The Business of Life

Things have been pretty dang chaotic lately. Pressure at the old day-job is mounting, and it coincides very Murph-ily with our deciding to change things over into Unity. What this causes, mathematically speaking, is "Double Stress Unfun Times."

June 14th continues to casually creep its way up into my life, taking one sly step at a time, as we the team at Sprout scramble to create some kind of playable demo before the show. For poor Matt, it means having to almost completely redo all the code he's done so far. For Murilo, it means working on new terrain pieces as we move into a true 2D style, and coming up with a host of new background pieces.

For me it means redoing the levels completely, finding new framing for each "stage", and rewriting our story progression. Which, to be honest, is a bit of a relief. Something had gotten lost in our progress and I feel a bit of the heart behind the game had somehow dissolved away in the production.

Yes, that's right, we're going to change the story a bit. Into the more abstract. Without revealing anything important, I can at least say that our visual style and progression is set to match the overall arch of these paintings by Thomas Cole. If this seems too pretentious, I apologize. But I love these paintings and I go to visit them at their home in DC at least twice a year. They ~speak~ to me.

And I hope that, through this game, I'll be able to do something similar with the people who play it. Connect to them in a real and sincere way.

As far as Nintendo goes, we'd really like to be able to develop for the WiiU, but it comes with some complications. Specifically, the cost. I can't remember how much of this is public knowledge, but for the sake of safety, I'll not disclose the exact amount but I'll say it's more than we currently have in the budget.

Nintendo in general is a great place for us to look at for three fundamental reasons. In their history, more than any other console platform, they have shown time and time again a willingness to try experimental and innovative games. In this way, they become the perfect platform for Indies. They also seem to be pushing specifically for a growth in their Indie scene now, and getting in there at the beginning can only serve to help us.

The third reason is perhaps less logical. I happen to be an old fan-boy looking to get back in the game. Meanwhile, Murilo is a huge Zelda fan. In fact, when I was initially looking for artists for Sprout, it was a certain picture he did of the Witch's hut from Link to the Past that had attracted me to him.

Also I had an old friend test our level recently and was pleased to see it took him almost 45 minutes to complete. The poor guy was positively puzzled by our puzzles!