one-sec, out now on Mindjolt!

Hi hi! Our LD28 entry, one-sec, is up and featured on mindjolt. Play it now!

A short recap

It's been some time since my graduation ceremony from Digipen. Since then I've been involved in a couple of projects.

For one, I worked under James Barnard of Springloaded, first aiding in porting his game titles to the PSM platform (namely Hiragana Pixel Party and Spacelift Danger Panic). Shortly after that I worked full-time on his Tiny Dice Dungeon project, which is a unique mobile experience. My main role in the project was to ensure that multiplayer component of the game works smoothly (among other minor things). I was (and still am) extremely green towards matters regarding networking, so it was most definitely a nerve wrecking experience - because I don't deserve half the trust the team had in me. Thankfully, James managed to get hold of a more experienced programmer who then took over handling networking and server side code. I then moved on from Springloaded to pursue my own projects with my team. I have much to learn.

While working for James, my personal project, TheWiredWorld, snagged a merit award at the National Infocomm Security Competition. That encouraged me to pick up the project again some time in the future. Hrmm. Yess.

We applied and managed to get ourselves an office in GSC in October (a government initiative, in collaboration with a school). This is the push we need to pursue our indie dreams. Things are nowhere near smooth-sailing though - the scope of our project seemed to have gotten larger than we first imagined, and we end up fighting this crippling self-doubt that haunts us everyday (like, you know, what if the game isn't FUN? And, where are the levels??). On the brighter side, we managed to make a couple of mini-titles in our spare time, one of which is a Ludum Dare 28 title. That leads me to...

one-sec, our first ludum dare entry, snagged a 50th place. Sweet. I think.

One of my school projects (Voxel Smash), got featured in Freebie Bundle 7. haha.

Again, some time near the end of the year, jon and I took on a freelance job to support ourselves for a little bit longer. The project involved the use of Unity, so that was quite the learning experience (I'm also constantly reminded of just how inexperienced I am, working amongst experienced engineers from India). While we have little love for the game title we were working on, we made a good friend who shared his experience of having gone in and out of indie. He'd since returned to India, but we promised to keep in contact. That reminds me, I've forgotten to send him a new year greeting.. darn.

Victoria, whom I've worked with in school, is now working with us. She's got plenty of ideas, many of them interesting - but like myself, she can't seem to focus on a single idea to expand upon. That said, her assistance on our main project is key to our ongoing development. I look forward to the day we get to collaborate and work on one of her ideas.

Starting tomorrow, jon will be starting his new school semester. Working with jon is a rewarding experience - he's a close friend and a teacher - so him getting busy with school work very soon worries me a little. But we made the promise to hang on to our dreams as hard as we can, so I'm going to do just that.

Ludum Dare 28

The responses for "one-sec", our little game for LD28, have been pretty positive - judging from the response on our Ludum Dare entry page. We were pretty surprised by the responses, to be perfectly honest. "one-sec" is after all an exceedingly simplistic game. CS, whom had opted out of the jam due to a lack of sleep, seems to be interested now in participating in the next jam. Perhaps we can be a tinny bit more ambitious on our next romp =).

The game jam has been a breath of fresh air for all of us involved in our "main project" that has been on-going for the past 2 grueling months. I'm now full of motivation to work on the main project again!

Right after I'm done checking out the loads of cool ludum dare entries, that is ;).

Into the wild!

I've been quiet for a long time!
Since September, the group of us, jon, cs and I have naively set up a company to pursue our indie dreams - we're still hard at work. Victoria, whom I've worked with in school on more than a few occasions, has also recently joined the team as a freelance artist. We'll just need to push on, push on and hope to see some results.

On another note, jon and I have whip out something for LudumDare 28! Check it out at http://chinykian.games-ignition.com/ludumdare/ludumdare28.html. It's also my first experience with haxe!

Into the Backlog it goes!

I've toyed with a small but otherwise fresh game idea in the form of theWIREDworld - a game that involves players hacking one another in a drawn out game of Mastermind; I was pretty close to releasing it too - that is until I realized there's still so much that needs to be done for the game to be considered complete (tutorials, balancing, etc.). Essentially I've under-estimated the scope of a project again.

That's not to say that I've wasted my time, oh no, not at all. The project is my first experience at using a 3rd party backend solution, and it had certainly gave me a good insight into how I should managed/design around the need to reduce requests to server (they cost moolah!). Also, I have every intention to revisit the project in the future.

I doubt anyone reads this blog, but in case someone does, here's a poorly made video explaining theWIREDworld.

theWIREDworld

Beside working for James as a part-timer at Springloaded, I've managed to squeeze in some time for the past 20 or so days working on an experimental game project which I had just submitted for a local competition. It is grossly unfinished at this point and - if I were to get shortlisted for the judging, would mean that I have less than 5 days left to finish the game.

In case anyone's interested, the game is developed using Starling, a really sweet framework that makes use of Adobe's stage3D technology, and Flox (also by gamua) which is a service/framework that ensures that you can concentrate on developing your game without all the server-side hassle!

Stay tune for more news of theWIREDworld, or other projects.