Critter Flux: The Story So Far…
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Last year around this time I was working on Zombie Crawler with the Molamola team in preparation for Gotland Game Conference. This year, I’m with a new group of five students and together we’re developing a game for android devices called Critter Flux. It’s all very exciting and rewarding work; Not to mention completely and utterly terriying, the weeks are flying by and we’re closing in little by little on the dreaded deadline… Once again I am in the role of Lead Designer on the project and already our initial idea for the game has gone through many changes since we began production. It has been somewhat of a struggle to gain a good grasp of the core of our game, we’ve been wanting to implement a lot of very different features and mecanics. For example, we wanted evolution and genetics to be a big part of the game-play and mechanics, that the monster would evolve and change through breeding with other critters. We wanted the game to be online and multiplayer, for the players to be able to connect to one another and interact with each other’s monsters. As we presented our game to be Alpha-tested, it became painfully obvious that our game lacked a clear identity, we wanted too much. As we started cutting features out and scaling our project down, I realised the true meaning of the expression “killing your darlings” and why it’s such a good idea! It allowed us to refine our project and give it direction. The features we chose to keep can now be properly explored and hopefully developed to their fullest potential. Critter Flux now has a personality and aim, we are building a Tamagotchi-like game which centers around taking care of your creature, taking care of it involves taking walks with it for excercise which is good for the pet and the player alike! This may sound like a glorified stepcounter but please, bare with us. I’ll keep you updated with our progress, next time I’ll be writing about my work as a graphical artist. Meanwhile you can follow us here on Facebook!  |
