Introducing our Main Characters

Today I'd like to introduce you to our main characters.  So far they are nameless, but they have underlying motivations that have helped shaped them as characters, which will continue to build on as development progresses. Mousey Our central character, named "Mousey" by Julius, is a former government bureaucrat who wants to make a difference.  Why a mouse? Aside from being adorable, mice are often used in metaphors as being meek or silent.  This is a mouse who has worked silently for most of her (or his) career and is finally...

The Morality Meter

One of the many reasons we wanted to develop party animals was the lack of nuanced political criticism in the Philippines.  While we can be vocal critics of our government, we understand that running a democratic government is hard work.  And yet the majority of internet critics seem to think that politics is easy.  Politicians should simply "do the right thing" and follow the "will of the people". We don't think it's that easy, and we want to show people just how murky things can become on the way to the Kapitolyo.  Party...

Making Better Maps

Even the best artists (and I don't claim to be one of them) find that fresh eyes are useful when looking at their work.  We can get so focused in on an artwork and so used to how it looks that we find it difficult to disengage and see what we could do better.  So when I started working on the map again after the gamejolt contest I decided to put it up on tigsource to get some feedback on it. This is the map as it appears in our gamejolt entry: So generally speaking, people liked the look of it, though there were some comments on...

Why Party Animals is using a Finite State Machine

We finally decided on a game flow for Party Animals. This time we have something more complex than just answering multiple choice questions every turn. Note: Answering the same multiple choice question every turn is bad game design. Now that we have a rough idea on how the game is going to work each turn, the next step in the game dev process is for me, the programmer, to design how it is going to be implemented. The game is a turn based 2-player game so I came up with a classic solution: Finite State Machines (FSM) "State machines" is...