Judith’s Reception

Posted in judith
Terry Apr 15, 2009 32 Comments

I have to say, I’m a little surprised at the amount of attention that Judith has gotten! The reception has been pretty interesting, to say the least… There are some people who got the point of the game right away, saw what we were trying to do with it and liked it for what it was – but then there were others (quite a few others) who absolutely detested it. I can totally understand people not liking this – it’s naturally something which isn’t going to appeal to everyone… but I guess I don’t really understand the sheer amount of anger directed at it.

I think, maybe, some of the writeups and more positive comments led to people having very unreasonable expectations for it. Expectations that it can’t really live up to – after all, it really is just a sketch of a game, flawed and rushed in all sorts of ways.

In particular, a lot of the complaints I’ve read seem to be terribly concerned that it’s not even really a game – because it’s so linear and non-interactive. I feel like this isn’t really what these people are annoyed about, though – Judith doesn’t lack interactivity – hell, it’s about interactivity; what it lacks is gameplay.

And that’s fair enough! We did consider adding more complex puzzles to Jeff’s side of the game, but ultimately it wasn’t really what we were interested in doing with this. Perhaps we could have expanded the gameplay side of things without impacting on the real point of the story, I don’t know. In any case, I accept that it’s a valid reason not to like the game. I guess I just wish that people weren’t so angry about it…

Anyway. I’m a little tired of all the drama just right now. Thankfully Ludum Dare is this weekend – I’m looking forward to maybe doing something a little less serious.

32 Comments

Judith Update

Posted in judith
Terry Apr 6, 2009 8 Comments

Judith is taking just a little bit longer than I expected – I sorta got sidetracked on something else last week, so there’s still quite a bit to be done, and I guess I underestimated how long scripting would take. Still, we’ve been making pretty good progress over the last few days, so it shouldn’t be too much longer at this rate.

Now, let’s see… do I have a screenshot or something? Not really. Hmm, this’ll have to do:

Ominous!

8 Comments

Updates and stuff

Posted in don't look back judith
Terry Mar 25, 2009 4 Comments

Just in the way of an update, thought I’d mention that I put the RPG thing to one side temporarily to finish up an old project; Increpare and I are back working on Judith. We’ve done a fair bit of work on it over the last week or so and are aiming to release it over the weekend, or very soon after. Probably!

In other news; Don’t Look Back is doing incredibly well, far, far beyond anything I expected. Last Thursday it reached an unbelievable figure of one million plays! I still haven’t gotten over the shock – I don’t know what to say…

I’ve gotten a whole bunch of emails recently, and I’ve been terrible about replying to them… I’m sorry! In my defence, it’s just that I’m really bad at making decisions – see, when I have one email I usually reply to it right away, no problem. When I have two it takes a little longer – I end up thinking about my response to both of them before I send either.

When I have over a hundred unanswered emails, on the other hand – as well as all the blog comments, shouts, whispers and private messages on various forums, it is sorta like being a deer that is staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck.

4 Comments

year++;

Posted in buster drake detonate electric panic flyingcities judith pathways self destruct space void tower platformer
Terry Jan 2, 2009 4 Comments

Ever since I started rapid prototyping, as I called it back at the end of October, I’ve let quite a few projects build up on me. One of my new years resolutions is not to start anything else until I start finishing a few first! With any luck, this should be a pretty productive month for me as a result!

(In any case, I can’t really afford to continue experimenting like this. My loan’s running out, so it looks like this venture of mine is almost out of time…)

In rough order of priority, here’s what I’m working on at the moment:


Space/Void [Collab with Cactus]

Of all the unfinished projects I’ve got around me right now, this one’s not only been around the longest, but it’s also the closest to completion. I made the levels for cactus’ game way back in last april or so, and it’s been sitting idle since then because we’ve both been too busy to add the finishing touches. I think it would be a pretty motivating start to the month if I could get this out in the next few days. First thing I’m going to try doing is explore the possibility of a flash port (which could work quite well for this) – if that doesn’t seem reasonable we’ll just finish off the game maker version…


Detonate

I’m itching to get back to this, because I’ve got it to the stage where all the yucky vegetable coding work is finished and it’s just a matter of the chocolatey level creation and polish! Can’t wait 🙂


Pathways

I’d been chipping away at this over christmas – as much as I love the concept behind the game, right now it’s not really what I want to work on. I was trying to get it finished as soon as I could because of the whole ludum dare thing, but it’s so overdue now that I don’t really care – I think I’d rather take my time with it.

I’m also hoping to totally redo the graphics – it’s nice in places but I don’t like the sprites and it’s way too much work to draw the entire game like this and have it look good. Anyway, I think I can do better with a bit of work on a new style.


Judith [Collab with Increpare]

Another project where all the heavy lifting coding-work is out of the way, Increpare and I are currently in the process of designing the levels of this. We should be able to finish it this month if we can find a day or two where we’re both free to work on it.


Electric Panic

That screenshot isn’t exactly representative, heh. Electric Panic is a new game that I’ve got in mind that’s loosely based on the mechanic I was exploring in my december KOTM entry PANIC. I’ll have more details once I get a little further along with it! 🙂


Flying Cities

Started this just the other day, but I like it enough that I really want to get back to it and see it finished… With its technical focus it’s very different to everything else I’m working on right now.


Tower Platformer [Collab with Dock]

Dock works in the industry and is apparently in crunch mode at the moment, so this has had to take a back seat. Probably won’t be finished for a little while, at least…

In addition to that, there’s also:


Self Destruct Update

I think Self Destruct was the best game I released last year. It also got by far the most positive response, even extending into friends and family who don’t normally play games at all. Which is why it annoys the hell out of me that there are so many little things to fix in it *still* – in particular that you need to be online to play it. Sometime over January I want to make time to finally update the game, even if I don’t bother with things like the replay uploads and other crazy things like that that I was planning.

And finally, just to mention:


Buster Drake

Buster Drake is basically scrapped, at least in it’s current incarnation. The biggest thing I wanted to try for Buster Drake was the aiming mechanism and I’ve used it for Never Opened, so as a result I’m not that pushed about approaching this project from that perspective anymore. There are a few other things I still like about the project though. I’ve got an idea for a radically different form that I hope to explore later in the year, time permitting. It involves sitting down and learning a few new tricks, though…

Phew. Better get to work, then.

4 Comments

Judith: the beginning

Posted in judith
Terry Dec 6, 2008 0 Comments

I started working on something new today with Increpare, inspired on the raycasting rendering mode experiments we worked on at TIGJam.

Not entirely sure when it’ll be finished, since we both have a lot of projects right now, but it’s quite short so hopefully it should be fairly soon.

On a related note: here’s the actual rendermodes from TIGJam:

Windows + Source (3.47 MB) | OSX 10.5 + Source (5.85 MB) | Source (16 KB)

Ludum Dare’s tomorrow. I’ve got something in mind, but I’m still not sure about entering just yet. I’ll make up my mind tomorrow morning once I see the theme 🙂

0 Comments