So last we left off with our unfinished game-jam game ‘mini cave defense’ and our plan to add another few days of work to it.  Since then we’ve been busy with another few projects, so we haven’t yet finished it up, though it’s much further along then our last version. Check it out here.

So far we’re just over 100 hours, so hopefully we’ll get that one finished up soon.

Apart from that, we’ve been busy learning the ropes with Unity.  We’ve got a cool Unity project underway currently titled ‘inglorious robots’.  Here’s a screenshot for now.

So our initial attempt at finishing the game within the scope of one game jam didn’t pan out.  Through the process we’ve identified a few holes in our game design/development process which we think could help get stuff done faster in the future, though one of our biggest issues was correctly estimating the scope of this project.

If we do another game jam in the future (which is very likely), we’ll have to reconsider what is feasible with only two people working on the project for a weekend.

However, we are still very keen to finish Mini Cave Defense and put it up for auction, so what we’ve decided to do is this:

• We’ve spent about 50 man hour s on the game thus far (25 hours each)
• We decided to add another 50 man hours to try and get the game done (basically we’re adding another game jam span of time to this to see if we can finish it off)

So the latest on our game is this: it ain’t done by any means.  We did get a LOT of stuff in, however as expected we’ve got some broken/missing features.  In addition we had a last second crash, so I can’t post the latest version, so I’ll give you the last working copy we have.

A few notes:

• Our ‘info box’ isn’t wired up
• One of the tower graphics is missing
• Yes all the towers are the same right now
• Other bugs

I’d say we’re at a stage where we’ve got a tech demo with promise, but we don’t yet have a game.  You be the judge:

Fixes, gameplay, and fun coming soon.

We both plowed through a lot of stuff today:

On the programming front we’ve got the following working (and more!):

• Towers that shoot bullets
• Enemies that take damage and die from said bullets
• Path nodes for enemies (moving enemies)
• Collision walls
• A base that takes damage from enemies

On the art front, we’ve got some pretty visuals going on:

Definitely like how the game jam demands that you don’t second guess yourself for too long.  The constant time pressure on you really forces you to make a decision fast, and then figure out a way to make it work. 

Last push tomorrow, so let’s hope this thing comes together (or falls to pieces spectacularly).

As the title implies, we had a late start today as we needed to take care of some other stuff in the morning (including sleep).  Probably began the jam about 4-5pm.

We had a general idea of what type of game we wanted to make going into this, so I’ll start by giving an idea of what the game concept is:

Physics Defense (working title)

Our goal is to make a tower-defense style game laid out on a 2d plane.  We chose this genre of game for two reaons: 1. it’s the type of game that offers ’scalable, repeatable gameplay’ that we can hopefully get up and running fast, and 2. we want to make the game looks as pretty as possible (we think that a bunch of towers shooting box2d physics weapons against ‘gangly alien ragdolls’ could look pretty neat).

So far we’ve got the following stuff knocked out:

• Game design doc
• Features/milestones list + time estimates
• Concept art
• Some basic features (ability to ‘drag and drop’ towers onto the stage)

Should be a long, yet fruitful day tomorrow.  Hope to see this thing running at least at a basic level: enemy box gets shot by tower box and blows up (into little boxes).

A game jam is where a team attempts to build a videogame from scratch in a ridiculously short deadline (say 48 hours). The goal is to come up with a concept, design it, program it, and finish as much as you can do before time runs out (and is often accompanied with a lack of showering/sleep and an excess of drinking).

The outcome of this type of activity can be quite inventive, creative games, as well as buggy, incomplete disasters.

To kick things off (and get the two of us working on something), we decided to play with the idea of a Game Jam, and transform it into what we call a ‘Game Jam: Gold Coin Edition’ wherein we not only build a game within a short timeline, we also put it up for auction (on a flash auction site) to see how much it will go for.

As far as I know this has not been attempted before- if it has, please let me know, and you will have severely disappointed me.

So this weekend starting tomorrow (friday), Sunshower will give this a shot. The start time will be whenever we wake up and get to the office tomorrow. The end time will be this sunday-ish.

Could this fail horribly?
Yes.

Will it?
Probably.

Are we going to try anyways?
Seems likely.

Will keep you posted.

SunshowerGames.com is finally live!  I’m not 100% sure where this website will go and evolve to, but I’m of the type to figure stuff out as I go anyways.

To start things off, I feel like I should tell a bit about the company:

Sunshower is the result of what happens when two Andrews, one a programmer another an artist- both fresh out of university- join together to try and make games.  We have a more interesting ‘backstory’ to our company (cue the world’s smallest violin), which I’ll save for a future post, but suffice to say, we’ve had a troubled past (over the last 6 months).  However, for now I’ll give you (our first readers) an idea of the two individuals behind Sunshower, and then look to the future.

There are two founders of Sunshower:

• Andrew Osborne: a programming extraordinaire with multiple degrees (Engineering physics and Computer Science).  He specializes and evangelizes in ‘methodical programming’ and loves a good process.  His favorite game (as far as I know) is the 80’s x-men arcade game.

• Andrew Pope (me): I’m an artist with reasonable skill in traditional and new media.  I was one of the mass-horde of university grads who long to be game designers, yet don’t have or can’t find a route into the industry.  Through a series of fortunate events over a span of a year or so, I’ve now started to find that route (Sunshower).

For now I’ll leave it at that.  There’s a lot to figure out for this website/blog, so I feel like I need to clarify our goals for it before I move too much further.  So I’ll leave you with a series of unorganized ideas in no particular order of stuff that MAY be included on this site:

• Sunshower’s games/services <- very likely
• Design philosophies/processes/post-mortems/lessons learned/shoulders to cry on
• A 24-48 hour Game Jam
• Advice on starting up (as we figure it out ourselves)
• Work-in-progress stuff, maybe concept art on future games
• Sexy pics and free money <- unlikely