The Fourth Think Outside The Box Contest hosted by Stormy Studio via Gamesalad started on January 1st 2012 and I’m in it once again. It’s a contest/challenge were game developers have one month to develop a game related to the theme that thinks outside of the box and has great gameplay using the Gamesalad engine. The theme for this one is “End of the World.” The theme for the last TOTB contest was “The Ocean” in which I joined and ended up winning the award for Best Originality with my game Detective Deep. I like the idea of these contest and I find it challenging and fun. The prizes are also great and even more grand this time it seems. It’s neat to see what I can personally come up with and get done in a month and also to see what the other developers accomplish.
Ever since the theme was announced for this one I’ve going back and forth on a few different ideas for my game. Initially I leaned towards a specific type of gameplay that I knew would be neat and fun with simple smooth controls, but I couldn’t decide on the basic idea of the game so I couldn’t start working on the graphics, style and etc. I was leaning towards something that had to do with the afterlife since the theme for the contest is End of the World, but my idea started to become a little bit too potentially controversial and less fun in my opinion. Last night after some intense brainstorming I decided on an outlook of my game which was one of my first ideas but its been evolved and fleshed out more now. This new idea is more fun and silly than my religious afterlife idea but involves the same type of gameplay element. It’s about the end of the world of course, but it has nothing to do with humans…..it’s about animals that can hop.
Now that I have the idea behind my game and the style outlined I can start on graphics and implementing them when I get more time. I have the basic gameplay elements down but I’m going to enhance them more and add scores, power-ups, and several other neat details and gameplay elements. I’ll be posting some of my progress on my thread on the contest forum, and I’ll also post those details on the comments section of this post. More details on the contest itself can be found on the Stormy Studio Think Outside the Box website.
Non TOTB info: The main game that I’ve been working on, Codename Bit, is almost finished, and it should be available on the App Store in a few weeks. I’ve finished everything on the game except for the main theme music. Codename Bit has turned out extremely well and I’ve very proud of it. It’s a very unique and fun game with a great stylized look and smooth simple controls that take advantage of the touch screen. I can’t wait to release it on the App Store. While I’m working on this TOTB4 game I’ll continue to test & polish Codename Bit and work on the main menu music. Also my other new app “Codename Ultra” which actually doesn’t even have “Ultra” in the title anymore will be released on the App Store later this month. It’s an Entertainment app with motivational & productive aspects…. Busy, but exciting times. Happy New Year everyone!
8-Bit Avrin Apps 
Well the contest ended a few days ago and I submitted my entry in on time. I stayed up very late on the last night of the contest to put together my video. I did some screen capture on my computer, but most of it was from running an ad hoc test copy of the game on my iPhone. This was the first time I ever did screen capture for one of my apps using my DSLR so this was a learning experience. I wanted to make sure I got good lighting to capture the visuals nicely on my game since they are very sharp and retina enabled, so I did multiple takes and picked the best footage without taking up too much time.
I also wanted to show of one of the main features of the game which are the controls itself. You control the game using two fingers or two people with one finger each. Since the controls are a key element of the game I wanted my video to actually show the game being played like normal. I believe my entry video is a good rough representation of my game in it’s current state, which is near completion. I did find a couple of bugs during this process, however, I’ll definitely fix those and enhance a few other things before I put it on the App Store if I decide to do that.
It’s going to be neat seeing the results of the contest and I can’t wait to see how my game did with the judges. It’s definitely completely different from anything else in the contest and I think it’s a very neat game. Ok well enough typing back to working on a completely different app.
It’s been a bit stressful towards the end of the month trying to finish this TOTB 4 somewhat while getting ready to release my game, Lightspeed Bit Bit. I want to make sure I market it decently and that the release goes smoothly since I believe its a really good game. So I made sure to remind myself the fact that Lightspeed Bit Bit takes priority over this TOTB game right now. So yea I’ve been off and on with this game for this past week, but its actually almost complete. I did the majority of the hard work during the first half of the month so these last couple of days shouldn’t be too hard.
Tomorrow I’m going to finish the little in game intro cinematic and then finish all of the audio. After that the game will be pretty much complete. I’ve received some positive feedback on the progress of my game in the forums so that feels great and it’s appreciated. If everything goes to plan I’ll be ready to submit the video of my game for the contest a day early on the 30th. Then after more testing and polishing I’ll release it on the App Store in March!
Working on finishing up all of the gameplay artwork. I plan on having all of it implemented by the end of this weekend. Then starting on Monday I’ll work on the text graphics, main menu and pause screen and hopefully finish all of that sometime on Tuesday. Then I’ll start working on the music and sound fx and hopefully finish all of that by Wednesday or Thursday. Then I’ll continue testing everything and making sure everything is polished well and record a video for my contest entry. During the last TOTB contest I was up until the last night before the contest ended recording the video for my game and I don’t plan repeating that this time.
I’ll be releasing this game into the App Store as well, but I’m not going to rush it. Even though I plan on it being roughly complete for the contest it probably won’t be polished enough for my taste to release on the App Store. So I’ll continue to enhance and test it after the contest until I’m ready for it to be officially released. Going to post a little video of some of the gameplay on the GS forums soon. Ok enough typing, time for my left hand and right brain to create some more artwork.
01/11 Post: Since my game is cartoony I realized the realistic clouds didn’t fit so well the more I looked at them together. The bad part is I didn’t come to this conclusion until after I spent about an hour on several backgrounds. However, after deleting them from my game and adding my new more efficient artwork my game went down a couple MBs so that’s great. I’ve been doing a lot of artwork for the scenery, power-ups, and items to avoid. I’m also finishing up the basic gameplay and environmental elements.
This game is going to have an Endless mode and a couple Time Attack modes. I’ll post a short video later with snippets of what I’ve done so far. Oh yea, my game is about a planet of bunny rabbits that’s being destroyed and you need to save them….
It’s late, time to sleep.
01/08 Post: I’ve been working on a bunch of art this weekend and implementing it into the gameplay itself, testing, and planning out the rest of the gameplay, layout and etc. The dark shadow/Slightly 3dish effects on the outlines are on purpose. The whole game is kind of going to pop out a little. (Posted a couple pics on the forums of some of the graphics I’ve done so far)