PrimeDog Blog

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.

A quick progress report:

Our waterfall-like development method currently has us with 27 Characters marked ‘Gameplay Approved’, which is decent, if a bit slower than I would like.

I have Gender, Sexual Preference, Skin color, Age, Alignment, Height and Weight entered for all of the Characters.  Some have Names,  Family members, and a rough concept of what their Costume is.  Almost all of them have at least a temporary Occupation.

Core Gameplay (da Rules!) haven’t seen any activity in, oh, months I’d guess, but I’m revisiting them now for cleanup and a push towards completing that part of the game.  For the uninitiated, Core Gameplay describes the default rules that govern how the game is played and how the Characters may act, provided that the Character doesn’t have one or more powers which act as exceptions to the rules.  Read the rest of this entry »

Well, as it happens, our unwillingness to release on Friday has cost us our funding. Easy come, easy go, I suppose. Better get back to work, too.

Well, I haven’t mentioned it before due to legal restrictions, but I’m happy to announce that PrimeDog has now secured financing! We will be moving into our new offices and looking to hire another 150+ people to work on Lunchbox. We’re confident that once we’re able to devote multiple designers and artists to each character, production will pick up smoothly and we should have a game out very soon. With the massive spike in manpower Lunchbox will now be the game we always knew it could be. By our calculations, shifting from 2 people working part-time to a staff of over 150 working full time will allow us to shorten our production time by a factor of almost 360. That means that instead of releasing the game in 2009, we expect to have it ready to play by next Monday. It would be Friday but we think it’s important to really really get as much testing in as possible to ensure that this game is of the highest quality.

Well, with that I will now return to frolicking about my house with wads of $1oo bills spilling from my pockets. Have a good day and remember: sometimes wishes *do* come true!

Lately I’ve been working a lot on crafting the background data on the 60 Characters in Lunchbox. Once all of their powers were decided upon (were?) and the power rules in place, they needed background data. This ranges from the obvious things like gender, age, and the source of their powers to things like sexual preference and religious beliefs. My goal for the backgrounds has always been to have as much good diversity as possible. Once I started to assign characteristics, though, I started to wonder: am I creating a collection of characters that are predjudiced or offensive?
Read the rest of this entry »