Building a studio from scratch: Week 10

Week 10

OK, this week I got in touch with an old programmer friend of mine as I had another idea I wanted an opinion on and I didn’t want to overload my colleague Paul, as he was progressing so well on the underwater game.

This was for a separate game based on Sudoku, with a twist in the game-play. We met up a few days later and agreed that small puzzle games would probably take a couple of months as long as we have a base of code to work with. He mentioned that if we were going for iPhone / iPad and just using their internal APIs (which won’t translate to Android) then things could be done pretty quickly. This was pretty encouraging for me.

We had a look into a 3D option, but both decided that it would be best to keep this simple with 2D. I started to research these types of games, as I’d not really played a lot of them before and he started to look into Unity, getting to grips with how the scripts work and where they need to be placed.

Looking back at the underwater game, I think I’ll need help with the animation, as the animating jellyfish I produced, took quite a while and wasn’t as good as it could have been – for sure it’ll do for now for testing, but it’ll need to be replaced. I had a chat with Paul about getting some parallax scrolling working so that we can start to think about the design of the levels, which he will look at in the near future.

As for the racing title, this is cooking along too, I have a few more people interested in getting involved, so hopefully, we’ll have a strong enough team to start this earlier than I had originally thought.

The main news this week was that we have started some outsource work too. We’re working with Art In Games on their sequel to their massively successful game Air Attack.

I believe Air Attack managed to hit number one in the charts in over 60 countries simultaneously which is incredible for a small indie studio. We’re really thrilled to be working with these guys on the sequel to such a great game. Personally I owned it on iPhone and Ipad which I loved.

Total money spent so far: £292.63

Negatives
Nothing really this week, everything is going pretty well

Positives
-We’ve started to look at another game to develop
-We’ve landed our first outsourcing work with Art In Games

The Pixel Bullies
andy@thepixelbullies.com
www.thepixelbullies.com
Twitter – @AndyGahan