A Game releases, and I jabber about random things!

Man its been a while, I have been in a long long development cycle and getting my XNA skills up while working on Endless Princess.  But what matters now is that it is out!

You can now buy Endless Princess on Xbox Live Indie Games, or from the xbox.com website: click here
EP was in development for far to long, but in the end it was absolutely worth it.  Algitt Studios first commercial game is now out in the world, and we have two titles under our belts.

Let me roll through a little bit of the game plan.  The plan was to go through these stages, release a 2d game (1. Get through the production cycle of a full game, start to finish), release another 2d game (2. Get through the production cycle of a commercial game, and work with a more standard programming language (in this case C# and XNA).  We are now at stage 3, which is do a 3D Game.  That was always the goal, to get up to doing a 3D game, because thats where Algitt can reach its broadest market.

Frankly, I know this might sound crazy to some devs out there, but a 3D game is far easier than a 2D game for a one man studio.  Now of course this is relative, if my previous 2D games had art that was 8 bit retro style, it might have been faster to do a 2D game.  But trying to do flash based animation vs. 3D animation, the 3D is faster.  You can reuse everything if you design for it the right way, and that,s the plan for this next game.  All the characters will utilize the same rig, so their animation can be shared across.  This makes prototypes substantially faster, when in the early stages I can share, run, death, celebrate, idle, etc. animations with multiple characters.  Now that being said, as you can tell from Algitt's previous 2D games, I like to think inside the box, because I know I am not an environment guy, so if I can frame the gameworld inside a small area, I can usually pump a little more quality into it, than I would if the game was bigger and required a level of design that escapes me for architecture.  That being said, the next Algitt game will randomly generate alot of the level, giving it more variety than any game that we've released so far.

I've rambled on enough, more to come on the next game in its own post.  My lunch is over, time to get back to art-ing and networking!

Updates Update everywhere!

So Algitt has changed alot in the past 2 years (geeze, I really needed to update this more often -_-).

Contract Art
Contract Art is now the money maker for Algitt.  My everyday time is spent doing 3D Artwork for Exato Game Studios (as well as some 2D ie. UI, texturing, etc). I handle all of the Characters, from Modeling and Texturing, to Rigging, Skinning, and Animating.  We are currently hurdling toward some major deadlines, and things are looking good.  If you are curious about the game, Progenitor, you can check out the trailer that we released earlier this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=u4u2BxX0pFw&vq=hd720

Our Games
So many things have changed on the game front.  I've been doing alot of XNA lately, so that is the general direction our games are going (not all of them, but the next couple are).  Here's what is currently in development.

Endless Princess (Xbox Live Indie Game)
EP is a endless running game, with action and combat.  You are Sir Charles and you must save Princess Keepaway from your evil nemesis.  Fighting your way through enemies with Huge Axes, Flying Dragons, and of course the ever dreaded Spikes of death.  The gameplay is simple, and the longer you play and the longer your combo chain changes the difficulty and ups your score.  After much debating I'm looking into doing Online Leaderboards (through SpynDoctor's Peer to Peer method), unfortunately this will require you to have Xbox Live Gold to get leaderboards, so I'll make sure that there is a local leaderboard as well.  We are looking for a late April, Early May release date on this one.  The Programming is about 70% done (the main left overs being tied to Animation timing and Leaderboards).  I'll start posting screenshots as the prototype art is removed and replaced with some real stuff.

Orc Brigade (PC/MAC)
This is a reverse tower defense game that I have been dieing to make.  Development on it is just at the planning stages as I'm waiting for Torque 1.1 Final to get a release.  I'm using a combination of several different add-ons, including the Universal AI Starter Kit and Arcafe FX 2.0 systems.  I'm still playing around with how cutscenes are going to be done (could be 2D and animated in flash, or 3D realtime, with some sort of system like Verve, we'll see).  More to come on this one in the coming months, its not going to start rolling along truely into production for another couple of months.

Unannounced Xbox Live Indie Game
So I'm currently working on a game thats running in Sunburn 2.0.  Unlike Endless Princess, this one is Multiplayer-centric, and 3D.  Because of that its going to take me alot longer to get it done than Endless Princess has taken me.  I'm hoping to have it ready to roll in the Fall, but even that might be a little ambitious (there's only so much time in the day when you have a 8 - 5 thats not working fulltime on your game).  This one I'll start pulling back the curtain on after Endless Princess is released, after all I don't want to start double developing of EP will never get out the door.

SO.... that's where we are right now, 3 games in development of all sorts of sizes and ambitions, and long term Contract art in my lap.  I'm going to keep this more up to date with my musings and random updates as time goes by.  Until the next update, enjoy!  And check out the NEW and IMPROVED, AlgittStudios.com!

It's late, I'll make it short...

The New Algitt Studios Website is live!!!!

 

http://www.algittstudios.com

Check it out!  I will be posting a full Status update on our projects, and whats been going on over the past year tomorrow.  Hopefully that will tide you over while I get some sleep!