Category Archives: Project 1: Connections

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.

Continue reading →

Connections is released!

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Our first (or second) project is now released! Connections is a game about finding, cultivating, and juggling relationships all the relationships in a lifetime. As you grow you are given the opportunity to form new connections, rekindle old ones, and decide how you want to play.

We’ll be talking more about Connections with a full postmortem soon. But until then you can play Connections on our site or on Kongregate right now. Let us know what you think via our new rating system or the comments directly on our page.

Project 1 visual style

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I’ll like to take some time to discuss the visual style of the game so far. When we first developed the concept for the game it could be expressed in just simple shapes like circles or squares. These shapes needed to somehow relate to human connections in between people. In a sense it would be very similar to Rod Humble’s The Marriage.  So my problem was to come up with a theme that would match the concept. Continue reading →

Developing our new game

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Hey everyone, this is Mike. I’m the lead programmer on the mindful xp project and each week I’ll be doing some blog posts on how development on our games are going.

Because of the tight deadlines we set for ourselves with each game our focus is on rapid prototyping and getting results onscreen as soon as we can. Instead of weeks or days we need to think on the scale of hours with our project.

So here’s a little look at our next game with is currently unnamed. It’s going to be an abstract shooter with a special meaning behind everything you’re doing. We started today on the project and hope to have it playable for everyone by Monday next week.

Here’s a screenshot to get a sense of what we’re working on. As you can see right now we’re at the stage where there is just programmer art, but Dan (the art guy here) will be adding his own touches very soon.