let fewer games in. It's baffling to me how all these scam games get through. I was under the impression that they are still hand picked from the greenlight system. I guess that is not the case. Anyway it's a good sign that times they are a changin.

As for my little unintended project. I'm not quite sure what to do with it now. Should I push for greenlight early? Or just fork up the money later? I'm fairly certain it will be the hardest couple of months ever to get through the greenlight, since everyone wants to get past it before it becomes expensive. The game is not really that visually impressive or interesting, (it's not really the main point) so it might be hard for me to get through at this point. I was going to add more eye candy gradually as the game progresses on and really work on the trailer a lot. This anyway sparked some interest to get back to some of the things needed for a clear presentation of the game.


For example I've redone the title screen and added some context to it too.

I also worked on a much more complex background painting, but decided to scrap it and keep it simple instead. Now while doing this, I still discovered some issues with the player selection screen and some other problems at the main menus, so I started to polish them a bit. I might be naming the main characters soon and creating the final two playable characters. I think the game also needs a story cutscene at the beginning. So maybe I'll first work on the mud-king-boss-encounter and an intro cutscene soon after that.

On other news.. Someone recommended a book that I should read called Masters of Doom.
I have to say that, five chapters in, I would already recommend this book for anyone interested in videogames and their development or history.  It's very good so far. Carmack is such a genius.

I also went to the movies again and watched John Wick 2. It was very entertaining. It's interesting to see that no matter what genre, if you have passion for the craft, it will come out great. 8/10


So that's about it for today.
I'll get back to you in a week or so.
Good luck and Stay frosty

Unintended Puzzle Rooms

So. Next week is moving-day for me. Yay! That means that there probably will be a small gap on the blog and Unintended progress.

This week I continued on the Mud Tower and its main tower puzzle rooms. I've managed to create some fairly fun ones, I think.

Here are some examples:
One where you run through a room with spikes and try to keep ahead of the ones that are raising back up. It was very exciting for my tester. It probably should have a music also that keeps getting faster during the run. Have to think about how to achieve that.

Another room I did was this magnetic apparatus room. It basically has a magnetic connection thingy that will remotely control few of these blocks.

I think the tower has seven floors altogether, so maybe the next stop might be the boss man himself.

On another note: We did have our first outside tester for Lucius III and it seems we have something like 45 minutes of content "somewhat-done". It played fairly smoothly and did not have much problems on the progress. Overall feedback was also fairly positive so we shall see. I'm pretty hopeful on our current progress. It is pretty straight forward in the beginning. It remains to be seen how well it goes after that.

Well that's about it for today. I'll return in a week or two provided that I have an internet of some sort.


-Johannes