So I wrote the whole overview to Bit Generations a couple of weeks ago and am only now managing to get round to writing up my thoughts on Dotstream (who knows when the next ones will come along…).

Premise

Dotstream is Bit Generations take on racing. Simple in both gameplay and graphics (perhaps paired down is a better phrase). You control a coloured square which, from the word go, is always moving right leaving a glowing line of colour in your wake. All you can do is; steer up or down, turbo or collide with stuff. You have to do a number of laps (usually 2) and come first to win.

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This Wednesday we finished Milestone 3. Unfortunately some of the one of the items we wanted to do was just too much for this milestone. We made the tough decision of pushing it onto Milestone 4, when we originally planned it the item seemed like a 2 day task but we were being silly and it has now grown to a 2 week one! The rest of milestone 3 passed well tho’ so we now have full levels working.

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I’ve had the whole Bit Generations series for a few weeks now and thought it was about time I wrote a little bit about them.

Premise

The whole idea of Bit Generations is: really simple, pure yet modern games (think clean graphic design, electronic music and clean game play). There are 7 games in all with each one coming in its own beautiful packaging and on a Gameboy Advance cart. Its a liitle bit expensive seeing as they could all fit on one but then you wouldn’t be able to have a significant other playing one while you play the other. Each game focuses on a popular gaming type: puzzle, racing, adventure, audio and simplifies it to its core. Dot stream for example is Bit Generations take on racing, think Tron light cycles, you can only steer up or down, you leave a light trail, crossing another trail slows you down and you start with 3 lives/turbos.

Happiness

As someone who is going through prototyping at the moment and trying to set up his own games company these games reinforce why I am doing what I am doing. Each of these games shows that a simple concept with simple yet beautiful graphics can still be fun and purchased by games players. They are in essence, to me, what our prototype should be like. If I can get our demo(s) to be as fun and as pure as this then I will be very happy.

More to come

I hope to do more writing about Bit Generations in the coming weeks.

-Nic

On Tuesday we finished our second Milestone! In this we prototyped our AI, bad guy patterns and such. So we can now play about with the player and the bad guy side of things (still no hints on what it is tho’). The great thing is because of the xml files we are using we can place and script what they do and how they react.

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I just got Pokémon Mysterious Dungeon – Blue and I’m really enjoying it. Sure there are flaws to it but man its nice to play a different take on the whole Pokémon gameplay and universe.

Gameplay

You start as a Pokémon, or a human turned into one, who has to find a way to turn back. You get a few psychology type questions at the start which seem to determine which Pokémon you will play as, I got Mudkip! Then you get to choose and name your buddy, well doh Pikachu obviously.

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Well MSoft have my 360 and it should be repaired soon and back in my paws hopefully by the end of the week

I can’t wait as I now have Lego Star Wars, Dead Rising and finishing of Enchant Arms. That combined with all the great downloads from TGS and X06 and I need it now (I hope the downloads are not removed by the time I get it back).

I will definitely be checking out Need for Speed Carbon, the Banjo and Kazooie movie, Doom, FEAR and just for laughs Sonic.

-Nic

Well my Xbox 360 has had a happy life until this weekend when he couldn’t manage the strains of next-gen graphics anymore

I was playing the excellent Enchant Arms and it appears that my launch 360 had a fault which was just hiding in wait for the right time to strike. This weekend was when it chose to do so. 

The news is not all bad though! Although I have moved to Australia and my 360 was a UK launch model ever gracious Microsoft have whisked it away and are in the process of diagnosing its ills. I should be back up and running in no more than 10 days…

In the meantime I think I will try to complete my Pokemon collection (arggh) and finish off with the delightful Bit Generations range on GBA (more on them in a future posting).

-Nic

We have finished our first internal milestone and it was a success. We are now working on our second prototype.

Our first milestone was a prototype to test the player controls. It allows us to adjust the player character using text files and reload them on the fly. These attributes include speed, firing rates, textures etc. Due to this we can play about with the player controls to our hearts content adjusting it separate to the rest of the game code.

Milestone 2 is focusing on the players opponents and again will allow for them to be adjusted in a text file and reloaded on the fly as well as allowing us to specify much of their AI, patterns and/or waypoints. This milestone is due to finish at the end of September.

Milestone 3 will integrate both of the previous milestones work to allow us to see for the first time the interaction between the player and the computer opponents.

We’ll keep you abreast of our progress as it continues.

After interviewing many programmers we have settled on one, a recent graduate of University of New South Wales. This has allowed us to start the prototyping phase of our first game.

Today I updated the website again so there are some minor tweaks and more importantly more info in the Games section of the website. Its not complete but bit by bit we are getting there!

Content:

Games overview updated. Layout changes. Contact and About us sections amended.

Enjoy.