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RELEASE!

War Mages is out on the Play Store!

Get It HERE

SummonIcon256

It’s been one hell of a month. Since starting over in the 18th it’s been non-stop go go go to get this thing up and running.

Overall I’m really pleased with how well it turned out. I have a lot of little secondary features I want to add to it, but I think I need a week to recover.

It will be an interesting thing to see if the game finds any kind of an audience, I’m not aware of there being a whole lot of multi-player games on a single tablet yet.  However I think that it will be one of those kinds of genres where people can pop down for 5 – 10 min with a friend while waiting for the bus and play a game.

Time will tell.

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Art Code Development General OneGameaMonth

Feb 18 – week 3

10 days left.  Basic features are complete.
War mages is a 2 player game played on an Android tablet (7in or greater) where each player enters orders/commands for monsters they then summon onto the gameboard.
The goal is to have a fire elemental make an explosion on the enemy’s summoning circle.

Lots of little UI things left to do along with victory conditions but I’m in good shape

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Art Development Games General OneGameaMonth

Reboot

Tough decision made.  The original planned February game isn’t going to happen.

The Bad News

As I rapidly approached the mid-month mark I realized that I had actually made Anti-progress… I had started out with working off of the base Jan game  and broken it to the point where  it no longer had sound, and was actually unbeatable as that would crash it.  And I hadn’t even finished adding a single new feature (other than preparing to get the Spine actors put into place)

Then to add insult to injury I found out about Impire, which comes out tomorrow.  It looks an awful lot like what I want my game to be, except with a helluva larger budget, and that was pretty damn demotivating.

So I moped, and pondered and had a couple beers.

The Good News

At this point I started going back through my mental pile of old abandoned games to see if there was something that I can make work and turn into a game in 2 weeks.  And by golly I didn’t have to go far. My original blog post, in fact.  It’s time to do BombBots over again.. except in a fantasy theme this time, on a tablet, in 2d.  Oh and finished, seeing as I never finished the Second Life version (LUA server implementation problems), or the Torque Version (TGB never solidified into what I needed).  So the goal, is to turn it into a 2 player on 1 tablet/mobile device game.  Who knows.. maybe it’ll work out and be fun.

So the awesome thing is that just being ok with trashing the original idea really got me re-invigorated again.  So perhaps the Drakkheim games this year will just be all little experiments and then I’ll see what sticks before committing to some grand master plan and in the meanwhile I’ll have a chance to build up a good re-usable codebase and master all the tools I want to.

 

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Art General OneGameaMonth

Quick Peek

Goblin a Bobbin
One of Feburary’s Game 2 big new features, New art, and Animation!

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design Development Games OneGameaMonth

January Postmortem

Going to keep this short and sweet, can’t stop and reflect too much.

What went right:

  • Web editor –  having a web editor where I can make changes and just re-launch a level for testing was incredibly useful
  • Music – the non repeating drumtrack for in game music works really well wit the musical queues
  • Title screen fire – Damnit particles just make me happy.
  • Pathfinding and combat –  while it’s not the most dynamic combat (see what went wrong) it’s fairly well balanced.
  • Flexibilty of code – adding new UI elements and restructuring how combat works 4 days from launch and not a glitch.
  • Game website – Im really happy with the new http://www.drakkheim.com website.

What went wrong:

  • World rendering – having to re-write the world map rendering took a whole weekend of progress and as such required that things like traps, and ranged combat got cut. no Elves or Kobold archers.
  • Fun – the last minute changes to combat really improved the moment to moment gameplay elements, but really it’s not something you’ll be playing over and over.
  • lack of animation – lack of variety – essentially more time to create art assets would have been really nice.   I have a feeling this will be a recurring theme.
  • Broken analytics –  I totally messed up and forgot to install analytics on the website until 4 days after launch.. so I have no idea if anyone has even played it.

That’s it for now.