OVER 1000!

Our game has been on the market for a little over a week and we have almost 7500 trial downloads and  just over 1200 purchases!
We're excited at the success we have had! \(^_^)/
Now I'm just getting ready for the Graduate program in the Fall! Let's do this!

Passed in REVIEW! RELEASE FRIDAY APRIL 24

It's happened! Our game passed review! There were no bugs. Everything worked! We put tons of hours into making the project bug free and it's all paid off. We passed review in only a days time! We're are hopeful that the indie community will have the same response when it is put on the market. Only Friday will tell how we are going to do.

Game Breaking Bug

So we have to wait a week because our game broke when a Guest Account was logged in and then tried to buy the game we got a code 4. It was a big hit to our team because we thought we covered all of our bases. Now this last week we had to fix our small bugs and now we play the waiting game. We have been talking up our game to different press areas and trying to keep moral high. It's been quite a week because the amount of work has gone down, but things to do has remained the same. So this coming Tuesday we will push our game again and we are hope it will finally get accepted for publish.

IN REVIEW!!!

Our team gathered Thursday afternoon to start our final push towards finishing the project. I was placed in charge of getting the last pieces of the UI working and polished.We finally got the credits screen to work. We placed each of our avatars on the credits screen next to our names. It looks pretty sweet. I added the ablility to Trial and Purchase our game. We even added a feature that if you select a level that is locked in trial mode then it will send you to the market place.  With a lot of work and a late night we finally got everything  working and without bugs. Now with our game up for review we need 12 people to pass our game. We are now reviewing other people's games in the hopes that they will reciprocate the review and help us get our game onto XBLIG Arcade. Now we play the waiting game and reviewing games.  I'll update later when we have results.

Ready for Review?

The Last week has been crazy busy. We've been getting the game ready for it's second review.

 Blake and I fixed a bunch of multiple controller bugs to start off.

I've been getting the new UI working. I had to get a different better font formatted and textured to be able to get it in the game.

After that Max sent me some screenshots that we are now using for background art for the menu system. I got those working then set moving on getting the option screen to have a controller displaying what the player currently has as a layout. In the end I ended up blowing the dust off my photoshop and getting some art whipped up for that.

 I had to then get Layouts to work. I implemented the ability to use a controller layout, but it appeared that it was easier for my team to hard code the buttons into the game. I worked my way through the code and implemented the ability to change the controller layout along with the changing pictures on the option screen.

After implementing this, I quickly learned that my code did not have the ability to change controller layouts mid game. With the lack of time to the push time, I quickly put together an  in game option screen that didn't give the ability to change the controller layout.

A few more tweeks later and being 1 or 2 am (I can't remember >_<   )  we ended for the night still wondering if we should push the game for review.

In the morning I loaded the game up and deployed it on the Xbox only to find that some of the scaling was off when the television was widescreen. I jumped on it and started coding again. I could only get some of it done because of my lack of knowledge of certain areas of the code. That is where we were as of this morning. More end of game craziness to come.

GDC!

So with GDC come and gone, I learned some great lessons that I'm hoping to be able to apply next year.

-Make a game plan of where you want to be when. There are tons of speakers and discussion sessions plus things happening on the expo floor. Laying out a plan of where you want to be when will help it go smoother and you won't feel lost.
- Be prepared to feel frustrated with HR reps. I was told this by a professor but I didn't understand the extent of frustration.
-Go knowing what your strengths are and sell them. Too many times I told people I was a programmer and their response was "send in an application" The real conversations about jobs that I heard started when someone said "I excel in Tool making" or "I'm excellent with Game Engines" If you can narrow down your interests then they can further investigate if you are right for their company.
- Roger told us this but it was true. Swag run first to get your stuff, then go and wait in lines to talk to people.
- Don't be satisfied with a one time visit. There are many different people at the booths all day. Take time to go back and see if you can talk to someone else that you might click better with. This is one of my fatal flaws of this last trip. I was satisfied with everyone telling me to just go online and apply. I didn't try going back to talk to others.
-Plan to go to after parties. some of the best networking experiences can happen at an afterparty. Even if you are tired after the convention closes. GO TALK TO PEOPLE! In this program everyone has a game they can promote or show off. Talk to everyone about it!

GDC was a great experience and I would like to go to more conventions in the future.

Getting ready for GDC

We have some new screen shots up for the game. It's looking super nice! 

We've been working towards getting a couple of trail levels for GDC. 

  My Start menu in Action. hopefully the next thing is to put the logo in the background once we get a logo.

Some gameplay examples. The Trail following the character is a ribbon like particle effect that is going to follow the character.

So recently I've been on the fine tuning of the start menu. My recent adding have been a level select menu. Now I need to add a unlocked locked visual feature on it.

Moving forward, I have a lot to work on with it to make it a smooth navigation process.