It seems that the makers of the great mining game Motherload are creating a new version of the game, called Super Motherload. They have set up a Kickstarter project to fund the final portion of development. The new version seems really nice!

i wouldn't recommend to anyone that their first game be commercial because anyone's first game is going to be terrible

Classy Paul. Classy.

Oh wow! Have you guys and gals seen this? It seems that PAX is going to have a developer conference right before PAX Prime in Seattle and it's called PAX Dev. The price isn't that bad either. Well, it doable at least.

A Swedish gaming blog wrote about the game recently: http://www.blogemup.se/?p=7485

We had a meeting last week, our first IRL in a long time (at least with all three of us). It was decided that we are going to attempt the daunting task to finish the production and the distribution of workers in our game (at least until we do some large scale testing), plus start to make a system for the game's achievements (we want to make them relative to other players' progress and in that way add competition). 

Because of an increase in work-related obligations we have also settled on relieving some of the workload from our beloved programmer and hire someone to do the more front-end-kinda stuff like getting the game's market up to snuff. We might find someone we know to do the work but if not we'll post an ad here on the forum.

Wow, Arachne, those are some nice screens. The titlescreen is more dire than most horror games out there and the icons are top notch. I can't wait to see more.

I've always liked Game Developer because it is often an article and topic based publication that doesn't get too technical (which happens to be the number one criticism against the magazine). I'm a journalist and I like to read proper articles with proper angles, but that's me. The magazine is in many ways what its reader base wants it to be; the game creators and programmers that want more technical articles are welcome to submit them to the magazine.

The cost of the digital version of magazine is quite reasonable and I've been a subscriber for the past few years.

We have from the beginning decided that there needed to be a cap in how much resources you could have in your inventory. We didn't want people to be offline for weeks and log on and find that they now had an amount in the millions. We hadn't done anything about it because we didn't need it in the testing but we have now realized it was quite hard to implement. The ideal would be that you could only have a total amount of all your goods in your inventory, and have any amount in any ratio (2999 Tools and 1 Plant, 3000 in total). Keeping track of how much we would have in people's inventory and in turn switching off production when the total cap was reached turned out to be a total pain so we just decided to have a cap for every individual type of good. Simple is good enough sometimes.

So we now have a building upgrade called Storage. The Storage Level indicates how much of each good you can have in your inventory. So if you decide to invest in upgrading your building's Storage Level you will be able to raise the maximum number of goods you can hoard in your factories. Players will have one inventory per Neighborhood (so they won't have to keep track of which goods are in which buildings: boring!).

Our great artist Caroline has published some glimpses of work shes done for us on her blog. Check them out!

She has also drawn some standard avatars for us (to use before players upload their own images).

Incredible! You have effectively reduced my workplace to zero productivity this afternoon.

Wow, looking good!

I also totally missed träffen in April. I concur; a second round should be soon, preferably before the end of summer.

Interesting! I disagree, I found climbing to work exactly like I thought it would and I managed it on the the first try.

One thing, if you lie still in the water and float to the surface it gets kind of hard to move forward. Perhaps some forward motion could be added, by swingin the arms?

I like the look of the cancer cells. I'm just curious about the aim for the game. Is it about wish fulfillment? Does it depict a battle that you can't win (with lasers)?

I can wholeheartedly indorse Haven & Hearth. It has really cool game play. I especially like the combat system, very original actually.

Here's a

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We have a (semi-?)final list of producible goods in the game now. There are basically three types of goods produced: resources (goods for either construction or upgrading buildings), consumables (goods that can be consumed by players' workers) and papers. Papers are not created by any special house; all production buildings will have a percentage of its goods be papers. Papers have two uses:

• You can spend papers on Research & Development (R&D)
• They can be used as money in the game

We had an earlier system in which a player slowly amassed a pool of points could be spent on either developing new buildings or new upgrade levels. Such a system like that was just too game-y and tired. It had no connection to anything else in the game and it was strange to ask players to observe their inventory _and_ a separate system which just happened to collect R&D points.

We also decided against having a traditional monetary system. It felt, among other things, good that everything could be gathered in your inventory.

As for the papers' fluff; the Coalition (the people who sent the player volunteers to the disaster area) has deemed it necessary to collect as many valued documents as possible from the ruins of the city. Stocks and bonds, property deeds, government and municipal records, monetary bills and the like is now widely coveted by the higher ups at the UIC. The thing is that the UIC have been very vague with what kind of documentation they desire. People in the disaster area have therefore begun to accumulate all kinds of papers: company spreadsheets, printed letters and emails, newspapers, practically anything with print on it.

It isn't a very modern explanation (wouldn't everything important be saved on off site servers?) or even a very realistic one. We just thought it would be fun.

The resources are:

• Building Materials: used for the construction of new buildings
• Tools (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Quality Level
• Lamps (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Protection Level or Storage Level
• Plants (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Contentment Level
• Batteries (region specific): used to upgrade buildings’ Efficiency Level

and the consumables (all used to raise a building’s Contentment):

• Alcohol
• Food
• Relics
• Smokes

Many of the resources are specific to different Neighborhoods to stimulate trade between them.

We hoped the names of the goods are simple yet flavorful enough to be usable by players. We planned earlier to have different kind of metals as resources but that was really dull and very unwieldy (why use steel to raise Contentment?) and we just figured we could go wild and do whatever we want. It was still difficult and took a few meetings to work out though.

The summer is well under way and the game goes on. You wouldn't ever had thought that making a game can take so long. We’ve tweaked the game’s resource production and added some new goods for the market to make production more robust and diverse. I'll write more about it soon.

The best part of the summer is that our artist Caroline Breault is creating the illustrations for the game. I thought it would be nice to show off some of her work.







The last two images depict a few of the attack houses we have in the game (the Psych Ward and the Casino). It's been a blast writing the in-game description texts for the buildings and than see later how Caroline envisioned them. Lots of fun after months of coding and writing.

There are apparently a couple of different groups involved in Free Gaza, the Turkish based IHH (labeled "islamist" by the Turkish government) might have had a different view on how to react to the boarding of the boats (i.e defend the boat) than other groups (like the nonviolent Swedish group Ship to Gaza). The other boats didn't end in bloodbaths and there might be reasons for that. I write "might" because we still don't really know how the violence started on the Mavi Marmara. You'll have to excuse me but Israel has created (any way you see it) a public relations disaster for itself and their rapports could still be an attempt to paint a better picture on the events this early on.

I just happened upon the game Ancient Trader yesterday and I was wondering if any here had tried it. The art style is really cool and the game has really intrigued me... Any impressions out there?

Trailer

I just wanted to say that we have now chosen a person for the job: her name is Caroline Breault, aka Cab (not a TIGForums user I'm sorry to say).

Her work can be seen at her website: http://cabfolio.com/ and her deviantart page: http://enjeru.deviantart.com/

I would like thank all the people who showed an interest in our game and applied for the position. It is at the same time humbling and exciting to find people who think that you are doing something worthwhile. Cheers!

It took a while but we have now chosen the artist for our game. We are extremely happy with the turn-out and we are almost giddy with the possibilities of working with such talent. We decided on the Montreal based Caroline Breault, a.k.a. Cab. We thought it important to really go beyond what the browser strategy genre is doing at the moment and try to find someone who could make our game "pop" and stand out. We are very happy with our choice and can hardly wait to how things will unfold.

Cab's website: http://cabfolio.com/ and deviantart page: http://enjeru.deviantart.com/