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[Farbs]

Hey TIGers,

I keep an archive of stable builds of all my projects, ostensibly so I have a fallback if I bork my drive or run the design up a dead end street. Really though it's because I love to look back on all the quirks and rough edges. I figured others devs might get a kick out of this too, so I've grabbed screenies of Fishie Fishie from various stages of development & posted them here for all to enjoy.

Enjoy!



A game is born! This original pygame prototype took about an hour to reach playable, and after an evening of tooling around I found myself with a fun little game. Pygame oldbies might recognise the original Fishie sprite as the bomb from one of the tutorial games with a pair of eyes slapped on.



Engine #2. Having decided to take the project seriously I switched to the PopCap framework, reimplementing the basic game mechanics in C++. Food sprites were twitchy little spiders, and artist support was desperately needed.



Art support began to arrive, courtesy of illustrator and all-round swell guy Simon Lissaman. I started mucking around with different gameplay ideas here, trying to figure out the basic game mechanics should be besides moving and eating. I was still figuring this stuff out up until a few days after the initial launch, which cost me lots of time in redevelopment. Pro tip: Frontload your design risks.



Engine #3. By this time I'd suffered serious frustration working in C++ and pined for the days of pygame. I took some time off Fishie Fishie and built Pycap, essentially merging the fast and pretty rendering of the PopCap framework with the ease of development of pygame. The game was completely rewritten (again), & fishies started looking like fishies.



The final product. A tiny but mature videogame featuring levels that took 4 hours to build and 5 seconds to play

Do you fine folks have old screenshots or builds from final projects? I'd love to see this sort of thing for other people's work.

[Guert]

There was something like that about Aquaria on Bit Blot's website... I really like looking at this kind of pictures, it really shows the evolution of a game and it's always nice to see how a "vision" of a game changes while developing

 

[Jolli]

I love seeing these 
fishiefisheishfishe

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

During the development of Immortal Defense I posted a new image of it just about once every day. Some of the early screenshots of the game look pretty funny: http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/gallery/0000zcfy

[team_q]

Thanks for posting this, I really like watching the progression. Its neat watching from the embryonic phase up to full game.

[Farbs]

I wish I had screenshots from when the Polychromatic Funk Monkey was a brown square in brown square land.

[StephenAnthony]

Well, here are some screenshots from the first game I ever made. No, the graphics weren't custom made for the project and I definitely didn't make them. The game itself was pretty decent for a first attempt I guess, but it was WAY too ambitious for a first game and it turned out to be a buggy mess.



Here's an early screenie of the first test of Ara Fell: First Light tiles.



And here's the final product.



It came a long way! I don't know if this is quite what you had in mind, but it's the best I've got!

[Farbs]

So here's ROM CHECK FAIL about two days into development. Once again, I prototyped using coloured squares for everything . You can see that two of my original test levels actually made it into the game. It was a real bastard to play at this point because you could only tell what characters you and your opponents were based on behaviour. After getting to this point I concluded that the project was worth developing, and so the sprite ripping adventure began.

[RadRuss]

Neat post!  I love watching how things go from infancy to completion, it's a great process.