I could be characterized as a "big fan" of the Halloween season. While other Holidays are great for seeing family, eating, or planting tree's, Halloween is all about (to me) watching scary movies and looking ridiculous. And there's candy, which is a wonderful incentive to look ridiculous.
In honor of Halloween, here's a spooky creature drawing... As I sit here working on Incident at Long Rock Junction, I'm watching Halloween 2. I really should be watching John Carpenter's The Thing, because the similarity's between the plot of The Thing and Incident at Long Rock Junction are positively uncanny.

In Communicado!

Ah the joys of free wireless. I'm back in Illinois for a few days, where business owners are decent enough to provide free wireless if you're buying a cup of coffee. Unlike some places *cough* California *cough* where even Starbucks expects you to pay $8 for a one time connection. Seeing as how I'm online I'll drop a quick sneak peak on you.
This is the grimy kitchen in the mining facility called Long Rock Junction. As you can see, green ooze will be present in the game. This will actually play a major role in the story, being the perfect vehicle for all sorts of terrifying things, like terror, for one. More to come!

In Review...

The art for Voyage to the Unknown was officially completed on Sunday, September 23rd.

Admittedly I have returned to a few pieces and added elements since then, but as far as having done what's needed to navigate around the 2D environment, it's a wrap. Work continues on the written learning elements of the game, which will take the form of word problems (you get a block of text, and then questions based on that information). We'll be tying the learning content directly into the overall story, which works out better transition-wise (don't break the 4th wall).

Overall the experience has been a blast, though there are obviously places where I see room for improvement. The one thing that would have benefited everyone on the project is a much clearer picture of the finished product from the start. When initially discussed we thought we had enough to make a game on, but as it turns out we've had several "oh yeah!" moments throughout production. In order to alleviate that with our next title, I'm taking considerably longer to organize and plan the game itself. That starts with what the heck we want to teach next time, how the story will be structured around that subject, and finally how the art will follow the story. It gives me the creeps to not have jumped right into the art making, considering it is the most time consuming aspect of the project, but the early planning is a must. Additionally I feel that communication could be improved. This is something that should be easy to fix, however when you're dealing with two sets of people in different time zones, who have completely different schedules it can get away from you fast. If anything, we need to strengthen our ability to develop our different parts of the game independently. Naturally that takes more planning up front, which I believe I've taken into account for our next title.

I'll continue to update this Blog as our next adventure unfolds. Within a week or two we'll have links up to the actual playable version of Voyage to the Unknown. Stay tuned!

As fortune would have it, I was able to recover all the files associated with any sort of creativity; the written work and those images already heavily edited in Photoshop. I did lose a bunch of the tedious .html work, but was able to re-do it all in two or three days. Since my post a little under a month ago, I've gotten everything into the computer and ready for photoshop / HTML work. Heres a chunk of one of the games mysterious images:
What the heck is that thing? you might be asking yourself. Can it make soup? It's questions like these that drive the game play experience at the CITES Help Desk.
Currently I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. While my co-workers back in Illinois have been extraordinarily busy with the beginning of the fall semester, I've been scrambling to get the games images and text in proper working order. I've got a week and a half to complete the art for the game, with some wiggle-room (1 or 2 weeks) to handle any fancy image effects (like blinking lights!).
While this project is wrapping up I'm preparing for the next space-themed adventure, tentatively titled Incident at Long Rock Junction! Developing these games is a real learning process, and the road-bumps, pot holes and changes of course I've experienced with this project will hopefully be toned down in the next go-round. I've also been pointed towards a few books recently (thanks Carl!) which might be useful in upping the fun-level; Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design, and Katie Salen's Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. I would like to order both in the next week, but it remains to be seen whether or not UIUC will be picking up the tab.
More to come as the project wraps up!

Working from the Office

I've spent the last few days working in my actual place of employment, which is an odd change of pace - they have no swimming pool here, or free coffee and complimentary newspaper.
What the Digital Computer Laboratory (CITES nerve-center) lacks in the creature comforts it more then makes up in the "poeple" department. Nathan and Chris are both here this week, allowing us to talk "for real" about the games development.
In other news I got my business cards printed today, which come in handy if you're visiting a strange university far from home. Also another Help Desk full-timer (Jon) spent a hefty chunk of time today assisting me with my busted hard-drive (see previous post, aptly titled Busted). Some work has been recovered, the rest is going through a 41 hours data recovery process. We'll see what our tough little WIN98 machine has cooked up Monday morning.

BUSTED

You know, technology's a funny thing. Sometimes it works for months at a time, and sometimes your hard-drive dies and you're left without a working computer 3000 miles from home.
My laptop's a paperweight right now, but luckilly I've got plenty of drawing to do before heading home for a short visit later this week. While there I'll swap out a new hard-drive, make a pot of coffee and reinstall everything. I lost about 4 days worth of stuff, but making it up should move quickly.

Progress!

I spent a big chunk of yesterday in a Starbucks outside of Modesto California. They charge for wireless internet in a lot of coffee-shops out here, which is a shock to me - I'm used to wireless being more of a right then a privilege.
Anyway, as the title of this entry suggests I made some progress, specifically on the HTML side of the game. Throughout the Help Desk Game Development Group's history, several different guys have had the task of turning the images and learning content into a web-based game (Nathan, Chris, and a long time ago a very hard working student named Josh Krohn). Being the least HMTL-inclined of our group (and a horrible speller), I typically stayed out of that side of the process. But this time around is different; since we'll have a lot of animated GIF's decorating the game it made sense for me to take over the super-basic HMTL stuff, because I'll be updating it as the game progresses. What I wrapped up yesterday was splitting my images up into pieces, tying those pieces together in HTML frames, and getting many of the frames swapped with animated GIF's. Let's hope I haven't somehow doomed the project with my meddling.