Codrer Industries

We've been watching “Indie Game: The Movie” yesterday evening together with my girlfriend. Pretty great movie, loved it! Because I'm quite a geek too, loving typing code, because I love indie games, because... this story is very close to my life in some ways. I guess I'm one of the 40,000 developpers who has been impacted by this movie.

Anyway... I'm not actually in the same work context that those great dudes, for now. But I think I would like. I might be a masochist wish, but such ways of creating a game sounds totally exciting. I'd like to try this experience.

I really need to think a lot about this, right now.

Things are speeding up today: coffee, notepad, and after a couple of hours of thinking about this project, I've started to draft some things, some concepts...

At some point, ideas started to become more and more clear. I think I've got something cool in mind! Good ideas always sound obvious.

I won't work on a blueprint. I just want a couple of guidelines to start with.

It's sunday time! After a couple of hours, my game is now running with a great, very efficient, very attractive... black screen. Sweet nest for my forthcoming work.

My goal is to work as fast as possible on a simple prototype in order to know how much my gameplay idea can be enjoyable. Well... I'm ready to start the real work. Very close to... start. Yeah this is the blank page time!

I think... I may procrastinate a couple of hours more.

It was a regular day with my regular job... but when night came, my girlfriend aslept, my cats chasing invisible stuff on the roof... silently... I took back my new indiedev costume to start my hot new project…

I spent only a couple of hours, but I did efficient tasks, more than expected! For this game I’ve imagined a kind of spherical chessboard. Kind of a naive idea which can quickly turns into a raw mathematical nightmare. Anyway... I "spherifyzed" my playground. I did not plan to go further tonight... I can now get back to my regular life til tomorow!

At this moment, I think I'll need about a week to get some answer about the one question: is this idea any good?

K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple, Stupid!

All day long I'm repeating to myself: this has to be a minimalistic prototype version.

I even written it on my screen on the first day. Because... that's not so easy. No shaders, ultra low poly, no fine design, no personal skill to overpass... I MUST stay simple on any aspect and moderate myself. That's an indisputable foundation of the project. In the other case, deadline would run away in a timeline far, far away.

I must keep it simple. Always. Ok. I got it.

A "spherical playground" wasn’t really a good idea. Simple because once you’re inside a sphere... where is top ? bottom!?! left!??!? That's completely disturbing, far too much.

So I did another test with a "tube" playground where a single axis is curved. This time, result was much more playable!.

My secret underlying concept here is that an "odd" playground will bring odd new ideas for game mechanics.