The Goobers' Development Process (Patent Pending)

Howdy all,

Sam from Time Goobers Zudios here with an update on how we make the magic happen.  Each week on Wednesday the Goobers have an official status/planning meeting, its almost never our only meeting for that week, but its when we sit down and do our major planning.  We first figure out what we want to accomplish that week, and then we divide tasks up among our members.  No one has an official speciality, and everyone does a little of everything, so who does what often depends on the team member's availability and mood.  Once we've got tasks assigned everyone goes their own way to work.

We'll normally then have smaller meetings throughout the week as team members coordinate their work, or want to ask questions of the person who was working on something last week.  Eventually the week ends, and the time to merge all of our work comes.  We use Git for version controlling, and all during the week each team member has been working in their own branch.  Our software lead is in charge of merging all of these branches together and working with the developers to fix merge conflicts and make sure at the end of each week we have a single stable build that has everyone's work from that week in it.

And thats our process! If you have any questions feel free to post in the comments section below :)

Playtest Results

Howdy all,

Sam from Time Gooberz Zudios here.  As our avid readers know, last week we gave a presentation and play test session at Johns Hopkins' undergraduate campus.  To everyone who came by, thank you! We got a lot of really awesome feedback, and we can't wait to roll it back into the game for our next play test.  The next few weeks will feature us working on implementing the feedback we got, cleaning up the first few levels, and adding additional levels.

A lot of the feedback and clean up overlap, and we're looking forward to implementing features like transitions between rooms and smoother controls.  One of my personal favorite suggestions we've already implemented is switching our control scheme from WASD shoot, arrow keys move to WASD move, arrow keys shoot.  This is the control scheme that Binding of Isaac uses, and a lot of players felt off because of the difference.  As for the rest of the feedback, you'll be seeing it roll out soon!

Progress Report: Level 2

Howdy all,

Sam from Time Goobers Zudios here with a weekly progress report.  This week (in addition to working on the feedback we got from our play test) we've been putting together level 2! In level 2 we're going to be taking things up a notch.  In level 0 we designed rooms to protect the player and let them confront enemies one at a time, and level 1 we kept simple in order to properly introduce the player to the rewind mechanic.  But in level 2 we're starting to take the kiddie gloves off ;)

Below is a screenshot of the first portion of the level.  Unfortunately our enemies are still are sharing the same sprite, so you can't tell which is which.  But maybe thats good as it will leave some surprises for you come our next play test :)

Level 2 Part 1 in all its glory

We've also got some awesome cutscenes and new enemies, but we're keeping those a secret so we have something worthwhile to present at our next demo.

Presentation Today!

Howdy all,

The Goobers will be attending the JHU game demonstration day today!  We'll be presenting in the basement of Shaffer, on the the JHU campus, at 5pm today.  I'll be posting our slides here below, but we encourage everyone to come, see our presentation, play our alpha demo, and mostly just say hi!

Our Slides!

See you there!
Sam

State of Gooberz Address

Howdy all,

Sam from Time Gooberz Zudios here with an update on the game.  This week we'll be releasing the alpha version of our game, and I'll be giving you a full rundown of what to expect.  We've made two levels to test out the basics mechanics of our game - running and gunning.  We're calling them The Lab and The Cave internally.

The Lab is set in (surprise!) the research lab that our protagonist, codename 'The Janitor', has been called in to clean up.  It introduces the player to the basic mechanics - walking, shooting, not getting shot - that they'll be relying on for the rest of the game.  For hardcore bullet hell fans out there it should be a walk in the park, but for our newer players we hope it will help ease them into what can sometimes be a very intimidating genre.

The Lab ends as The Janitor accidentally causes an explosion that knocks him down an old chute deep into the Cave.  Our protagonist will spend the rest of the game trying to reactivated old lab equipment to help him get back to the surface, all while fighting off hordes of failed lab experiments from decades past.

The Cave will start to push the player a little bit, pitting them against enemies similar to the Lab but in much tighter quarters.  Near the end of the Cave The Janitor finds a watch left over from an old experiment that, after putting it on, begins looping him through time!  And this, lovely fans, is where life gets interesting :)

We'll have builds up soon, and we look forward to your feedback!