2013 is upon us. Its a chance for a clean slate and an opportunity to dive head first into a new project.
I want to start 2013 with a game that I can complete within a reasonable amount of time (say 3-6 months). I’m learning from past mistakes and focussing on a relatively simple core concept that I can build upon. The difference this time is that I already have a prototype built and some positive feedback.
That doesn’t make the development of this game easy necessarily, but it does give me a stronger base upon which to build my game.
The original game was built over 48 hours for Ludum Dare 25. For its speed, and out of interest, I wrote the prototype using the Moai SDK (targeting the PC and OSX).
For the new game, which will target IOS devices, I’ve made the decision to switch to cocos2d. My reason behind this decision is that I’m fairly comfortable with cocos2d, having built a number of games on the framework previously, it has a well rounded feature set, and it has good documentation and support.
For this project, I don’t want to fight my tools, I want to focus on producing a nice, polished game. Moai remains a framework that I intend to use for prototyping and for games targeting the desktop.
As always, I intend to write a series of blog posts tracking the development of the game. I’ve had a quick look back over my diary for Coffee Cellar and one of the things that was really helpful throughout the development was the mood board.
A mood board is a collection of visual inspiration. Its purpose is to give the overall feeling that you are trying to convey – a sort of art-direction for feelings. Here’s the mood board I created for Mini Mob (working title), which I’ve just set as my desktop background so that its always visible.
My next task is to port the simple mechanics of my game over to cocos2d. I don’t anticipate any problems with this and it should be reasonably straightforward. This is a strategy/simulation game and I think its going to be a great fit for the iPhone. It is the first time I’ve produced a game of this type so I expect some nice posts around determining strategies and balancing gameplay.
Next time, we’ll look at the starting point and at some of the ideas I have for expanding upon the core concept.