We've now been working on the game for a little over 1.5 months, and I'm pretty pleased with the progress we've made so far (and that's with very little work being done in the last week). I'm going to put up a video on Youtube to show the current state of affairs this weekend.
We released our "Friends and Family" build which was more proof of concept than anything else. It's interesting because despite the fact that we tried to tell everyone that it doesn't represent the final game, everyone pretty much assumes that what they're playing is extremely close to the end result despite the fact that a large chunk of the game mechanics are not implemented, there is still no final art, and no music. Heck, there isn't really even a menu or an ability to pause (or even suspend) the game at this point. What we really wanted to do was just get a feel for the core "game mechanic" of matching cards.
But I'm very pleased with the friends and family build. Despite how much it's lacking, I think it was successful in that it demonstrated that it is possible to make a game that is fun with extraordinarily simple mechanics. (Though not for lack of examples already out there, Tiny Wings is doing amazingly well and is arguably even simpler than a match game). We had a fair amount of feed back (13 people) and we selected from a diverse group from gamers to non-gamers, male/female of various age groups. We didn't expect the hardcore to be hooked on it as the game is missing most of the "addictive" components and has almost zero re-playability.
It also demonstrated how well Corona does in fact work. The game ran on 8 different types of devices without so much as a hiccup: OG Droid, Evo, Droid 2, Droid X, Droid Pro, Incredible, and even iPad and Xoom.
We'll likely need to increase the quality of some of the assets so that it looks better on the iPad and Xoom than it currently does, but I'm pretty pleased with how little effort that took. So kudos to Corona. They get a thumbs up from me. A few little quirks here and there that we've run into, but all in all, very solid.
The amount I've learned from this experience so far has blown my mind.
We finally got an artist for the monsters. We found her on Deviant art, pretty much what we were looking for. We're still trying to figure out what to do about backgrounds, UI elements, buttons, special effects. Right now I've hacked them all together myself. Has given me newfound respect for people who work on photoshop for a living (though, I'm using GIMP myself). So amazingly painful and time consuming. Definitely not something I particularly enjoy, and I look forward to replacing all of that garbage with something more professional.
Music and sound effects... wow. Haven't even started on that yet, and judging by the feedback I've received, it's something we need to get on top of soon, but I've not even got the faintest idea about how to go about that.
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