After all the hard work, Square Off passed peer review and has been released on the Xbox Indies games site! You can find it here: Square Off on Xbox Live Marketplace (USA) Square Off on Xbox Live Marketplace (UK) We also updated the website! You can see more info on Square Off and try the Xbox 360 demo here.
Well done team – looks like all those late nights paid off. We’re especially happy because the standard of the competition was incredible this year. Don’t take my word for it, check out the videos for the top 20 entries, courtesey of Matthew Doucette of Xona Games.
The purpose of most game tools is to streamline process of content creation. They should enable the artists to easily get assets straight into the game, thereby reducing the work load of the programmer. That’s the theory anyway. Right back when we were building Balls Unleashed and Throng, I started making the Character Editor 2D with this theory in mind. The idea was to have an animation tool that could handle a hierarchy of Quads that could move independantly (eg head and arms attached to a body) and do sprite sheet style animation on each Quad at the same time. …
Now that DBP is done and dusted, we have to start deciding what features will make it into the final game. Obviously there’s a rather large wish list but at the same time we’re all really keen to have our first game released. We’re hoping to get it out by November and we want to have at least 9 levels (currently we have 4). I’ll leave that decision up to Adam and Scott as they’re the ones who’ll have to build them, and I believe quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears goes into each one!. Other wanted/needed features …
Don’t worry, we’re not dead. The blog posts dried up because our current project took a major detour. We decided to put Throng on hold because we couldn’t possibly do it justice in the time remaining for Dream Build Play. So, two months before submission deadline we made the radical decision to change tack completely. Enter project Square One. Part of the reason for this change was that we read an excellent article called Subtractive Game Design in Game Developer Magazine by David Sirlin. Scott suggested that we don’t really need gravity, and in fact it makes so many things …
