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...

World Map Update

Hi all, just a quickie update here on our world map.  Compared to the previous versions of the map I've added some new landmarks and also experimented a little bit with some animations. That's all for now, more next we...