Sorry I’m tardy on my Kickstarter posts. There hasn’t been a lot of visual things to show for the efforts put forth. Most of the effort has been under the hood type tasks and reworking some things to better serve a wider variety of the game’s needs. The past few weeks have been long and pretty arduous, especially from an emotional standpoint. There’s still a lot to be done.

The good news is I’ve been trying to get it into my head to quit being so hard on myself and just focus on what really matters: making the game fun. So my mantra for the past few weeks has been: “getting back to basics”. It’s easy with the creative help I’ve had to get the visuals looking fantastic, but that’s ultimately not what will keep everyone engaged in the experience. I’ve been spending a lot of time sketching level ideas lately. Just getting the core vision of what the game should be according to what I see when I close my eyes and envision what a great version game of this game is.

I’m also toiling over a method to more expediently build our game levels. This includes everything from how big a planet is radius-wise to the environment props that affect gameplay directly. It’s been difficult to plan and implement this due to the round nature of the planet. Assets that would work for one planet radius won’t work for another so I’m talking with a few Unity plugin developers and working on a solution of my own to allow us to lay the level out in 2D (think a Super Mario Bros. level) and wrap that around a planet. If we just place things as we have, the lack of roundness is limiting and it counters the perspective we have, throwing it off slightly. Maybe one day I’ll be able to demo clearly the difference when I’m through with this aspect.

I appreciate you guys taking the time to follow along and I would love any additional encouragement you could afford to toss my way. The progress hasn’t been as quick lately as it was in 2012. Our main (and currently only) artist is tied up with his full-time job and carving out time in the midst of a 60-80 hour salary work week for him has proved very difficult. With this in mind, I still feel that circumstances are challenges presented to us so that we can overcome. I think we will do just that :).

Later, -Burton

We’ve got a new post up on Kickstarter that outlines some of our plans for the year and moving forwards to keep everyone more up-to-date and informed with the progress of the game!

State of the Treats Address January 2013

Galaxy Map target concept. Most text is placeholder Lorem Ipsum :) . Click on the image for a larger image.

Concept

The world of Robots Love Ice Cream is full of various planets you’ll get to uncover and explore. Today we’ll take a look at the Galaxy Map that you’ll use to traverse the various sectors of the galaxy and fight back the robots that are pestering your loyal customer base!

Design Influence

Designing the sector map, we dug deep into our videogame upbringing and pulled influences from the games near and dear to my heart as we designed the look of our map. U.N. Squadron is one of my favorites and I think you can see a bit of that in the sector map, but the perhaps the biggest influence is Starfox.

Sectors

Sectors are the term we use to designate a grouping of planets in Robots Love Ice Cream. All of the planets in a given sector carry a particular theme. We are aiming to create very different environments throughout the life of Robots Love Ice Cream. The first sector is tentatively called the Futuristic Sector. In the coming week I’ll be going into more detail about the role that a sector’s theme has on our environments and gameplay. We really want to utilize the themes in significant ways to add to the immersion into the game universe. We’re trying to push that envelope and make sure that each sector is providing a new dimension to and a new take on what Robots Love Ice Cream can be.

What do you think?

What’s we’ve shown here is our concept target. We’re still working on getting this screen fully realized and looking every bit as good as this concept. It’s pretty close, but not quite there. Let us know what you think. We want to get your feedback and reactions as it’s just as much your game as it is ours. HIt us up on Facebook or Twitter

Tutorial Planet (a.k.a Home Sweet Home) - Concepts evolution

Hey guys! Figured I’d start this post off with a concept we’re working on bringing to life. This is the ice cream factory that is located on the tutorial planet. The idea behind the ice cream factory is that it harvests ice cream directly from the planet’s surface (via the conveyor belt on the left) to make a wide variety of tasty treats within!

SIEGE 2012

I’m getting this particular update point out a little late, but two weeks ago we had the chance to show the current state of the game off to people at SIEGE (Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo) conference here in Atlanta. This is a yearly conference held in Atlanta for the game development community here and in the Southeast. It was really fun to connect and share a bit about the path we’ve traveled thus far with our efforts on Robots Love Ice Cream.

On Friday Oct. 7, Becca, Michael Stanley, and myself got a chance to speak about the game’s progress and the lessons we’ve learned to this point. It was great to give a candid talk about the ups and downs of the project and how we’ve persevered and continued moving things forward. We’re not there yet, but I’ve definitely grown from the experiences and challenges that it has presented me as a developer and leader. At the end of the session, we got to show the game off and take questions. Some of the things we talked about were specific to our tools and our use of third party libraries. Other questions were in response to challenges and how we solved those challenges. It felt great to have that dialog with friends and some fans about the game.

On Saturday, Oct. 8, we had a shared suite party with some other local developers, Secret Library and No, You Shut Up Games. Thanks to the GGDA and SIEGE for working with us and our budget to help us make a party happen at all! It was great fun and I had the game there with our 47” HDTV to allow people to spectate. The reception was really good. We definitely have a lot left to do, but it’s healthy for us to share all the while to get feedback and perhaps help us more effectively direct our efforts moving forwards.

Learning from and Enjoying the Journey

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the project is how important it is to just keep chipping away at your tasks a little bit every day and keeping a positive attitude towards everything you’ve got going on. I can say with all honestly it’s been really hard for me to deal with it all at times when it seems like there’s a continual mountain of tasks despite my best efforts to get it all done. Just as Becca had reminded me during our Kickstarter campaign, all you can do is keep trying and working to make things happen. She’s also been great at making sure I’m enjoying the process of making the game while I’m doing it. If it’s what I love to do, shouldn’t I be enjoying doing it? Of course I enjoy it, but sometimes I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself and can be my own worst enemy. Times like that, I’m sure Becca can attest, it sure doesn’t look like I’m enjoying the journey. Ultimately, I put the pressure on myself to make sure we are making the quality of game that we feel really proud of and the game we know you, our fan, truly deserves!

Upcoming posts

I have been making time lately to curate some of our work and come up with a process for getting you guys updates and peeks at the game on a regular basis. To that end, I’ve got lots of content that I’ll be posting throughout the week. I’m currently working on a writeup of our process for defining the look and feel of the buildings in our first environment, the Future Sector. I should have that done by tomorrow. Wanted to dig up some older concept material for that to show how far it’s come!

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll be posting a more in-depth look at my programming progress on my TIGSource DevLog thread. Stay tuned for more concepts and updates this week. -Burton

From left to right: Michael Stanley, Burton Posey, and Rebecca Posey. Photo by Jonathan Liu. Used by permission.

Hey guys,

We just got back into Atlanta last night from PAX. It was incredible! We had the opportunity to show the game to so many people. We also got to meet and network with some of the people we really look up to in the games industry.

I’ll start off by saying that I wish we could have written throughout the day, but the area we were in offered neither cell phone reception nor wifi. I had to retreat to a nearby Starbucks to reach the outside world, :). It was less than ideal. We have a lot of images we’ll share for you over the next 7 days instead. It was also our first conference so we probably weren’t quite prepared for how “on” we needed to be at our booth all of the time. I’ve been itching to tell you guys how things went.

We had lots of traffic coming through our area. We handed out buttons, stickers, business cards and had three iPads for people to try the game out on. Through it all, we managed to collect lots of feedback. We humbly received a lot of praise for the look and feel of the game world and the presentation of the environments. It was so nice to have that pay off for all of the very hard that both myself and our two artists have put into the world and characters to bring it to life and have people fall in love with it.

On the flip side, we got a lot of feedback and observed a lot of people playing the game. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to put that data to good use and make several tweaks to gameplay we’re going to be working on over the next few weeks. It was practically our first public showing outside of our team for the game, so it’s safe to say we’ve been in a bubble for a while in terms of what works and why we thought it worked. The good news to take from it is that we’re not so far off from having the gameplay mechanics from where they need to be. It was a bit excruciating through the weekend not having a computer to fix the issues on the spot.

Lastly, we met a lot of incredible game developers we look up to. It was really awesome to get feedback from so many talented people and I’m honored they’d give us some of their time to provide their thoughts and feeback. I think for me personally, I’ve always wondered how our company could ever “get to that level” of their skill and ability. The feedback we got this past weekend was validation that everyone working with Addo Games could be taking some sound first steps on the path towards that goal.

I’m gathering a few pictures taken from PAX and will post them when I get a chance to process them throughout the remainder of the week.

Take care,
Burton

We had a busy day at PAX. The Kickstarter Loves Games room is situated right across from the Kraken hall, where a lot of the big talks were being given. Had a lot of people come and play the game, providing feedback and generally enjoying it. We got loads of praise on our art styles and presentation. It was an amazing feel to have so many people giving it compliments.

That said, we’ve got a lot of work still to do en route to the final product. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to go to my computer (still in Atlanta) and fix the things people were providing feedback on. We had some great insights and some of the stuff was definitely in the category of, “Well, why didn’t I think of that?”

Got to head off to the convention center before it opens. Seattle is so beautiful. Downtown was pretty sketchy when we went back in last night. Despite that, it’s still really amazing how well the city takes care of itself all in all.

Here’s to a productive and awesome day 2. Thanks for following along guys. Take care.

Hey everybody,

We’re getting closer everyday to having Robots Love Ice Cream ready for release. There’s still more to do, but we decided to take what we’ve got to Seattle and show it off at PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) in Seattle.

Thanks to the wonderful people at Kickstart and their continued support, we’ve been given some space to show the game off in their Kickstarter Loves Games space! It was such a tremendous blessing and we intend on using it to the best of our ability.

We’ll keep you updated while we’re here. Consider today and this post the curtain being lifted on what we’ve been doing with the game. I had said before we were waiting until we were close enough to launch to show our hand. That time is now!

Talk to you later today!

p.s. We’re discounting our posters on the store now as well. Only $15 bucks + shipping during PAX

Hey guys,

We’re still at it. A few of our major tasks involving the UI ending up taking weeks instead of days, so we’re not quite on schedule. Just wanted to keep you guys informed. The game continues to excite me each and every day and it’s in part by the great people I have helping put it together.

In lieu of our beta build (likely two weeks away now), here’s a glimpse at the citizen building texture concepts for the Future Sector of planet. Click on the image for the full-size version.

As always, if you guys have any questions or feedback, let us know! You can post on Twitter or Facebook (links to our pages are on the right navigation).