Author Archives: Mike Lee

Press on mindful xp Student IGF

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Hey everyone! With IGF next week we’ve been fortunate enough to give some thoughts about mindful xp with a few places. We had a nice interview with Polygon two weeks ago where we went over how mindful xp started and some thoughts about our process. And today Gamasutra posted their Road to IGF 2013 on mindful xp where we had a chance to talk some of the lessons we learned with our project.

Next week at the IGF pavilion we’ll be part of the IGF Student Showcase. We’ve printed out some nice business cards showing off the different games that make up the mxp volume. Feel free to drop on by Wednesday thru Friday and grab one (or all 8). We’ll be hanging around to talk with everyone and hang out with all the other awesome IGF teams.

We’re in the IGF 2013 Student Showcase!

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Wow! The mindful xp volume (a collection of our games from the mindful xp project) has been chosen for the IGF 2013 Student Showcase. We are honored and humbled to be selected by the judges for IGF 2013 and we’re looking forward to being at GDC and the IGF pavilion with all the other awesome student winners.

Thanks to everyone who supported and gave us advice throughout this project including, but not limited to Jesse Schell, Ralph Vituccio, Drew Davidson, Paolo Pedercini, Andy Nealen, Ian Bogost, Craig Adams, Walt Dessler, Adam Lederer, Luke Jayapalan, Chris Bell, Aubrey Hesselgren, the fine folks at Meaningful Play, the awesome dudes at Experimental Gameplay Project, our fellow students at the ETC, everyone who played/shared/commented on our games, and many more!

We’ll see everyone in SF!

Moving Toward the Heart: Get Closer Postmortem

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[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Get Closer was the final game created for the mindful xp project. It was an individual game created by myself about the difficulty with trying to get close to someone. As the last project in our semester, it was a pretty straightforward process to develop the game.

Development:

Get Closer is an offshoot of a previous game idea I was working on for the Ludum Dare 48 competition this April. The theme of the original Ludum Dare was “tiny planet” and the original game was called A System of My Own. In the game you controlled a planet trying to navigate around various solar systems and find the right orbit. However while the design for that never quite came together, I did take the main orbiting mechanic and adjust that for Get Closer.

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Lost Alone: Collect Postmortem

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[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Collect was the end result of a long process developing my own individual round game. Initially I had hoped to develop an entirely different game based on an experience that was very personal to me. In the end though I was not prepared to develop that experience into a game that I felt could clearly communicate everything that I had hoped. Instead of releasing something that I felt was substandard I instead changed tracks and released something less personal and could be realistically achieved within the time constraints of our project.

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Going Through the Grind: Scott Told Himself Postmortem

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[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Scott Told Himself was the 3rd game we developed for the mindful xp project. Or at least the 3rd we started. 1 month later we released Scott Told Himself after we developed two more game projects and finishing it during our spring break.

So what happened? Why did we stop Scott Told Himself in the middle of development? A lot of went wrong with Scott Told Himself could be filed under typical mistakes made while learning how to work together as a team. Thankfully though we as a team learned to grow through these mistakes and learn how to effectively work as a team going forward.

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Taking the First Step: Connections Postmortem

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[As part of our project, mindful xp is committed to documenting our progress – part of that is creating post-mortems for our games. Post-mortems are very candid about game details, so if you don’t want a game’s experience spoiled before you play, reading these might not be in your best interest.]

Connections is an abstract shooter that deals directly with the difficulty of maintaining relationships over time and distance. It was the second project developed for mindful xp and the first game we developed in Flash.

You can play Connections on our website, on Kongregate, or on Newgrounds.

Development:

Within mindful xp we consider Connections to be our “first” project. While R-evolution (our first release) was developed within mindful xp, it was an idea we had brainstormed while outside the project semester. Connections represented the first time we as a team had gone completely through the process of brainstorming, designing, developing, and releasing the game entirely within the context of our project.

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Get Closer released

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What a wild ride it’s been! We released our final game for mindful xp today. You can play Get Closer on our own site, on Kongregate, or Newgrounds right now.

Thanks to everyone for your support and plays this year. It’s been an incredibly rewarding time developing all 10 games this semester. We’ll keep on updating with new postmortems and other new so please keep in touch! Thanks and keep playing!

“Exhaust” is ready for a test drive

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Two games in a week? mindful xp is releasing our second game this week, Exhaust. To not spoil anything, it’s a game where you drive a car.

Exhaust was an attempt to do a quick pivot and see how quickly we could make a meaningful game. We spent a day and a half on it and focused on a single interaction. So play it on our site or Kongregate and let us know what you think!

All three of us are now off to GDC next week. We’ll be hobnobbing with fellow game developers and hope to come back a little smarter and re-energized for a second half of game creation. Thanks to everyone and their support during the 1st half of this project! We’ll be back soon with more exciting stuff.

Meaning and moving on

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Last night we decided to put our 3rd game, Scott Told Himself, on developmental hiatus as we continue with different projects.

This was not an easy decision. A major component of our project with mindful xp is creating game after game in rapid succession. We’ve been working on Scott Told Himself for 10 days now. Typically we had hope to spend about a week per project, but with Scott we pushed ahead after our deadline hoping that one last major push would finish things up. Yet even with these late nights the game is still incomplete, a bunch of systems lacking any connective tissue.

With most projects it would make sense to release a prototype and move on. Especially with rapid prototyping not every game idea will work out and there are valuable lessons to be learned from every experience. With Scott Told Himself, there are a few lessons from its short development that we feel are important going forward.

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