The Machinations of Politics Part 2

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Meet the Candidates of Party Animals

Election fever is starting to hit our home country of the Philippines, so I thought the time was ripe for a quick devblog about the candidates of Party Animals.  Each candidate has a specific set of bonuses that will nudge players towards a specific play style and ties in to their personal history.  We only have three candidates for now, although we have more candidates down the line, and ideally we'll be able to let players customize the candidate of their choice.  With that said, let's meet the candidates! Mousilita Ereñeta Mousey...

Stories and Tradeoffs in Political Party Animals

This is Ka Eldereta.  He is a tribal chieftain that represents the interests of the indigenous people of Summer Island.  His name is a play on words, as “Kalderetang Kambing” is a traditional Filipino stew made with tomatoes, liver paste, carrots, potatoes, and most importantly, goat’s meat.  Filipinos have an almost embarrassing affinity for wordplay and puns, and it’s something that we wholeheartedly embrace.  For example, we have an excel spreadsheet of animal names for Owls that includes “Owlfredo” and “Owlberto”.  If...

The Animation Pipeline for Political Party Animals

As we inch ever slowly to a closed Alpha, we’re slowly building up our social media presence.  If you haven’t already, please do follow us and spread the word on Twitter and Tumblr.  We’ve had a pretty good run of bi-weekly testing and for the first time last week the latest version of the game was played by people from outside the team.  The results were encouraging, since both our friends Kyle and Gwen had fun playing (see Gwen's victorious pose), but there were definitely numerous things that we still have to work on. In the...

Patronage Politics and New Mechanics in Political Party Animals

Ryan's note: Hi all, I asked Marnielle to write this month's devlog, and he talks about the mechanics that we're slowly adding to the game. The development of Party Animals has been hanging around for over a year already (or years) but the truth is that the game’s mechanics are not yet zoned in. We’re still looking for the fun part. We’re at the stage when we are adding new mechanics and testing them out as soon as we can then decide whether to keep them, change, or discard. If we’re not having fun with it, our target players most probably won’t....

Expressing Personality Through Animations

The Party Animals team is going heavily into revised game mechanics right now, and we're hoping to have something to share on that front very soon.  In the meantime I wanted to show off some of the animations I've been working on in my free time.  These animations will show up on the world map as your characters go around and do actions.  They will be much smaller than they are right now (see previous post), but I work on them on a much larger scale to inject as much personality into the animations as I can, hoping that some of that...

Explaining the GIF!

We usually try to keep our blogposts to a regularly scheduled once a month for the sake of consistency.  But this week I wanted to take a little time to explain the GIF that I shared with you guys last week when Marnel was talking about our AI.  So without further ado, here is the explanation: There are 3 characters right now, Mousey, Croccy, and Police Staff.  Mousey and Croccy are the candidates on opposing side, and Police is one of the Staff that you can hire for your campaign (she's the only one we've finished so far) The...

One AI is Easy, but FOUR?!?!?

The following is a blog by our programmer Marnel, talking about AI in a strategy game. Our AI in action I have implemented my own FSM and Behavior Tree systems for AI in games. I know how to properly use them in most cases. They've worked really well. I honestly think I already have the working knowledge for the AI of the kind of games I'd like to make... until Party Animals came. I felt stupid and incapable. FSMs and Behavior Trees are good for single agent AI. Single agent here means that the simulated behavior is only responsible for itself....

The Difficulties of Transitioning from Artist to Producer Without Becoming a Giant Asshole

In October 2013 Julius and I hatched the idea to make a jokey political game called Party Animals for a 1 week gamejolt gamejam.  Our original plan was to keep working on the game, finish it in 6 months, and ship it out as our first indie collaboration.  A year and 6 months later we've added two team members and our estimated release date of 4th quarter 2015 looms closer and closer everyday.  It's only been 4 months since we've had our full team of four, and so while I was willing to chalk up the preceding year to experience, I knew...