After much development work, MARCH, my (Felix) individual round game is finally released, marking the culmination of our individual round games. Enjoy playing, and as always, please comment away or send us an email with your thoughts!
Category Archives: Development
The Path Taken art and direction
Hello everyone!
As mentioned The Path Taken was more of a prototype and not a finished game. We had a couple of concepts and mechanics in there and not all of them made the cut. I thought I’ll like to share some the art that didn’t (and some that did) make it through and talk a bit about our art direction.
So if it isn’t obvious Zelda played a big part in the visual style. We thought a dungeon crawler was a good genre to explore the feeling of regret and I looked at various Zelda games as a reference. However there are some design choices in the game that made a bit different. Let’s take a look at this process shot:
Meaning and moving on
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.
Project 2: A game about romance and junk
At mindful xp we don’t have the luxury of any significant downtime after each project. Prototyping a new game very week means our turnaround time needs to be pretty immediate. And so the night we finished wrapping up Connections we were already starting on our next project.
So here is a screenshot of our 3rd game. With Valentine’s Day coming up it occurred to us that creating a relevant game for the season could be a lot of fun. So we’re working on a game that’s about the small moments and awkwardness of being attracted to someone.
It’s all still very early, but here’s a screenshot for your eyes only.
Systems Abstraction
Project 1 (now called “Connections”) shares a fair bit of commonality with Rod Humble’s “The Marriage” – both are abstract in aesthetics, expressive about personal relationships, obscure…
We made the conscious decision to not pursue the level of abstraction that The Marriage embraces, though. Why? Continue reading