Tag Archives: development

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON July 24, 2010
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    Surviving the Dip

    It’s really nice when things work out. Like our awesome new quest system, new grove, and revised layout to the forest. We were talking today about how difficult it is to nail that last 10% of any creative project, how you can find yourself lost in a soup of self doubt and hopelessness at struggling to find a solution that you can truly be proud of.  But those times when you break through and end up with something awesome really make it worth while.

    We’ve decided on a live date, and it is Monday 2nd of August, 10 days from now. Exciting! We’ll also be ramping up our public exposure, starting with a new Twitter domination plan orchestrated by our resident funny-man Mark. You can follow us here, and here.

    If you’re in Dunedin and keen to do some play testing later next week, message us on Facebook or in the comments here. We’re getting brutal on refining the user experience and need fresh people’s clicks to analyse (wow that didn’t sound creepy at all).

    Couple of things that we thought were really cool this week:

    Transformer Owl

    Kevin Butler takes on New Zealand TV3

    Ian Bogost presents a Facebook game parodying Facebook games

    Final Staracraft 2 story trailer

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON July 19, 2010
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    It’s All Coming Together

    Woah intensity. We’re into our final ~week of development before we reset for good, and while everything is looking awesome I gotta tell you, we’re certainly running this one down to the wire! We’ve responded to a stack of your feedback asking for tweaks to the movement, load time, and the implementation of a quest system. That info we get through the surveys and feedback form is hugely valuable so keep it coming.

    Oh, thats a peek at the new background graphic above. Heaps of the art assets have been overhauled and we’re working hard to make sure the environment is bursting with life (and secrets!).

    Thanks so much to those people that played through to Level 20 for us, you’ll be getting a real boost next week and we’ll announce who got there first very soon. The data we got from your play throughs has allowed us to adjust the XP model so its smoother and more rewarding to progress in the game. We’re very interested in hearing from everyone on what they like / dislike about: a) social posting through Facebook e.g. announcing an achievement on your wall, and b) premium item sets (what would be of huge value that you could see yourself paying for in the game). Fire us your comments below, on Facebook, or by email.

    We move into our new home in a few weeks, and we have also been quite into animated GIFs recently (swimming in our overtime madness) so these two facets of Runaway life bred this abomination:

    Hang tight, we’ll have something pretty awesome for you next week :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON June 28, 2010
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    Version 3 + Competition

    PLAY HERE

    It’s been a grueling couple of weeks but we have arrived and Alpha Version 3 is now LIVE for you guys to play with.

    Please remember to take the survey as its incredibly import for us to gauge reaction to the game. We’ve now hooked it up so that if you click the link below the game and complete the survey, we’ll reward you with an extra 5,000 HD! (the bonus will be processed for you overnight)

    This version was a big deal for me as we crossed the line where I started having honest to goodness fun with our own game. It’s always been the objective of the game to  feel warm, relaxed, connected to the natural world while letting players work towards something they can craft as their own. I felt that involuntarily, without having to fill in the blanks with my imagination, it’s just there. So now the more important part comes, to see if YOU get it too. New stuff:

    - Grove Expansion! You grove will get bigger at levels 3, 5, 10, and 15. These expansions also bring with them a Fruit Tree, Frog, Hummingbird, and Toucan

    - The Fruit Tree starts out little and will grow to soaring heights if you come back to water it daily

    - New creatures for your grove as above

    - Refined XP progression, blockages are now free to clear once you get to the required level. Yellow Seeds are now a big deal and could be the key to you advancing quickly (they make a flowerbed double in XP and HD)

    - Stacks of new foliage and flowers

    - Caterpillars now walk along the bottom of your grove, and are fed in the same way as other animals. Make sure you feed them the right host plant!

    - Visit your friend’s grove by clicking on their portrait. This will grow their Social Flower, and you’ll be able to harvest from their visitor flower

    - Gifting. You can drag any item out of your inventory and into your friend’s grove to leave it for them as a gift

    Stay tuned for details of a competition that could win you a serious in-game bonus when we start the game for real in a couple of weeks. We’re creating a race to level 20, so if you’re super keen to start you could begin …. oh… NOW! :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON June 1, 2010
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    Thanks!

    Awesome feedback coming through from our testers. It’s hugely appreciated and as you can see above its already being put into great use in prioritising bugs / tweaks / feature requests. We’re now focusing on:

    • - Tutorial intro with dialogues to explain mechanics
    • - Tweaking flying to make navigation simpler
    • - Some quick framerate fixups
    • - Interaction with animals

    We’ll be fixing bugs through the week, with a big release and reboot happening next Tuesday. In the meantime keep firing in those ideas and see if you can get to the top of your friends leaderboard :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON May 31, 2010
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    Video Blog EP1 – Beta is Live!

    It’s time! We’re very happy to announce that the beta is now live for all of our Facebook friends to try out. While its still early days we’re keen to see what you think of the core gameplay and help us refine our ideas on where to expand the game.

    Read the Beta Intro then Click here to play

    (NOTE: You must “Like” Runaway to be allowed access to the beta, this will allow us to stay in touch with testers)

    Also see above the first of our video blog episodes which will be coming to you roughly once a week, each focusing on a different part of our development process. Let us know what you think and what you’d like to see more of. Also when you’ve had a play of Flutter please remember to fill out the survey. It’ll only take one minute and it gives us hugely valuable feedback :)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON May 21, 2010
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    Core and Character

    Check this guy out! He’s awesome, very happy with how our animals are turning out, which is what Emma and Mark have been working on for the last couple of weeks. They’ll be in the game and live for everyone to play with a week from Monday.

    While the art team have been heads down on new stuff, the coders have been iterating through the live build, adding features, fixing bugs, plugging holes, getting services and APIs to play nice with each other. We’re working hard to refine the core loop we have, packing enough stuff in to do on your daily visits into the world of Flutter, while making sure its all balanced and intuitive. I’m pretty happy with a couple of huge simplifications to the pollination design I’ve made this week which should streamline the experience and not require you to plan your whole life around when you need to check back in with the game (we’re looking at you Hotel City!).

    Jeff was unwell earlier this week, but is on the mend now so send him your positive healing energies and all that hippie stuff :)

    Some cool links:

    “Indie Game: The Movie” got funded through Kick Starter and is looking like an amazing documentation of the indie game dev spirit

    Mark is bigtime in to the works of Adventure Time’s Fred Seibert

    Darwin’s Beetle is both tireless, and ruthless

    Zynga and Facebook conclude their very public squabble, with a favorable outcome for our chosen virtual currency solution (Facebook Credits)

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON May 13, 2010
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    Refine. Test. Scale. Repeat

    We made it! The game is live on Facebook, all the elements have come together into a cohesive experience and our design focus shifts away from dreaming up user stories on paper to refining a playable experience. That’s a screenshot right there from the game playing, and you’ll be able to get your hands on it real soon.

    So what happens now? We’re going to spend about a week iterating and refining ahead of focus tests in house here at NHNZ. Watching people play through the first 5 levels of the game will give us some great feedback for ensuring everything is intuitive before kicking a version out the door for our Facebook fans. We then have a great feedback system for all you guys which will allow us to capture a ton of qualitative and quantitative data, all of which will mix into a close feedback loop as we iterate through the game. Through an 8 week process, we will expand the base of testers, add features, refine and reset the balance of the world, all in the quest to fine tune a fluid, rewarding, and meaningful gameplay experience.

    I’m personally very proud of where we are now, and hugely grateful for the supportive structure here at NHNZ which has given us the time to refine this game to be all that it can be as opposed to kicking something average out the door. We’re very lucky to have such an awesome team here, let’s get cracking on some serious spit and polish guys!

    Neat new things this week:

    1. The Humble Indie Bundle raise over $1 million for indie developers and charities
    2. Steam comes to Mac with free Portal
    3. Zynga and Facebook butting heads over credits and the constantly evolving social platform (p.s. we’re personally down with the whole credits thing)
    4. If Super Mario Brothers was made in 2010, it might be a little more social
  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON April 14, 2010
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    Visual Inspiration

    We had a really fun time this afternoon combing through our stacks of reference images to find a few defining pieces that we can use as benchmarks in this final stage of refinement for our in-game assets. We’re aiming to create a bright, fresh, and vibrant world full of light and colour, a magical place that people want to explore and spend time in. These images just captured that for us so I thought I would share.

    Since we love putting stuff on our walls, these are off to the printers to be super-sized! Also been listening to the soundtrack from Flower now it’s been digitally released. It is soooo good, if we can get anywhere near that I will be over the freaking moon.

  • BY Tim Nixon
    ON February 5, 2010
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    Refining vision and building pace

    What a full on week! We’re getting some great momentum going for the new year leading up towards the two big conference deadlines of DICE and GDC. We took part in the Global Game Jam over the weekend, which meant we started off the week a little shattered but still full of energy and insight after getting three games together over 48 hours. You can check out the games we made here.

    We then had Emma arrive from Germany after a grueling ~35 hour trip with 4 stops along the way. So we now have the whole team on site here and we’ve been having a lot of fun throwing ideas around while testing, breaking, and iterating through some of the mechanics for pollination and general environment interaction in Flutter. The weather in Dunedin has been epic, lending itself well to outdoor meetings and making the butterfly exhibit and the Otago Museum incredibly hot (35+ degrees on the top story). We visited this afternoon and got a huge amount of reference photos, some of which you can see in the Flickr stream (super awesome thanks to Emily Hlavac for her amazing photos)

    And we decided on a logo! Wow that was a mission, but we’re incredibly happy with the result and have just ordered some super sweet business cards which should be ready in time for DICE. Thanks Hayden from HAMR for such an awesome job, and sorry for being such a fussy client.

    This week also sees us approaching completing of the new rendered and level editor, which together with our new dynamic tree construction system will give us so much power in iterating through our level designs. We’ve had to be very patient so far this year as the visual and technical sides ran seperate from each other to establish solid foundations. Very excited to see the progress culminate in a new playable early next week.

    Links that rocked our world this week:

    This Global Game Entry is a real scream

    Sonic 4 (you can do it Sega!)

    My life ends when Civilisation comes to Facebook

  • BY admin
    ON December 19, 2009
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    Nervous Excitement

    It’s funny this whole game development lark, always a roller coaster ride no matter how much you prepare. A rush through anticipation to see the smile on a happy players face and the purest fear that your creation will simply be no fun. We’re running an agile development methodology that forces us to put the game in front of players every two weeks, and we’ve been brave enough to set ourselves a pre-Christmas deadline of presenting in front of a rather large audience.

    With only two sleeps to go until we show the game off, these emotional highs and lows are thrashing  against each other big time. It can be hard to silence those little guys on your shoulders when you’re trying to put the finishing touches on your baby, but I’ve come up with a simple strategy to deal with pre deadline jitters:

    The end of a game project is like landing a plane. Keep your eye on the end of the runway and you’ll be fine. Look at the ground and you’ll crash!

    It’s all about keeping things in context. Think about how much you believed in your game when you started out on the project? You should feel the same way now, embracing it’s long term vision while appreciating that every little piece that clicks into place is bringing you closer to that vision’s reality. Most important of all is the fact that by putting your game in front of people you’re making the most significant step towards a successful end-product, as either love it or hate it your audience are going to point you in the right direction.

    So if you’re getting a little stressed out about the deadline, just take a moment to remember why you’re doing what you do and how awesome this thing is going to be. And remember, keeps you eyes on the end of the runway.