I really should write these posts more often.

We’ve had an insane last couple of months. We’ve become a proper registered business and we’ve made a whole new game – Star Squad Space Rescue.

Star Squad Space Rescue comes out on iPhone / iPad / iPod on Wednesday, March 25th. Which is insanely soon! Thankfully I think we’re ready. Taxes: done. Business accounting: done. Legal paperwork: done. Business-to-business emails: done. Oh, and also the actual making of the game. But that was the fun part.

The game will be here: http://itunes.com/apps/star-squad-space-rescue

I think we’re on to something, though. Fast-paced games dev is hectic, fun and rewarding. It’s also much harder than you think – well, unless you’re a games dev who has done it yourself. In which case you know exactly how hard it is.

Big huge shout-out to the following people who are totally awesome and who have contributed to the game in more ways than they know.

John Passfield, Steve Baxter, Alistair Doulin, Kieran Lord, Cameron Owens, James Bowling, Wes Clarke cialis preiswert. Business advice, mentoring, code advice, critiques, suggestions and encouragement have all been super useful. You all rock.

Also huge thanks to our beta-test team. I know we’ve not found all the bugs, but you guys have been hugely helpful. Especially Tom Graham and Szabo Gergely.

Wow viagra rezeptfrei billig.

So it’s been a year. Time really gets away from you if you let it. Thankfully we’re nearly there now – so it’s way past time to be talking about Ninja Raft again. Especially since we’re looking for beta testers.

If you need some convincing, check out our latest gameplay video here!

Our publisher, Right Pedal Studios, have thrown a couple of extra developers at us: Wes Clarke and Alex Driml have joined the team. Right Pedal Studios have been great supporting us through this – this is just the latest thing in a long list of reasons why I’d recommend any indie dev partner up with a good indie publisher.

For those who want to participate in the beta

If you have a Google Play account and have an Android device, fire me an email at support@geekbraingames.com. iPhone and iPad owners: fear not! We are releasing on iPhone and iPad as well – we’re just using the Android group to iron out the nasty bugs first.

New Financial Year’s Resolution for me: post more here and on facebook! Feel free to call me on it if you want to.

Yes, okay. It’s been a very long time since the last update.

We’ve been pushing hard on getting Ninja Raft sorted out, which is not really a good excuse – but we have cut some footage of gameplay and got a new playable together.

The game has undergone some serious cosmetic changes and some rethinks on interface, but the core of the game remains the same as it always was. This is a good sign: the main game vision remains strong.

There is a great video of some gameplay footage taken from the latest build (0.20) up on YouTube internetapotheke viagra. A new playable will be available on this website as soon as it finishes uploading – details to follow!

So here we are three weeks in… (!)

Ninja Raft has secured funding through Right Pedal Studios, and we’re on full-go getting the game built.

The core game concept hasn’t changed; the big push for the last few weeks has been working on the overall game framework and general look-and-feel suche viagra. We’ve been doing a lot of UI concepting, getting the front end flow in and working, planning the overall flow and feel of the game and working out the new player experience.

New player experience is one of those things that is properly hard work. The prototype is fun, but without someone telling you roughly how to play it, it’s just confusing. Building a raft without any idea what the different tiles do is a very random experience – sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not.

I personally don’t like that, so we’re reviewing our introduction to the game.

To solve this, we’ve had a toy around with some of the features. I’ve thrown together a raft auto-builder that constructs a semi-sensible raft from a set of tiles, going through the same build process that a player would. It still builds the navigation grid, etc. – only now you can instantly have a fully functional raft which you can defend.

Like a good developer, I’ve thrown away most of the prototype code (well, I keep it for reference) and am rewriting the core game in a substantially less messy way. I’m nearly back to the game being at the same stage as the prototype: we’ve got the front end flow in, we’ve got dojos and cargo, we’ve got ninjas and you can direct the ninjas around.

Next week we’re hoping to have our first properly playable build; right now its an almost-game, but realistically just a toy with no objectives. I am very much looking forward to that changing!

In early January I went along to the State Library of Queensland’s first ‘Level Up Games Night’ – in this case a game-jam done in public. The contestants (of which I was not one) were tasked with making a game to a theme within 2 hours, with the entire development process being streamed to a projector so the audience could watch the code and art as it came together viagra 20mg.

Anyway, while there I looked at some of the other indie games both in development and made by other Brisbane studios – a range of small projects as well as some big name indie games; after all, Halfbrick are here in Brisbane and are still an indie developer – albeit a very successful one.

While there I used the opportunity to do some networking – talked to other devs in the area as well as various others – and two things dawned on me. The first was that there was a lot of opportunities to partner up with people who are better than I am at things like marketing, etc. The second was the final idea for a game concept I had been rattling around in my head ever since playing the board game Galaxy Truckers and spending too many late nights playing FTL.

From this combination was born the idea of Ninja Raft, which I then approached Rupert about since we’d just finished putting Pin-Up Weather Girl out the door. He was immediately sold on the concept, so we started work on a prototype.

Fast-forward to now, after I’ve been nose-deep in Unity3D again with my skills thankfully bolstered from my mucking around last year, and we have a prototype and what is shaping up to be a fairly solid concept.

If you want to have a look at the prototype, it is right here. It is somewhat rough and ready, but the core game is there.

Today I started work on my next project, which for now has been named The Great Laboratory Breakout.

The concept is fairly straightforward: guide some cute blobby creatures past a variety of hazardous things (grinders, acid, lasers, chickens) in an attempt to get to the exit.

This time the levels are considerably bigger than a single screen. I’m quite happy: I’ve got the interface for moving the blobbies around working and for moving the camera around the level viagra singapore. Not too bad for three hours! If only every day could be like this.