May 13, 2012

The end is nigh!

Since we announced Face-Plant Adventures back in February, not an awful lot has been happening here on our site. Actually, nothing at all has happened although we would have liked to post updates and share some insight into the development process. So how come we've been so lazy about updates? Well, the answer is rather simple. When you write about making a game, you don't spend your time on actually making the game. All of our team members have full-time day jobs, so we can only work on the project in our sparse spare time. When I come home at night and have to decide whether I should write an article about level design or whether I should rather work on a level, it would seem more reasonable to me to dedicate all of my efforts to finishing the levels. This seems to have been the right course of action as I managed to complete the final two levels of the game last week. Yay!


Swim, Florence, swim! These are the final strokes...
Currently, I'm working on creating and implementing the sound fx, which should be finished within the next two weeks. We have also given a test build to a handful of trusted, professional testers who will try to reveal the last bugs and provide precious, detailed feedback on balancing, which sadly was almost impossible to get in playtests on AppHub. So the end of May and beginning of June will be spent on the finishing touches for Face-Plant Adventures, which will then be submitted to Dream.Build.Play 2012 and AppHub Peer Review. If everything goes well, the game should be available in the Indie Games section on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 80 Microsoft Points by the end of June. Expect us to be more communicative from then on... :-)