We had put together a few quick levels, and while the general idea was fun enough, I found myself unable to come up with interesting level designs. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’m just not that into level design. I like creating game mechanics, but I don’t necessarily like coming up with interesting variations on them. I guess that’s why I became a programmer and not a designer.

So is the game canned?

No. I’m going to let it stew in my brain for a bit, and possibly get some outside help from some industry friends who actually like doing level design. The gameplay itself may even change drastically over the course of development. But hey, that’s what indie development is all about! If something just isn’t working, unlike at a big giant quadruple-A game maker, there’s room for experimentation and course correction. It’s no fun working on a game you just don’t fully believe in, so you might as well put the brakes on now before you’ve put so much time into the project that you can’t go back.

Visualizing The End

There’s another project I announced here on the site called Visualize, which was a visual logic editor for the Unity engine. While I had a large portion of the work finished for the plugin, I was mostly waiting for feedback from the Unity developers on a few features. They essentially came back with a “we don’t support that particular interpretation of our documentation”, and so a big feature I wanted to implement would not make its way into the plugin. Eventually, enough time passed that someone else did what I was trying to do, and managed to do a much more complete product than I had planned on doing.

So if you were looking forward to Visualize, I suggest you instead go download PlayMaker from Hutong Games from the Unity Asset Store. We’re now using it in our projects, which means that Visualize is essentially dead. I’m not complaining though; I didn’t really want to get into the tools business. We needed a visual logic editor for our games, and none existed at the time. Now one does.

More To Come

So even those Safety First is on the backburner and Visualize has been put out to pasture, we’ve still got other things brewing:

1. Word Monkey update: This one has been a long time coming, and it’ll still be a little while before it’s ready to submit to Apple, but it’ll be worth it! Retina display support, bug fixes, and Game Center support (leaderboards, achievements, and oh online multiplayer). No estimated time frame for that other than “soon”.
2. There’s a top secret project that we’ve been working on since the middle of last year. It’s been going very, very slowly, but it’s also our most ambitious project. It has the potential to be very, very big… but I can’t talk about that one, unfortunately. No time frame on that one either.
3. There’s also one other game we’ve been developing, and that’s one I do want to start talking about going forward. We started this one late last year and then I got derailed writing Visualize. Now that PlayMaker is out and I’ve found time to sit back down with the project, some pretty cool things are starting to happen with it. My next post will introduce you to the game and will kick off my (hopefully) regular posts about the development of the game.

We apologize for the inconvenience this issue caused our players. As always, our support link is available if you find you are having problems with one of our games. We will always give our best efforts to resolve any issues you may have with our games.

We have submitted a fix for this problem and are awaiting approval from Apple. Please note that you do NOT have to upgrade to OS 3.0. You simply need to update to Sheepstacker 1.2.1 when it is posted to the App Store. We are hoping the update will be posted by this weekend.

I would like to personally apologize for any inconvenience, and I thank you for your patience in this matter.

For the few of you that have iPhone OS 3.0 Beta installed, we’re aware of the graphical issues with Sheepstacker. Unfortunately, this boils down to the Unity engine being incompatible with the OS 3.0 Beta at this time. We are working with the Unity guys to resolve the issues, but be advised that since iPhone OS 3.0 is Beta, we cannot guarantee that these issues will be resolved before iPhone OS 3.0 is officially released by Apple.

We apologize for any inconvenience.