First: We will talk about N later in this post.

Second: The reason for our horrible failure to post in May is probably not as exciting as you might hope: we now have an office. Or, we will once we finish fixing it up and moving in.

The past couple weeks have been full of painting, assembling Ikea furniture, installing air conditioners, trying to figure out basic plumbing, and lots of sweating. Although now that the air conditioner is in, hopefully less of that

Here are some “before” pictures! “After” pictures coming soon.

What is the point of an office? After discussing this at length with Toronto indies who have offices, we are convinced it could help us to get things done. We mainly hope that a dedicated work space will help increase productivity and reduce stress relative to working from home. It will also have room for others to work, in case we need to team up with people or if any of our friends feels like working in an office for fun

 

In other news, the sixth annual TOJam happened a couple weeks ago. In case you don’t know what this is, here’s a link: http://www.tojam.ca/home/default.asp

TOJam is one of Toronto’s most exciting video game events, and has resulted in many, many memorable games. The benefit to video game culture is immense — the Toronto game development scene is very much indebted to TOJam, and we can say with certainty Toronto would not be as vibrant without it.

We were most impressed by the quality of the games jammers have produced in just three short days. Their talent and skill is indeed awesome.

We didn’t participate in the jam itself, but it was held just a couple blocks from our office, so we decided to “remote jam” and make something fun and small over the weekend. And so, we present to you a simple 2d basketball prototype! Compared to the official TOJam games, this one pales. But it was a fun little project and we’re happy we participated.

LINK

The controls are a bit awkward — we need more time to refine them

A fast-start tutorial would be:
-click in the window to set focus
-press tab
-press 1
-click+drag to pull back ball; release to throw

As you can possibly tell, we spent most of the time on the editor and didn’t end up having enough time to get a real game working; we’ve got a couple ideas of where to take it though so hopefully we’ll have a chance to revisit it in the next couple months.

 

And now we will address what, judging by the comments on the last few posts, is on everyone’s mind. Yes, N.

We are still on track to get this new version done this year, and will be ramping up progress as soon as the office is complete and we can get back to work. In the meantime, we’ve been making levels and planning so that we’re ready to start knocking items off our to do list. Levels are actually becoming much more difficult and time-consuming, because at this point we’ve made over 2000 of them and we’re trying not to repeat ourselves! Thankfully it’s still fun and enjoyable to test them.

The ragdoll has been rewritten, and there are a very few small things to fix up game-wise (e.g finally figure out how to make un-breakable one-way platforms!) but on the whole the rest of the work is database/back-end and UI type stuff.

We really appreciate your enthusiasm for N, and we hope this will be the definitive version. For the sake of our sanity it will probably be the final version, at least for the forseeable future (and notwithstanding a possible PSN version); at this point the game has become somewhat of an albatross for us, it’s a very hard first act to follow!

We know that we can eventually produce something that we like just as much as N, but so far all of our efforts on other games have been disappointing and frustrating… nothing is really turning out as well as N did. But still, we struggle on, because there are games we want to play which don’t yet exist, and we are dying to make them happen.

 

This month we leave you with something quite silly. Some of you may know Kris Piotrowski, a Toronto indie from Capy. A photo of him taken at GDC 2011 inspired us to create Happy Little Kris, a little pocket of ridiculousness that has been cheering us up ever since:
http://happylittlekris.tumblr.com/
Here’s the facebook page.
Happy Little Kris just makes everything more fun.

Filed under: dev, misc, n and n+, news by M&R