Hey friends, this post by Burton was originally published on AltDevBlogADay, which is a great community dedicated to promoting and supporting indie game developers. Enjoy!

I wanted to take this first posting on the blog to introduce myself, my company, and a little bit about where I’m coming from as a developer and indie startup. I know if I were seeing a new name or face for the first time, that I’d like to know a bit about who they are and where they’re coming from. Excuse any overlap from Becca’s post yesterday. Hopefully the different perspective will be a bit refreshing.

Where the adventure starts

Over the past two months,  my wife and I have ventured fully into independent game development. My last gig was developing the engine and building tools for the gameplay portion of a transmedia game for The Electric Company (Sesame Street), working with Primal Screen, a local digital media production company. As that development cycle started to wind down, I was able to start thinking about what the next steps in my career might be. Becca and I had been positioning ourselves to allow me time to work on a game of my own design. Still, you never really know what it’s going to be like working on your own project until you’re the captain and the ship is really yours to command. I couldn’t put myself in that position until the other project wrapped up. In hindsight, the transition was a bit jarring for me.

I had started planning what will be my first independent game, Robots Love Ice Cream, over the last several months of my work with Primal Screen. I remember sitting down with Becca at a local restaurant and describing and drawing out for her the visions of what this game will ultimately be. Surprisingly enough to me, she was sold before I finished my pitch. Over margaritas, we started considering the game experience through wireframes, considered how approachable it was, and defined a style. One of the things we’ve felt was paramount in our efforts is that people can instantly look at the game and distinguish it apart from a lot of other indie efforts. We think this will give us a better chance to make a splash when the game releases.

The Hero? Well, are you sure?

This is my first article on the site, but I think as I write more on my process and approach to game development, you’ll find that I don’t consider myself a particularly deep programmer. Maybe it’s because I got a programming degree from an art school. Perhaps it’s just the level at which I’ve always identified with games and even music. I’m notorious for falling in love with music that has some of the most appalling language. I just don’t hear the lyrics first. The melody and instrumentation is what sets my heart on fire and evokes the emotions in me. Game development and design is the same way for me. Tim Lindsey taught me level design in school. He did LD work for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the Coolboarders series, among others. He taught that you can connect with the player through a minimal amount of information. He showed me how to develop a 3d environment with simple form and color, no textures, no fx. If you couldn’t connect with the emotional context of one area from another with just those two elements, then you might need to reevaluate the immediate environment altogether.

I use this sort of mentality with my programming. I, myself, have to enjoy the process. I have to connect with the form of things; how approachable it is; how easily I can convey a feeling or sentiment without crazy effects all over the place. I guess we’ll see at the end of this first installment how well I’m able to effectively communicate these feelings with the player.

The Hero’s Companions

I’d be remiss to give proper credit in this post to my wife, Becca. Without her, I’d likely not be in a position both emotionally and mentally to take on this project. She’s helped us to account for every last detail, keep our artists on track. She’s also been a stalwart promoter during our current Kickstarter promotion.

Apart from my wife we’re working with some great creative talent. Rob Shepps, who is serving as the Creative Director on the project, is helping us keep a consistent style in place as well as making sure our contract artists are getting the needed feedback to move their efforts forward. One of our other artists is Alan Tupper, who is incredibly good at taking all of our ideas and turning them into something concrete and impactful.

The party sets out for the adventure ahead

Thanks Mike Acton and company, for having me on the blog. I look forward to sharing some more “meat and potatoes” stuff with you guys in the coming weeks. Speaking of which, I’m going to be giving a peek into my game’s development at the end of the month at the Atlanta Unity Meetup. If you’re in the area, please stop by. Anyone else can find me on  Twitter anytime.

Around spending an incredible amount of time promoting both the Kickstarter project and the game in general, I’ve been working on developing out the gameplay logic for Robots Love Ice Cream. The quicker we’re able to do this, the sooner we’ll be able to begin balancing the experience.

In today’s update, I wanted to give you a little background now on how we’ve envisioned the basic gameplay will flow. These are our current ideas that we’re working towards implementing and testing. These approaches could change as we tweak the experience, continuing to make sure the game remains approachable and enjoyable.

Player’s Health = The Planet’s Citizens

In Robots Love Ice Cream, the player’s health in the game is determined by the number of citizens you as the player are tasked to protect. If a given level has 10 citizens, you must protected them in order to continue playing the game. Throughout the progress of a game level (each planet is a level), the robots will come down towards the planet and look for citizens to capture. If you can envision the classic UFO beam that takes things up to the ship, that’s close to what we have in mind. On each planet there will be an assortment of buildings that carry the personality and theme of that planet. Buildings with lights on have a citizen in them. If there’s no citizen in a given building, the lights will be off. We chose this concept as it allows the player to race around the planet as quickly as they want and still be able to understand how well they’re doing by the state of the level’s visuals. If the planet is pretty dark, with fewer buildings lit up, the player will feel that tension and understand that they’re closer to losing. The basic thing to understand is that you need to be looking out for suspicious robots (hint:most of them are suspicious!) hanging out above any buildings that still have their lights on.

Level flow

When a game level starts, the player will enter into the game level. To give the level a sense of robot presence and bring in some tension and purpose, we’ve been discussing how to show the player a planet already under attack from the robots. As the hero, you’ll arrive on the scene to deal with the problem. Once the player has arrived, the game will start and robots will begining to approach the planet and the buildings and citizens the player is tasked to protect. The robots will come in waves and it is the player’s responsibility to dispatch these waves as quickly as possible.

Various types of enemies will have different movement and behavior patterns. I’ve been messing around with various movement patterns akin to the ones in classic arcade shoot ‘em up games like Galaga and 1942. Sometimes enemies will pester the player and prevent them from defending the buildings, while others will be seeking to capture enemies. We’ve been looking at ways of using both color and form with the robots to identify at a glance what the intent of a robot is at a given point in time. The more we can give the player a quick understanding of the state of the game level, the more immersed they’ll be and the more they can continue enjoying the game.

At the end of the game level, after battling through waves of robots of various and successfully defending all or some of the planet’s citizens (more is bettter, ;) ), the player will have to face a robot boss. We’re still very active in discussions internally about how the boss encounters will work, so I don’t want to get into too many specifics yet. I can tell you that the designs we’ve come up with so far have been really neat and should offer a lot of personality and variety from level to level. The designs we’ve concepted thus far have been really promising and I can’t wait to show them to you when they’re ready. Once we get our first boss concept nailed down, I’ll make a point to post a Backer’s Only update about it and share it with you guys!

This covers a lot of the basic elements of gameplay. I will be posting another update in the coming weeks that covers more about what we’ve planned for how exactly the player will interact with the game. This will include talk about movement around the planet and the player’s “weaponized ice cream treat” selection while in the active “planet defense” portion of the game.

Promotions Update

Becca, myself, and the rest of our team have been hard at work promoting this game around the clock. We are hoping to have a lot of new interest coming in this week. We’ve got many emails, tweets, updates, and phone calls lined up for the coming week to continue to promote the game. We really need your help as well getting the word out and getting people excited and supporting the game project so that we can make it happen. We appreciate your pledges of confidence in us and all of your efforts to get the word out thus far. Your support and your belief in what we’re doing have made this incredible experience even more meaningful. We can’t wait to celebrate the successful funding of this project as something we achieved together.

Thanks,

Burton

Well, we’ve passed the $1000 mark, which means we’re not far from reaching the milestone of 10% funding after just 3 days on Kickstarter. If you’re one of the fabulous people who made an early pledge to Robots Love Ice Cream, THANK YOU! We truly can’t thank you enough for getting us off to a great start.

If you haven’t yet pledged to Robots Love Ice Cream on Kickstarter, we hope you’re inspired by what you’ve seen and will want to become a part of this project, too. We would love to make it to 10% by Tuesday, so just know that you still have the power to help make our dreams come true.

The point of this update is to remind you to take advantage of the FREE music download that we’re offering as part of our Kickstarter promotion. You don’t even have to give anything or wait until the project ends. We’re so proud of the creativity that’s going into Robots Love Ice Cream, we couldn’t wait until the end of the project to start sharing the rewards with you. 

So here’s a little taste of what you’ll get if you pledge $25, $100, or more: the original theme song for Robots Love Ice Cream composed by Disasterpeace and MisfitChris, from the Robots Love Ice Cream soundtrack. Download it, share the link with friends, play it over and over again. We dare you to listen to this catchy, exuberant song without totally grooving in your seat. 

More updates coming soon. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback about anything related to this project. Take care and stay awesome.

To all of our supporters so far, thank you so much for your support. After the first 48 hours of our project being up on Kickstarter, we’ve already hit the 5% mark just from a little social media promotion to our networks, and the support of a few great friends who’ve reposted or retweeted our messages. The IGDA is featuring us at the top of their curated Kickstarter page, and we’re excited and thankful that they’ve chosen to support and recognize this project so early in the process.

I know some of the artists have heard me use this term a lot lately, but the idea of people supporting this endeavor is really humbling. The artists have done it with their talents and gifts, and now you guys are financially backing us. It’s just awesome and we’re very grateful!

Becca, our artists, and I have been hard at work spreading the word about the game, trying to get any sort of coverage we can. I’m personally spending time researching and experimenting with the best ways to get our illustrative graphics style represented in the game. I’ll make an effort to shoot some video of these tests so you guys can check it out as it’s coming along.

Thanks again,

Burton

After a lot of hard work, we’re ready to show the world the game we’ve been working on. Today we’re launching a Kickstarter project for our new game, Robots Love Ice Cream. The game will be available for the iPad and iPad2.

This game is a bottled-up concoction of one part childhood nostalgia, one part modern creative inspiration, and at least two parts of the absolute best we can offer.

We’ll be posting a lot of details, new concept art, and video blog entries from here on out.

Check out the project page here.

As the players of our game and customers of our product, you deserve to be part of the dialog. So drop comments here or on the KickStarter page about ideas for the game, what you’d like to see, or just tell us about your favorite games. It’s our goal to add Robots Love Ice Cream to that list.

We’re putting our hearts and every bit of energy we have into our first indie game effort. In the next week, we’ll be launching a KickStarter for our first game project.

Stay tuned for more details!

-Burton