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[Fenrir]

I'm voting for 2 too, but I also like 4 and 5.

[oahda]

Agreed, #2. Love the spines earlier on, tho. This game looks fantastic.

[noethis]

DevLog Update – Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm a terrible person for not updating this in so long, so to make amends here's some cheesy Valentine's Day cards for you!

More (real) updates soon!

[BananasGoMoo]

DevLog Update – Terrain

So you may have noticed from the last update that I've introduced various forms of natural terrain for the trees to grow around--cliff faces, overhangs, etc. At first I was really hesitant about this--clinging with a death-like grip to my precious abstract circles and ground. But I pretty quickly realized that using *just* circles led to a lot of ridiculous looking situations. The tricky thing is that Prune sits in that awkward space between fully abstract (Hundreds) and fully realistic (whatever "realistic" means in a video game). So it's not like I can just go gung ho towards one side or the other--it's about striking that balance.

Whatever I go with needs to mesh well with the abstract red and black circles that are already in the game. Also, I need to be super careful not to start down the "realism" rabbit hole by throwing more and more detail at it. Sure, games like Limbo/Badland look great with their detailed silhouette environments, but I have neither the time nor talent to go that far.

With that in mind, I've explored a few different possible styles of terrain. I'm not super happy with any of them at the moment, but I thought I'd post them here to get others' thoughts.

I like number 3 the best.

[noethis]

DevLog Update – Setting Deadlines
So this is going to sound pretty trite but I'm going to say it anyway: Set hard deadlines for yourself. It's a lesson I've been learning over and over again in the last few months.

What does that even mean though? Just saying something like "I'm totally going to finish developing chapter 4 of the game by March 1" or "Finalize jello physics by Friday" in my experience hasn't been enough. First, you usually end up being way too vague as to what these goals entail. And the larger problem, for me at least, is that it's really easy to brush off these deadlines when there's nothing at stake.

So the thing I've found useful is putting skin in the game. I find it helps immensely to have a specific reason for the deadline, whether you're showing the game at a meetup, in a festival, entering contests, etc. It doesn't matter what it is, all that matters is that it's important to you.

Back at the turn of the year, I used the IMGA mobile game contest as an excuse to polish up a build of the first third of the game. While I'd previously been languishing, it lit a fire under me to figure out some longstanding art and design issues I had been putting off. The January 1 deadline ended up forcing me to make a solid build that I was then able to show some others (plus it netted me a nomination for Best Upcoming Game which I was not expecting!).

Since then, I've used a number of other external sources as deadlines (local meetups, AMAZE Fest, external playtests, etc.) and it's always been A Good Thing for me.

Speaking of which, I finally got a quick website up for Prune, once again due to a deadline (submitting games to festivals tends to require a website!).

Check it out! http://www.prunegame.com

[Liza]

This is so cool, I can't wait to read through your dev log in detail. It reminds me of a 1000 times better version of my first One Game a Month game called Alien Tree (only in theme - this is so much cooler than what I made)

[noethis]

Alien Tree is pretty cool! Got 9 fruit, which is probably not very good. Couldn't figure out what the fire is for though, now I have to know!

[noethis]

DevLog Update – Teaser

Long time, no update! Anyway, I made a teaser trailer! Not sure how to embed it, so I'll just post a link:







I ended up making it pretty much entirely in Unity, which worked out pretty well overall. One useful article I found early on was this one from the Cadence guys:

Creating A Machinima Game Trailer With Unity

Originally I was using OBS to capture footage of a standalone version of the game. This worked reasonably well but I was starting to run into performance issues running the game and also recording with OBS on my 7 yr old computer. Luckily there's a way to take rendering "offline" via a Unity script I found in the article above.

The script utilizes Time.captureFramerate which basically forces the game to a specific framerate, slowing everything down if necessary to let it fully render and take a screenshot per frame. One gotcha I found was that it would actually alter the look of certain things like the star trails in the video above. I ended up having to check if Time.captureFramerate > 0 and tweak things on a case-by-case basis.

I also ran into an issue with the screenshots never getting written to the hard disk in standalone builds. Here's an updated version of that script that fixes that: http://pastebin.com/uN1eaFpU




Finally, once I had the folder full of PNG files, I took it over to Blender, added the audio track, and rendered it out. Overall I was pretty happy with using Unity for the trailer and will definitely take the same approach when it comes to the launch trailer!

[noethis]

DevLog Update – Beta!
Prune is finallllly starting to wrap up and I'll be doing a small beta very shortly if anybody is interested! Looking for general feedback as well as any issues/bugs that crop up. iOS only right now.

If you want to help, e-mail me at [email protected]!

(obligitory screenshot because no devlog is complete without one)

[Kyle Preston]

Prune is out now for iOS.  It has been my pleasure to work on the audio/music for this game for the past severalish months. The game is.......f'ing beautiful.

now live.

[oldblood]

That trailer is fucking beautiful. I don't have ios or Id buy. Best of luck on the launch...

[cvasquez]

Damn, such a beautiful game, congrats on the release!

[JobLeonard]

Wow. Going to the app store and getting this right now

[fall_ark]

Absolutely gorgeous. I hope there's plans for PC release in the future?

[noethis]

DevLog Update – Release!




Prune has been released on the App Store! Go pick it up if you have an iDevice: http://apple.co/Prune

[JobLeonard]

Have been having discussions with my former colleagues at Uni with whom I taught game design in the ways this is similar and totally not similar to Fruit Ninja (we've used Fruit Ninja as an example of juiciness in class).

The basic interaction is the same (swipe to cut), and it both involves plant life of some form. But FN is about cartoon violence, where this is about nurturing through denial.

FN is all juiced up, this is minimal and peaceful.

Pruning a bonsai <-> Ninja 

We also see some aesthetic connections to Solar Flux (gameplay) and Monument Valley (graphics).

But at the end of the day what matters is that we're really enjoying this puzzle game :D

[noethis]

Yeah I used Fruit Ninja as reference a bit, especially for the 'swipe' effect/mechanic. Also, when I was making the trailer I checked out their trailer and it's pretty hilarious how over the top / dial-it-up-to-11 it is. I was half-way tempted to parody that for Prune, haha.

[oahda]

Wow. I was surprised to find this among the top puzzlers on the App Store yesterday and thinking "oh, it's that cool game from TIGS!". Congrats!