PrimeDog Blog

In anticipation of the start of actual development of Lunchbox I’ve slashed the character list from a wishlist 60 to a pragmatic 10.  It was by turns much harder and much easier to do than I expected.  The hard parts involved letting go of my visions of the fully-realized game, with the fully-animated characters powering around the board, the players enacting their cunning schemes.  The plans, the upsets!  Oh!

But really, it was relatively easy to see which ones to work on first once I purged those visions (or at least put them on the back burner).  The survivors were (names withheld for now):

Guy Made of Rock: Very strong and tough, with boosted Hit and Defense.

Guy Who can RUN: Very fast and agile, with boosted Action points.

Alien Who’ll Steal Your Powers: Can stun a character and copy all of their powers.

Teleporting Alien: Move anywhere instantly.

Girl With Electrical Blasts: Do I have to explain this one?

Self-Duplicating Monkey: Creates copies of himself.

Girl on Fire: Ignite and extinguish flames.

Mind-Controlling Alien: Directly control another character.

Healing Woman: Rapidly heals herself and others.

Woman with a Do-Over: Can undo a turn and retake it.

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Plans to preorder Braid have hit a minor snag in that apparently I need to upgrade to a new version of IE in order to use Impulse, the game distribution network Stardock is using to distribute it.  Now I just have to decide if I want to do the upgrade just for that.

… of time, that is.  I’ve just discovered that Braid is going to be released on March 31, 2009 and is available for preorder.  Apparently it was originally going to be $20 but has been reduced to $15 after there was some vocal dislike of the price.

I have always found game mechanics involving time to be very intriguing.  I’m really looking forward to trying out Braid.

I went looking through my posts over on the CS forums and I can’t believe it’s been so long since I first heard about Braid and Flow.

Greetings,

Far too much time has passed, and many things are different, now.  It’s 2009, obviously, and Lunchbox hasn’t made any great strides since the last post.  Finding people willing to playtest is as hard as it ever was, so there hasn’t been much of that.  A little, but nothing significant.

There has been some progress outside of Lunchbox, though.  I’m learning to use Multimedia Fusion 2 (by Clickteam), and I’m doing alright with it.  I’m trying to gather together more of my friends who have interest in game or application creation, and that went really well, with a lot of energy and enthusiasm everywhere.

And, of course, I’m back on the blog.  We’ll see how long this lasts.

The time has come, finally. As of now PrimeDog has completed all of the Character gameplay design that we will do prior to prototyping and actual programming development. The core gameplay is done as well (though undergoing a quick rewrite for clarity (go go bullet points!) ), so I feel a bit adrift. It’s been so long working on just getting all the gameplay aspects planned that now I look at the rest of things and I’m not sure what to focus on. I’ve been a designing butterfly lately, doing little bits of work on things like the credits, the reward systems, some of the presentation, the audio and whatever my roving eye falls upon. I’m sure I’ll figure out a plan of how to tackle what remains. In the meantime, I can exult in the existence of what should be a playable set of Core and Character gameplay.