Life at an underground game company.
Mini Games
This is a category devoted to minigames produced by Double Cluepon Software.
WireWorks is now an open and public beta!
02 years ago
Wireworks is now available to the public as an open beta. Give it a try, knock yourself out. We are VERY interested in hearing any feedback you might have and we definitely want to hear about any bugs you might find. Send them along to: azr...@doublecluepon.com.
If the open beta goes well, we will be uploading and releasing this title to Kongregate by the end of the week.
(EDIT: May 4, 2010 at 5:51 pm: We are aware that some people have issues with WireWorks using Chrome. We are looking into this. In the meantime, WireWorks does quite well in FireFox/IE/Safari.)
(EDIT: May 4, 2010 at 6:00 pm: The issue seems to be localized to certain versions of Chrome running in Linux. If you encounter any issues, please e-mail azr...@doublecluepon.com with…1) Your OS. 2) Your browser. 3) The version of your browser. (you can find that in the about box). )
Where you will find our games.
02 years ago
In preparing for the release of WireWorks, I have been researching and looking into places to release WireWorks to the public. While we could be content to simply release it on our own infrastructure (and we will), we want to also reach out to a broader audience. WireWorks is a labor of love and sweat equity.
But more than that, we want to put it somewhere it will get exposure so we don’t have to work twice as hard to get people looking our way. We are about to really ramp up production on Emerald Kingdom, and to some degree, while we will spend time promoting WW, we don’t have the resources to promote and drive people to our site *alone*.
What I have found in the world of Flash and game portals is both illuminating and frightening. As an indie company, with a great deal of work and effort put into art, code and development…we want to make sure our work is protected, and more than that…that we maintain the rights to it, our ownership of it, and our right to choose how and when it is displayed.
I have personally found that “indie” is a danger word when it comes to sites and portals. It’s to this end that we have settled upon Kongregate for small game releases. I found that in looking through Terms and Conditions for many other “indie” styled and named portals, a great many of them position themselves to take rights, grant themselves abilities that are the antithesis of supporting and helping the true indie studios. We are not going to get into names, or URL’s. We don’t believe in pointing fingers. However, we think it’s very important to point out: The big print giveth, the small print taketh away. Before you use that easy peasy upload form for your work, make sure you read and understand what you may be agreeing to. Someone’s got a contest where you could win $5,000 or $10,000? Great. Does it mean by entering you’re giving up the right to your equity or ownership of the game? You better find out. A portal is well known? Great place to upload? You better make sure they are not granting themselves the right to own whatever you upload. I have found many sites, some of them with “indie” in the title…with Terms and Conditions that could completely and utterly screw any indie developer that comes their way with a hit.
Kongregate truly understands, supports and is fully up-front about their nature. Not only did I find their terms and conditions easy to get through, they lacked a lot of double talk, weasel words, and sheer B.S. This is the bit that won big points with me:
Scope of License: By displaying, publishing, or otherwise posting any User Content on or through the Site, you hereby grant to Kongregate a limited, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, worldwide, fully-paid, royalty free license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such User Content. This license will terminate at the time you remove your User Content from the Site.
In other words, you have the right to terminate the license you grant them. If this is not the most important feature of a license, I don’t know what is. Kongregate is basically saying: you grant us a license, and we acknowledge you have the right to terminate that license. Compare that with this, which I found elsewhere:
By submitting content to the Site, you grant to [NAME-REMOVED] and its successors in business and assigns, a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, distribute, modify, edit, display, adapt, create derivative works from and market and promote the content, for any commercial purposes, and in any medium now existing or hereinafter developed, and to use your name, likeness, voice, performance, and any personal information you submit with or contained within the content, without your prior approval or the payment of any compensation and without notice.
[Emphasis mine]
As an Indie game developer, we feel that we should have the right to control how, when and who displays the fruit of our efforts. We feel this is a right that any Indie developer should hold near and dear. The big thing to remember here is: you have to look out for your own best interest, if you don’t, who will?
Any of our games we choose to release via portal or network will be available on our own site, and exclusively on Kongregate. Period. End of Story.
WireWorks in Beta testing. Almost ready for release.
02 years ago
Yay hooray. If you are a fan of us on Facebook, or you watch us on DeviantArt, you should already be in like flynn for beta testing WireWorks, as we opened the pool today for testing. If all goes well in the next week, it will be released on Kongregate. =)
StoryTeller begins to take shape, and other things!
12 years ago
One of the first things I learned about the production of video games was that, while the game itself is important, one of the more important parts of creating game content are the tools used behind the scenes.
The first ever thing built in StoryTeller. Ugly but beautiful. Note the Junkworks Building!
Early on, we recognized that content creation was going to be 50% of Emerald Kingdom. Possibly more, so while we were writing specs for Emerald Kingdom, it emerged that we were going to need some rather robust tools to create the world for the game. It was out of this discovery, that StoryTeller was born. StoryTeller has been in active code development now for what amounts to no more than a week, in terms of work done. That being said, we had to get some specifications down on paper (or in our case, a wiki) and then our new software engineer, Zach took to it. After a flurry of work yesterday, we have object placement working so far. It’s terribly rough, and it’s highly crude. The interface can be uglier than a blind date.
So with that said, in the span of about 40 hours, StoryTeller has:
- Zoom In/Zoom Out.
- Drag
- Grid selection
- Tile selection
- Tile Paint/Delete
- Object placement
- Asset drawers (where we keep things we want to use for building)
- XML File loading.
- Adding assets (tiles, objects)
- All kinds of other stuff, some working, some not.
All in all, not a bad job for the small amount of time it’s been actively worked on. The overriding specification for StoryTeller is this: creative people should not have to talk to a code developer to implement their art or vision. That goes for the people who draw (the artists) to the people who write (the writers, and quest developers) right down to the producer (the person who oversees, and maintains the vision of the finished product). A good tool should enable, not obfuscate. Simply put, when StoryTeller reaches a stable point, where it becomes useful on a full time basis, Emerald Kingdom’s world will begin construction. With the way we have done the specs for StoryTeller, building Emerald Kingdom will not take long. Why you ask?
Because while Zach is working on StoryTeller, and Doug is working on the back end of things…
Amy and the Art Department are creating model sheets.
Thynity, drilled down from a concept, into a model sheet.
From those model sheets, she has been putting together the assembly line for animating everything from Gremmies to Sprites. Clothing, Items…even Buildings, as you can see from the above picture. We are also adding another artist in the next week or so, to aid and speed up this process. (Wheee, Double Cluepon will be 6 people!)
While that is going on, story material is still being produced and edited. The Web Comic is being moved forward.
In short order: by the time StoryTeller gets to a usable point, which is not too far in the future…we will be ready, and we will have the supplies we need to paint the world. I have found that working in game development is not unlike cooking: there is an art to preparing all of your ingredients so things are all done in the proper order, so you can then assemble the dish.
WireWorks .85 Alpha. Note the updated menu.
Let’s also not forget WireWorks! WireWorks is approaching Beta. Sound has been plugged in, as well as numerous other planned features. One of the newer features added is a selector which will allow you to go up and down in the level ladder by 5 level increments. All of the menu functions have been enabled, and as I said previously, the sound is there. Sound is currently being tweaked. In addition to that, we will be updating the menu screen once more, to add a mute button for music. While we happen to think the music is great, and not in any way overbearing, some folks just don’t care for background music. We strongly believe in options, so one more menu board revision!
One of the more interesting features to have been added to the main playfield thus far is the “fuse” or timer/ticker. You can see it in the next shot.
The "fuse" timer bars, which tick down the time till the gel starts a flowin!
We had always planned for a good and intuitive timer in the upper left hand box. It’s finally been implemented, and works quite well. Note the three node board. Things start to get tricky with three nodes. At that, the version of WireWorks which will be in Emerald Kingdom will have high level 4 Node Boards! (Red, Green, Blue and Yellow) Nonetheless, the game play and timers are still being tweaked a bit more. Once WireWorks hits beta, we will be opening up the testing pool a bit more. We will be starting with people who have signed up for our mailing list. Random folks will be getting Beta invites for testing WireWorks. We’re betting the beta testers will have a great time playing.
Wheee, Elphie teaches you the ropes.
Speaking of playing, the other thing which has been implemented, is the “How to Play” tutorial. Elphie in all her glory. While the actual dialog is something that is not set in concrete yet, the routine for it is. We will be tightening up the how to play, with all the needed details and proper grammar over the next few days.
We can’t have Elphie acting illiterate! We know for a fact that hooked on phonics worked for her.
That’s about it. In wrapping up, we have not dieded. We’re all just busy busy busy. Making stuffs. For you. =)
Ja Mata!
Alpha testing – Level 51!
02 years ago
Level 51. Things move very very quickly.
Alpha testing of WireWorks is ongoing. We are up to v0.45a.
Elphie is about 50% Functional at this point. She does a very basic tutorial, and gives a success/fail message.
The skill ladder and timing seem very good with this latest version. Aside from bug hunting, we are also adding the spit and polish, and hope to have a “feature complete” beta soon.
This morning, I played to level 51, submitted a bunch of bugs to our trac. I can tell you this: this game is teh awesome. Once you pass level 25, things start to get really hairy. You have to think fast and plan ahead. I love this game. =)
Needless to say, WireWorks is starting to turn into a really really fun puzzle game. Casual, and fun. Thats how we like it.
Hooah!
