It's 3am and a few members are well into their all-nighters, making sure the game is good and ready to go for our professors during class today. We've come a long way this semester and it's time to really show that we mean business!
Videos to come soon.
The Jam was a HUGE success. Over 50 commits in just over 2 days and the game is really looking great. Not to mention the 2 bags of chips, a box of oreos, 2 boxes of cookies, a bag of nuts, a bag of pretzles, a box of chocolates, 4 cases of drinks, and 6 extra large boxes of pizza from Pasta Roma and over 250 man hours that were put in...
Bottom line, we're looking great for our Midterm review this Thursday.
Today marks the kick-off of our 2-Day dev jam! All of the Clockworkers have gathered in one apartment and have locked themselves away until the work gets done. This is going to be a really fun weekend and there is going to be a TON of progress made on the game. See ya'll on the other side.
GDC was an absolutely fabulous time. We hung out with a few members of the Blink and In Memory team, got ourselves relatively lost in the San Franciscan ghetto and followed by 2 conspicuous men for ten minutes! Not to mention a ton of free beer and... oh yeah, awesome contacts!
With GDC over doth arrive the ever awaited Spring Break. Dev can take a few days off from school but never from the game!! We have a couple of fun things in store for this "vacation."
Happy GDC Week! Only half of the Clockworkers are going to GDC so that means the other half are still busy as ever cranking out our puzzles! Hopefully everyone has a fantastic time!
In lieu of the design team falling slightly behind, Lead Designer Jeremy Le went ahead and built out the first pass of our "Hub" and it's pretty awesome! Seeing the hub in game has been really motivating and it's going to be an excting couple of weeks as we get ready for our midterm review!
It's hard to press on through development at times when you can't actually see the end results of what you're doing. Engineers are busyily writing le codez and designers are well... designing! We're definitely in a stale mate at the moment and will be for a few more weeks until the two teams can wrap things up a bit and start brining it all together.
After several weeks of very heated discussions, we have confirmed our puzzle sets and Engineers are well under way in implementing the tools required to make the designers happy... I mean make the game great!
New Team Make-up!
We have finally locked down our spring development team. Several people left the team over winter break either for personal reasons or because they graduated! We wish them all the best of luck in their future endeavors and let's wish a warm welcome to Scott Kohn (Engineer) and Andrew Thompson (Designer)!
On top of individual puzzle design assignments, design is meeting 3 times a week to iron out what our puzzle sets are going to look like. Can you say laser gears??
After spending a lot of time in meetings, we have agreed on a completely new way to look at this game. What we showed off at December's Demo Day was great, but it was essentially 4 rooms connected by hallways.
The goal now is to create an environment in which the players can truly immerse themselves, creating a 3D space that actually feels like a AAA game. To facilitate this, we are now beginning development on what is known as our "level sets." These levels sets are going to be larger series of puzzles/rooms that incorporate a central theme. This is to help the game feel more connected and over all just make more sense. To that end, we have decided to remove our Clockwork Toys, for now, as we really want to focus on the core interactions between Benjamin and the Gears/Zombies.
Additionally, we are introducing a central "Hub." Each level set will be a wing of this hub. When the player completes the level set, he/she will have effected what went on back in the hub.
We hope this design change will be for the best!