PrimeDog Blog

I’ve requested some help refining some power and character names for Lunchbox, and the help was returned in the form of a shared Google Doc. I like it. It’s accessible, seems stable so far, and best of all it allowed us to cooperatively edit it together. The responsiveness of our interaction wasn’t great, any chat app would have beat it, but then if it was a chat app we wouldn’t have been building up the content that way. I guess it sits somewhere between the feedback rate IM and the editable-contentness of a wiki.

Hi world!

A good friend gifted me with a previously-enjoyed laptop last week. It’s not pristine but it’s in good shape for my needs. I’ve been installing things I need and tweaking the ‘experience’ to suit. I figured I’d give some insight as to what I’ve been using in the course of making Lunchbox.

My work is split about 80/20 between writing and drawing, I’d say. For many reasons, Notetab has long been my text editor of choice. Multiple documents open as tabs, a very useful search-and-replace and some robust but comprehensible sorting functions. I always install the Pro version, which has some features enabled on a trial basis, but honestly the all-free standard version does everything I need.

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Another year, another ‘Hey look, a blog!’ post. As it’s that time of year, let’s look back over the past 12 months and see if we can peer into the future a bit.

This time last year I was just getting into Multimedia Fusion, thinking that it would herald the completion of Lunchbox. I still think it might be possible to do in MMF, but the coding bug was hard to sustain. So many more interesting things glittered for my attention, including the design parts of Lunchbox. Most of that work was a bit tedious but necessary, going through the powers matrix and looking for bad interactions between the powers. That took a while, but was very worth it. Now I have a nice large spreadsheet with interaction data.

A few months after that, I was let go from my QA position, all the QA work having been shipped overseas to China. That stung (still does), but it almost felt like a convenience to have the time to prepare for kid number two (Hi, Hunter!). Work on Lunchbox was still fragmented but never fully stopped.

About 2 or 3 months ago, my good friend (old buddy old pal) Jason Stewart said he wanted to try working on Lunchbox in Python (and/or Pygame). Filled with giggly glee I said ’sure’ as casually as I could (one thing learned from fishing: no matter how bad you want the fish, you have to let the fish set the pace). Since then there’s been some coding progress as we figure out what we’re doing. I’ve always enjoyed working with Jay, and this time is no different. He’s still learning his coding, sure, but he’s quick. He has experience with audio, graphics, animation and QA, and brings a voluminous knowledge of games and gaming. As a bonus, we have vaguely similar ideas about stuff and aren’t afraid to argue out our disagreements amicably. In short (too late) I respect Jay a lot.

While he’s been coding, I’ve been working on getting 10 starter characters ready for production. So far that’s meant doing visual design for them and figuring out some documents to track visual/audio/text/FX assets.

As for the coming year? Honestly I’m really preoccupied with finding regular work. Something to keep us in food and shelter while Lunchbox is under way. But assuming I find a job, what’s to happen with Lunchbox? The next big goal is to get a playable prototype that I can give to people for testing and feedback. We’re going to start with a ‘pawn-level’ game, which has all the common game elements shared by everyone, and no special powers. Kinda the Lunchbox version of checkers or chess. My hope is that people generally like playing around with the game even before the powers are introduced. That would be great. Then we go from there, adding in the 10 starter characters one at a time and checking things out.

More and more I find myself doing Producer-type stuff, like the asset tracking docs. It feels odd not to be buried up to my brain stem in design work, but this shit’s gotta get done by someone and I’m pretty much it. Time will tell how well I do.

All in all, I like the way things are going with Lunchbox, and I can’t wait to see how much progress we can make in 2010.

Recently, an entirely new form of progress has begun with Lunchbox: actual coding! My colleague has been working on it in Python for at least a month now. I am frequently giddy at the prospect of actually playing Lunchbox in a digital form, and working with him has forced whole new types of thought regarding all aspects of production. Hmmm, could this be what it feels like to actually make a game? Cool.

Now I’m transferring the pose notes to electronic file (Notetab for now, spreadsheet later), during which I’m making edits and consolidating how I’m tracking my plans. One thing that came up for tracking early on was noting which poses will require ‘facing’, a term I’m using to indicate poses that will need left-facing and right-facing versions. Some poses, like Shriek’s preparatory deep breath, can face the player. Since her ‘Stunning Scram’ is an AoE power, it can face forwards as well. Her Sonic Fury blast has to have facings, though, as it’s finely targeted.

I’ve also found a few powers that are redundant, really, and can just be folded into other powers as special cases. A good example is Whisper. For boardgame play the Invisibility Disruption power is good at making the effect really explicit for the players. In an electronic game, though, I think it will be sufficient to simply apply the disruption effect without making a whole ‘power’ unto itself.