Hey folks! Happy week two here at pillow castle HQ. It’s been another fun one as we try to figure out the nuts and bolts of our project and our goals. Add pressure from school and personal lives and the bitter Pittsburgh cold and we’re all in very, very optimistic moods at the moment.
Thankfully Global Game Jam will be here in just a few hours to wipe away our grind of a week and put us back in the swing of CREATING something. We’ll have 48 hours to build a game worth playing. That’s not a lot of time. We installed a bed in the office to compensate. I promised myself I wouldn’t use it, but hell, what do I know.
Back to pillow castle planning! About halfway through the week, it was announced the Albert’s demo (The Museum of Simulation Technology) was selected for IGF Student Showcase! Whaaat! That rules.
It means we have to refocus a little bit (this is becoming a common theme…) and make sure we are ready to man a booth at GDC for the week. You can expected to see us there in all our glory, though. We’re about to order t-shirts. What color do you think? I like pink. Yuxi likes pink. We might not ask anyone else.
We’re looking for a composer at the moment to create a theme for the new game. That process is going pretty slowly, mostly because we haven’t devoted enough time to talking to people. One of our goals next week, for sure.
Xiao & Albert are working on solving some of our current concave collider issues in Unity – they think they may have found a work-around for now, but it remains untested.
Yuxi modeled all of our assets in like an afternoon (she’s fast!) and then has spent the rest of the week delving into the technical requirements of bringing Zhengyi’s visions to life. BTW, Zhengyi’s visions are awesome. More at the bottom.
We’re working on our branding materials and hope to have them finished by the end of next week so that we can focus all of our attention on the game itself.
We’ve developed a development strategy of dividing our work into “design answers” – creating small prototypes to test technology and art that answer questions we have about our design (and eventually, our narrative.) We’re halfway through a cycle of development for our first prototype, the “toy box”, and we will be having an internal review of the final product next Friday. We hope to develop a minimum of three of these prototypes to test various elements of the design over the course of the next six weeks – a tight schedule, but one we can manage if we stay focused.
But hey, who cares about being focused. It’s Global Game Jam time in Pittsburgh here at the ETC, and we’re revving up to get down to business. We’ll be live-blogging the process and will hopefully have a cool game to share with everyone at the end of it. If I have my way, the game will have some fart humor. Don’t tell the other pillow castle, folks. I’m going to sneak it in on them…
Check out our blog for further updates from the week. There’s an interview with Xiao on there. Along with some humorous anecdotes and accidental xenophobia. And clown bashing.
Here, have some concept art for being good readers:
zhengyi has things in his brain that just kind of fall out like loose pebbles.
