Give Me Fuel (Async Card Battle)

It's fine - if you're not interested in this because it doesn't have guns, there are plenty of options for you out there. It's a personal decision for us. I had a friend who was shot in 6th grade by her brother, accidentally. Yes, the responsibility was with the people - her parents, for not locking it up properly & not teaching the kids that this was lethal, her brother - even though he was a kid - for playing around with it.

But part of that is also cultural. Her brother played with it because he'd seen it in basically all the media he'd consumed, and it was cool. I've got kids of my own. *I* don't want to make a game that makes it cool to use real-world weapons, or close approximations thereof, to shoot people. I *play* those games *all the time*, and I know that I'm not going to go out and shoot someone because of that. But it's a very hazy line to me. I used to be very "games don't influence behavior" - and for *mentally stable people*, I believe that. But I also believe that for mentally unstable people, a culture saturated with violence ... well, I'm not as sure.

I'm not saying you shouldn't play games with guns, nor am I saying that they're bad, full-stop. My favorite games of the moment are Destiny and Halo 5 - I'd be a hypocrite if I said I those games are "bad". I'm just saying that *we* are creating an alternate reality. We can make one that's a little bit different. If it's not for you, then sorry to hear, but that's okay with me.

 

Just a quick look @ what the game's looking like now. The capture's super choppy, but gets the idea across.

 

Thanks for understanding. Obviously, I hope you'll give the game a shot regardless - the mechanics are exactly the same as they were before, guns or no. But if not, no problem. cheers.

 

I post a bit on our blog at wonderspark.co, but figured this might be worth posting a link to here: http://www.wonderspark.co/helavawondersparkco/2016/3/2/working-with-constrained-resources

The reason is that while most developers are usually rah-rah-rah about how great their game is and how awesome it is right out of the gate, for us, that's not the goal. We don't have endless pockets. We don't have endless time. But more, launching is only the beginning of where the work is. For us, our goal is to create a core game that can be built upon for years, and the best way to do that is to get it in front of real players as quickly as possible to make sure that our core assumptions actually work the way we think they will.

We don't have the luxury of running a six month beta test, refining the game to perfection before launch. If we did that, we'd be dead before the beta test was finished! (well, not quite but close.)

And in our experience, if the core of the game isn't unique or fun enough to speak to someone even if the experience has some rough edges, then it's not fun enough, and no amount of polish will help.

So I'm putting this here in part, sure, to set some expectations about what GMF will be on launch, but also because the process of developing a game often isn't what players think it is, and maybe a little bit of insight is interesting.

 

App icon's in process. What's interesting is that we like the app icon so much it's redefining a bit of our in-game UI art style. Moving away a bit from the darker concept image and toward something a little brighter.

 

Oakland for life! You here, I assume? If so, if you're up doing a live playtest with us, I'd really, really love to meet up with you over lunch or something.

 

re: app icon influencing the art style -

It's kinda funny how things evolve. At first, we started with just a card game. We knew we were trying to represent combat, and the reference I had in my head was a chase/fight sequence from The Bourne Ultimatum. Then from there, we tried to figure out what kind of world *we* were building, and that came down to trying to find one event that would create an interesting alternate universe that would preserve some critical features of our world, for a game feature that we're going to be building a few months after launch. (And is, actually, the core "big idea" behind the game, we just need to make sure the card combat works well before building this other part!)

But so we did that, and ended up figuring out a good point of "divergence" that leads to a pretty interesting and plausible alternate reality. I spent a little while writing some world lore & history for this alternate reality, and describing it, it's pretty bleak. Most of the world is desert, except for the coastal cities, which are all flooded and toxic - the visuals we started working with from that lore ended up pretty green/brown/grey with the color coming form the energy used for combat. You can see that really starkly in our concept image (1st post).

But the thing is, as much as the real world probably *would* be green/brown/grey, it's just sort of dull to look at. Bleak. And games don't have to be dull or bleak, even in a world that might be *realistically* pretty washed out. The great thing about writing the lore was that we know how the world works. But sometimes you need that inspiration to get to something un-obvious. And for me, the app icon was a great first step toward a pretty interesting evolution in the style of the game. It's not going to change the in-game colors yet, and to be clear this is a very rough image - but I love how overwhelming it is.

Again - this isn't a polished image. It's just an idea. But I'm digging it. You?

 

Last call for 1st-wave beta testers! We're going to be rolling out the beta in just a few days. Just dotting some i's and crossing the t's. Hope to see you in-game!

 

Heh! I met up with spikeyflip yesterday & showed him the game. Got some great feedback on how it's confusing as hell for a new player, so we're working on adding a little bit more info to communicate what you're supposed to do. It's kinda strange, but the way we're dealing with some numbers in the game is not necessarily intuitive without a little explanation. Most of that will be taken care of, in time, with animation, but for now we've gotta do some quick & dirty stuff until we can devote the time to a really polished intro.

But we're getting super close. We've got the beta approved in Testflight, and considered sending it out today, but sending out a new build on a Friday is suicide, so we're gonna wait 'til Monday and squeeze in as much extra polish as we can before then.

 

But just so folks here have an idea of how the game works a bit, you can check out the thing we wrote up for the Friends & Family release at wonderspark.co/faq.

Before going live on the App Store, the big focus is going to be on just making this even remotely understandable for new players. After going live? Lots of stuff. One thing to make clear is that we don't see any of the things we're releasing as "done". This isn't like a lot of games, where we expect that you'll play it for a day or two and then put it down. Or where we're getting as many users as possible "at launch" and then not supporting it as the hype around launch dies down.

The goal is to make the "core" of a game that's sustainable and expandable over the course of *years*. This is something we've done for the last five years (before Wonderspark) - it doesn't just mean adding new features once every few months - it means adding something almost every week. It means seasonal events. It means evolving almost every aspect of the game over time. We're a small team of 4, but I hope you'll get a chance to be surprised by how fast we move.