First things first: I wish you all a happy new year 2015! I hope it will be filled with fun, achievement and great gaming experiences!
For Oddly Shaped Pixels, it will certainly be a great year (let's hope so), primarily because:
Super Rocket Shootout has been greenlit!
That's a wonderful news for me and for everybody who has been following and supporting the game. That means that the game will get to a final state where it can be considered as a fully delivered game, and not just a fun demo as it has been up until now.
The future of the game will be largely discussed on the Steam page so I invite you to go and check it out, and follow the game to get all the news and have the opportunity to be part of the development process.
Now, some other great news: Oddly Shaped Pixels will be releasing (at least) one other game in 2015! I've been contacted by a publisher and we've come to an agreement so I'm really pleased to tell you that some game of mine you've already playing will be expanded and will come to your favorite handheld device during the first semester of 2015! I'm still a bit mysterious because I have to check first with my publisher if I can talk freely about it, but anyway, I'll make an official announcement when I'm given the permission!
And to conclude this post and to remember the last bits of 2014, here's a game I've had the opportunity to make during the Ludum Dare #31 with some really talented people that are:
- Deconstructeam, the guys behind the great "Gods Will Be Watching"
- Kevin Cerdá, the great game designer behind Nihilumbra and now part of the team working on "Rime"
It's called Atticus VII and it's about playing a ship's AI while a crew member has been mysteriously murdered. It mixes elements of story telling, deductions and micro management. It also has a great replay value since there's not (or almost not) a unique right ending, but 12 different endings, each with its own meaning and set of revelations about the whole picture.
You can play the game on the Ludum Dare entrye page.
This Ludum Dare was for me the occasion to experiment making a game as part of a team, and it has taught me a lot. Firstly because I had the chance to participate in the game design with certainly two of the most emergent and talented spanish game designers (Jordi de Paco and Kevin Cerdá), and secondly because I've had to learn being part of the team and not a self centered one-man-army. I have to confess it has been hard, especially with the turn of events (I had to withdraw from beeing the lead programer due to technical setbacks), letting aside the ego boost of making a game on my own. But what an enriching experience and what an amazing game we made!! It clearly could'nt have been possible being on my own.
The game has been really well received and I'm really proud to say that it has ranked #12 on overall. It's great to see that players have felt compelled to play the game and to replay it until they understood the whole story. You can check the reddit thread just to see how players exchange their clues and views of the story, it's great to see!
Yet the game still has some design and game design issues, not because we didn't see (or foresee) them, but mainly because we decided that what had to prevail was to make this rich story fit in the 3 days of competition. Almost 2000 lines of dialogs have been written and arranged to create a complex narrative structure!! It's just amazing to have been able to make so much content in do little time, and I guess it's thanks to a natural and almost unspoken task repartition we've come up with. The counterpart is that the game still has some bugs and several elements of the mechanics, interface and story sill could benefit from a bit of polishing.
But anyway, the game is great and it has been a wonderful way to close 2014, a year that has allowed me to enter the world of game design and to start the foundation of what I hope will be a long path of creations and personal achievements.
Thank's for the reading and stay tuned for more news!
R3nD
