The Cutting Room Floor

Lately I have been advancing Texas by leaps and bounds. It's true that the game is still a fair ways off, but it's coming together wonderfully. Here's part of what has happened to the overworld in the past two weeks:

Note: Left is before, right is after. As you can see, I also spent too much time refining the original map graphic.

I'm just about ready to launch another Alpha (read: at least a couple weeks solid of fixing, tidying up, etc.) I'm in the state of development where I'm just kind of walking around making notes about what's broken and what seems to be missing.

Problem: Trekking to the Cave is Boring

Early on you have to trek along a river bank to a cave; this is a nice enough trek but a bit empty-feeling. I really wanted to solve this, but somehow felt I should avoid the obvious thing of having enemies along the path.

In this video, Sam takes down a floating eye and collects some greenbacks for his trouble.

This is the Floating Eye, an enemy that wanders the Farmer's fields near Happy Town.

Where'dja Come From, Floating Eyed Joe?

I made another video blog. These are fun to make but a lot of work:

This one talks about TNT and making things explode.

Let's Talk Indie Game Dev Kitchen is my game dev video blog. This episode I discuss what it takes to make TNT (AKA DY-NO-MITE) work in my upcoming game, The Real Texas.

I've posted about graphviz in an earlier post. Basically, I find it immensely useful to sketch out gameplay ideas in terms of dependencies.

Flower Power Example

Suppose you have an idea for your game, a "flower boss". To defeat this boss, you imagine the player attacking it with a fertilizer bomb. In Graphviz:

flower_boss [shape=octagon]; // we want bosses as octagons
flower_boss -> fertilizer_bomb; // beating the flower boss depends on the f-bomb

fertilizer_bomb [shape=box]; // items will be squares

The Calgary Public Library (Castell branch, downtown) is having a small business fair and I've rented out a table tomorrow. Such short notice, I know, but nobody reads this thing anyhow.

I'll be showing off The Real Texas in playable form. It will be awesome to watch people play. Here's a commercial from the Library: