10 million dollars is being invested into the OUYA!

Very awesome news! A company in China is investing 10 million into the OUYA console. I've always believed in it, and I wanted to see it grow. Unfortunately, it didn't get much of a backing in the U.S., and most would rather use their phones or other console of choice.

Us developing for the OUYA would be very viable, and we can tap a different market than what we're used to. But I do think that it would be a fun venture to look into.

I'm excited!

Game Design Philosophy: AI with the same rules as the player

Was attempting Turn 9 earlier today, and there's a outside "ring of death" that the players can't walk into or they die, hence the 'ring of death'. Enemies can be pushed into said ring of death and take no damage. Yay for enemies not following the same rules.

So now I'm interested in the topic: Is there a game where an AI enemy can follow the same rules/limitations as the player, yet still be fun and not over the top easy or impossible?

Feel free to let me know if there are any games, I'd like to give it a shot. But for now, relevant linky

‪#‎GameDesignPhilosophy‬

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyRulesAreNotYourRules

Regarding Toonami being shrunk to 3 1/2 hours in length

Now I'm even more heartbroken - It's not just that I can watch all of the anime they're dropping elsewhere (yay, internet/streaming). It's the other underlying message. Action animation gets poor ratings and will always lose out to comedy.

Another issue is the lack of western action animation. Maybe TV isn't (and probably never will be) the place for it again, because even that gets turned into comedy ( Teen Titans GO! ) - There is definitely an itch that needs to be scratched

http://toonami.tumblr.com/post/109334851853/ch-ch-ch-changes

Game Design Philosophy - Team Structure

This post about Game Design Philosophy will be about our team structure.

For Selatria, I act as the central focus point for the project, where the different team members would report to me, and with that information/assets, I would pass them onto other sectors of the project. I also have a hand in the game design and programming and story.

The flowchart of team structure for Selatria

While a good feature of this structure that we've created is that we can ensure everyone is on the same page for the project, a big drawback from this structure is that far too much responsibility is placed on one individual. Another big drawback is we did not have much accounted for in terms of marketing.

For this reason, we want to change the structure for future projects we develop in the studio. We're going to try this method which allows us to have more than one project in development at a time.

Tentative Game Development Structure

In the above flowchart, we've separated Overseer and Director. The Director will focus on leading the team and production of the game, the Executive Producer, the Overseer, and Director will talk about the development of the game, and the duties are split. Because of the role and knowledge being separated over three people, no one person is being hit with the brunt of all of the responsibility.

And as mentioned earlier, we now allocate a spot for marketing in the process from the get go. Time and time again, we've underestimated the importance of marketing in the development process, and to fit that into the core of our team will be a good step going forward.

Are you developing a game in a team? What is the structure like in your team? How can we improve ours? Feel free to comment below!


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Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #30

Hey all, Happy New Year! Back with the 30th development log.

With a new year comes a new mission and list of goals for the company.

Goals for 2015:

• After celebrating four years in development, the story/plot and all of the music for Selatria will be finished up, and looking forward to making a lot of progress on the development of cutscenes.
  
  
• One more casting-call for voice actors for the second half of Selatria.
  
  
• Start a new surreal/comedy action/beat-em-up game that I've wanted to work on but never really had time to.
  
  
• Attend E3 with the expanded development team
  
• Giving more talks about game development and our experiences at the studio to CSUSB. I really enjoyed that this year and I'd like to continue that.

In order to fulfill these goals, I'm going to follow the Three C's Plan: Create, Communicate, Collaborate:

• Create - Expand studio days to the weekday afternoons after 4PM beginning later this month. Finish Selatria this year and release it to different game networks. Also evaluate the best performing team members from Selatria and ANTics and merge them to work on a new project beginning this summer.

• Communicate - Develop a fan base. Get the word out of our projects in a more efficient manner. Consolidate the created Whim Independent Studios twitter accounts, sync the posting activities between social media, have something to show for #screenshotsaturday, and bring a Marketing person onto the team to get news about our progress to the right channels, and not repeat the same mistakes.

• Collaborate - Focus on working with others using checklists and defined requirements to work towards a finished product.

This will be a great year for development. Even with the recent setbacks we've encountered, we still have a lot of great things to show you this year.

Until the next development log!





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