Political Party Animals December Devlog Update : More Political Machinations and some new art!

December has been a rather slow month for the team.  A storm earlier in the month delayed our weekly meetings, and the inevitable Christmas slowdown set in by the 23rd.  We're starting to get back on track now though, and looking forward to 2015. More Political Machinations The paper prototype phase has been very useful in making hard game design decisions about scope, but given we only meet once a week, in order to be efficient we need to find digital ways to test out game design ideas.  Our latest design that we wanted to...

I've got some good news, and some bad news...

That's what Julius (our main programmer) told me a couple of weeks ago during one of our weekly meetings.  Turns out he's got a job offer, which is good. But it requires that he move to New Zealand, which is bad.  Of course we'll still be able to keep working on Party Animals online but there's something different about meeting and working together in person, and it sucks especially now that we seem to have finally gotten into a bit of a groove.  Julius' leaving is the final nail in the coffin of our short-lived attempt to get...

Prototyping in HTML5

These past few months we have been making the Party Animals prototype.  We built it in HTML5 and javascript (instead of Unity) for 2 reasons: (1) it's a technology I, as the sole programmer, am very comfortable in and (2) we won't have to worry about implementation details and premature optimization. Working on a project knowing that it will be discarded later gave me a lot of freedom on the actual implementation. I didn't have to worry about scale and, to a certain degree, maintainability. I figured I only need to keep this maintainable...

Prototype Version 2 coming soon!

The mockup (and I must stress it is just a mockup) above should be familiar to anyone who's played Crusader Kings 2 or indeed any game that used Paradox Interactive's Clausewitz Engine.  In this blog post I'm going to go over some of the new directions our next prototype is going to go, taking a lot of inspiration from the aforementioned games. Prototyping is all about figuring out what works and what doesn't.  this is something we're learning the hard way by prototyping our way to a version of Party Animals that we're happy with....

The Machinations of Politics

We are currently overhauling our prototype based on feedback from players and discussions between the team on the direction the game should take.  In the meantime, here is our designer Tristan to talk to you about one of the tools he uses when designing games. There's already been a few posts regarding the technical and art side of Party Animals but none yet that looks at its design. Let's tackle the basics here first, then hopefully we can examine each individual mechanism through succeeding posts. This initial post will give an overview...

Fixing UX Prototype Issues

We sent out an email to our mailing list a few days ago with the first build of our Party Animals prototype.  Up until this point we hadn't shared the html5 prototype with anyone else, and the feedback that we got was very useful.  In short, our game was confusing.  Prototypes are generally cut a lot of slack by people because they are proofs of concept and only used to present the core concept of the game.  So in many cases a lot of user experience issues are not paid much attention to.  This is fine for action games,...

Bribing My Way To The Top

So I had my first fun playthrough of the prototype yesterday, which seems like an odd thing to say.  Surely if our game is good then it should be fun from the start?  I suppose with action games it's a lot easier to "get to the fun" right away, but with strategy games that take multiple mechanics into consideration it takes a lot longer.  Or maybe we're just slow.  Regardless, I had fun with our game yesterday, and here's what happened. I started out trying to test a new dialogue mechanic we'd implemented earlier in the...

Crow and Penguin Concept Sketches, plus Prototype Update

Recruitable Characters We're still hard at work on the prototype, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been able to sketch out some more characters for Party Animals!  The two characters I'm introducing to you today are the first of what will be recruitable Party Animals.  Based on certain decisions you make they may decide to join your campaign and give you bonuses during your campaign activities.  Above you can see Felipenguin, an immigrant comedian from the South Pole.  Felipenguin is the stereotypical demanding celebrity,...

Partially Healed Knees, New Maps and Animations, and A Prototype (Announcement)!

Mine Hey folks, I know that it's been a while since we've last blogged, and that's because we've been hard at work!  Quite a few things have been happening lately, and I just want to go through a couple of them before we get into the update.  First off, I'm walking again!  I'm not sure I mentioned it but when I got back from Japan I had a knee injury that kept me off my feet for 3 months.  It was a long and frustrating road but I'm mostly recovered now and so we're gaining a lot of steam with regards to development.  I'm...

We're Featured in Rockpapershotgun's Devlog Watch!

And we're quite frankly both terrified and motivated in equal measure.  I don't want to write a giant blogpost like the last one, but I thought I should at least acknowledge the coverage and welcome everyone who's decided to pop in because of RPS.  Welcome!  And do sign up for our mailing list (top of the right sidebar, can't miss it) to get updated on release news.  I also wanted to address one of the comments on the article where they mention that the devlog hasn't much gotten into the nitty gritty of game mechanics.  Well...

Making Metaphors : Using the Itinerary as a Metaphor for Party Animals

Metaphors are a powerful tool that every piece of software can use to make something that is nebulous immediately understandable.  Microsoft has used the desktop metaphor to such great success that the Metro-style sliding UI of Windows 8 is having a difficult time superseding it.  Today I’ll talk about a visual metaphor that I hope will make Party Animals just as intuitive : The Itinerary. We’ve been tweaking the game design for the past few weeks now, something that has been made more difficult because of my knee injury.  We...

How to Win An Election: Geography

This is part of a series of posts on local elections. (see Part 1) Not all districts are created equal. Before the official campaign starts, your team should have already charted the "lay of the land" through an initial survey. This includes basic information like voting population and its demographics and candidate specific details like voter awareness and trust. Territories The initial survey should reveal 3 types of territories: bailiwick, neutral, and hostile. Bailiwick - if election day is tomorrow you will win this district by a landslide....

Why I chose Hand Drawn Animations over Puppet Animations for Party Animals

Spriter vs Photoshop I said I would experiment with the animation tool Spriter in a previous post to see if it would be a good fit for our game.  I did, and I decided that as great as Spriter is, it just doesn't make sense for us to use it in our game.  In my first few hours with Spriter it became clear to me that to create good animations with it would require a lot of skill and time.  Otherwise they'd look exactly like their namesakes : puppets.  Given the fact that I only really have a few animations I need to create...

Worldbuilding : A Description of Summer Island, its Districts, and Kapitans

The Geography of Summer Island I wanted to expand on my previous blog post where I showed you guys the current state of Party Animals’ world map.  The map depicts Summer Island, a fictional tropical island nation.  The shape of Summer Island is actually loosely based on Samar Island in the Philippines, which is where Julius is from.  Fittingly, it was Julius’ idea to name it Summer Island.  It’s a play on words because the way Filipinos usually pronounce the word Summer is “Sah-mehr”, very similar to how you would...