Blendimals

Young players at Buster Festival

Blendimals is not a kid’s game. It’s meant for 15+ people with an interest in puzzles. Never the less the graphic style has an immediate interest for children and so Blendimals is often mistaken for a kid’s game at first look. Because of that we got invited to showcase at Buster Festival, a children’s film festival with a media workshop. We expected the kids to be 10-15 years old so despite being outside the target group thought it would still be a good opportunity to try out the game and spread the knowledge of it. We were in for a surprise..

As it turned out Buster Festival had a run-in with another, slightly bigger event in Copenhagen: The world championship of cycling. They were set in the exact same 10 days and both at Rådhuspladsen, right at the center of Copenhagen. That meant major restrictions regarding car travel and parking in the center – and very few people at Buster Festival. Furthermore the average age of the children was about 6, not exactly an age we expected would be able to play an adult puzzle game.

That didn’t stop them from trying, though.

The graphic style was a magnet for kids with the goofy animals, sounds and animations. Most of them were so exited about the game concept that they kept playing and trying to get through the rapidly climbing difficulty levels. Many of them sat playing the iPads for ½-1 hour at a time. Often they even came back to the game after taking a round to the other stands. We were amazed that they would be so insistent in playing when the game was so beyond their difficulty level and most of them had to try a level 10 times or more to get through it. It got us thinking that maybe later we should make a kid’s version..? Kids rock!

So even though we didn’t get the audience we expected, either in number or age, we got so much input from the 6 year olds. We had brought a prototype with the first 10 levels of the game. The kids found lots of bugs and gave great input on game play, but the most significant discovery we found was that the game needed a much lower difficulty increase. It simply got too difficult too quickly. Inspired by the test sessions 10 new tutorial levels were quickly drafted to teach the player specific actions, and new help screen were also added.

During the play sessions we also witnessed all that is fun about Blendimals. It was a great experience for the whole team to witness first hand the reactions to the game. “I got a dog! I want to try the dog!” -The kid had just gotten a mole.

Sometimes a dad would sneak in a little play time

So where are we now? We are feature complete this week and then it’s on to build, tweak and decorate the remaining levels. We’re working on implementing the tracking and test distribution system TestFlight. It’s mainly a testing system to track actions that test players do in the game, for instance how long it takes to play through a level, if the player is stuck somewhere in the game or if the game chrashes. It should help us spot lots of bugs in the game and find out if certain places are too difficult. Furthermore the system makes distribution of the game to testers really easy. So we’re really excited about that. It should be up and running this week and then all we need is lots and lots of testers.. (Did you notice the hint? If you’re one of our smart, puzzle-loving target audience I’m sure you did – and can’t help but sign up of course!)

I’ll end this post with a big thank you to the kids who played Blendimals so vehemently at Buster Festival. You have thoroughly impressed us!

So, we had our first deadline.. As in things have generally been pushed because they have taken longer than expected. But this coming weekend and 10 days onwards Blendimals is to be showcased at Buster Festival in Copenhagen – and we had promised to show the new iOS version. A while ago it became clear that the game was not going to befinished by then, but then we set a deadline for a demo version and some requirements for what it should contain. That deadline was today.

The game has been almost complete re-written from the student version (which is one of the reasons it took so long) and several of the animal abilities now work differently due to feedback from the student game. For instance the blowfish now needs fans to blow it around. It was also decided early on to focus the game more on puzzle than platformer - you may have seen the earlier post about the level design. Therefore the game is in many ways different now and so we are very excited about how it will be recieved. Some of that excitement was released today as we had our first external test – as in testing on someone that’s not us..!

A blowfish-rabbit is floating around with fans guiding it. Lots of spike balls and other unpleasant stuff that you don't want to hit..! This is still visually a work in progress as the fans expell purple stand-in particles and there are no decorations except for the background.

We had 5 people over for testing and the focus was usabily and game play: Does the game explain itself well enough? Are the game play elements fun? How is the difficulty level? Stuff like that. If the game had serious faults that needed to be fixed before Buster Festival then we needed to spot them today ..and they needed to be quick fixes, as it has to be ready by Wednesday. We found that if you’re a puzzle enthusiast the levels seem to be both fun and challenging, but we do have some control problems in some areas. Nothing too bad regarding Buster Festival and we might even be able to make a few fixes for that. So a relief and a very enlightening day.

Next stop is Buster Festival that starts Saturday. Buster Festival is a film festival for kids, but it has this big thing called Medialab which is a playground for everything media related – there among a series of games being showcased. It’s both workshops and showcasings for scholl classes (during the week) and open house for families (during the weekends) so plenty opportunity to show Blendimals to the public. The weekends are the most busy in the showcasing areas where we will be, so during those the game will be available to play on iPads and someone from the team will be there. During the week it will be available on PC.  

So if you’re in Copenhagen drop by and have a free play of the first demo of Blendimals for iOS! We almost guarantee it’ll be fun (at least if you like puzzles) and we would love to hear what you have to say about it. There are lots of other games to play there as well. It’s at Politikens Hus and you can see what they have to offer at their website: http://www.buster.dk/b/index.lasso 

Anyway, the conclusion after this first deadline is that Blendimals is shaping up and the finish line seems to be getting close – at least closer which is a big step up from seeing it moving further and further away.

All the best,

Ditte

So, it’s been a little quiet here over the summer. That’s because we’ve been very busy. Jakob and Jacob has been sitting at the closets thing we have to a headquarter, in the Bretteville house in Aalborg. That’s an innovation environment for small media companies, where we got a free working space – thanks Bretteville! Jakob and Jacob has been rewriting the whole game, so they have had their work cut out for them – and still have actually, as all features are not implemented yet.

Ida, our visual artist, has made new interfaces for the different menu screens and in the game as well as textures for 3D objects and backgrounds and decorations for the different level environment.

Dennis has designed 55 levels for the game, many of them very complex and a real challenge for a puzzle lover. They are drafted on paper, then build in the game engine (Unity), tweaked and tested. I’ve added a drawing of level 5. If you’ve tried the demo game you should be able to understand most of it and maybe even solve it.. (The tube sticking out of nowhere in the top is where your blendimal pops out, and the animals you can use are drawn in the corner as well as the optimal number of blendimals needed to solve the puzzle.)

Production is still running high, but as school starts for some team members and the need for a money making job becomes apparant for others the efficiency is bound to slow down within long. I’ll keep you posted on how development comes along. Until then enjoy what’s left of summer

All of last week the Blendimals prototype was available in the game zone at Roskilde Festival, and according to our spies it was played A LOT – perhaps by you? Naturally we’re thrilled that so many people were having fun – especially because they were doing it playing Blendimals

To exploid this happy moment we shamefully spammed gamers with posters and business cards about the new iPhone/iPad version.

I’ve added a picture taken by Jacob from the game tent where Blendimals was played. Looks comfy..

Right, so after working on it for a while, the website is finally up and running and I can get back to working on the actual game, but first I wanted to write a post about the nice, free tools we’ve used to get the site up. I can pretty much guarantee that this won’t hold many surprises for those already familiar with setting up websites, but it might give some slight insight to those who aren’t. I mainly just want to give an nod of acknowledgement to the talented people whose work we are using, but it would also be cool, if this little writeup could help encourage someone to go ahead and set up their own website.

This website wouldn’t work at all if not for a whole bunch of people who probably doesn’t even know it exists. The short story is that the site runs on the WordPress blog engine using the Graphene theme, both of which are completely free and created by enthusiasts kind enough to make their awesome work available to the general public. WordPress is an extremely polished and easy to use open source content management system tailored for personal or multi-author blogs – meaning that it provides us with a nice and easy interface for putting stuff onto the website – and Graphene is a really nicely done and very customizable theme for wordpress.

Even though WordPress really is a blog engine, it works really well doing content management for all sorts of websites. It all depends on the settings and the theme you choose. You can have a look at the showcase on wordpress.org or the blogs at wordpress.com to get a feel for the variety of looks you can achieve with a wordpress blog. Oh yeah, the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com is that the first one is where you go if you are interested in the engine, downloading it and setting it up on your own server or web hotel, the second one is where you go if you want a free, hosted blog with minimum hassle.

WordPress straight out of the box is really nice, but in my opinion it only really starts to shine once you add a theme that suits you. As mentioned, we went with the Graphene theme since it gives us that nice news-slider thingy on the front page, is very customizable and – this one is important – is pretty. To give you an idea about the options provided by the creator Syahir Hakim, I’ve added a screenshot showing you one of the screens of the settings tabs for the theme itself. There’s two of these pages. Yes, it’s humongous. Apart from that you are given the very handy option of appending your own CSS code to the theme standard, giving you pretty much complete control over the theme.

Graphene demo site screenshot

Graphene options

Adding to CSS that someone else wrote for styling HTML that someone else wrote can be quite daunting, but fortunately Google Chrome – my favorite webbrowser at the moment – lends a helping hand there. If you right click pretty much anything on a webpage viewed in Chrome and click “Inspect Element”, or whatever the bottom option is called in whatever language you are using, you’ll get to see all the CSS code affecting the chosen element and can even tinker a bit with the values there. Given the cascading nature of CSS – allowing you to change the style by overwriting bits of it at the end – this makes modifying CSS much easier. Amongst the most important modifications made to the Graphene theme on the site you are looking at right now is the myriad color-changes, some borders here and there, a little tweak to make the embedded prototype fit on it’s own page and of course the inclusion of the Brady Bunch font, which is available at DaFont.

Chromes inspect feature

I hope someone at least found this interesting and that it may even have encouraged someone to take a deeper look at some of the amazing resources available out there. Don’t be daunted by it. Apart from having tinkered with some CSS some five or six years ago, I had next to no qualifications for setting all this up, but it still went relatively smooth. There is a ton of guides for setting up stuff like this available on the internet, you just have to look for it.

Also, while WordPress is a great blog-engine and CMS, it is far from the only one available. It might not even be the one that suits you the best, so explore a bit.

When Blendimals starts taking shape we are going to need some testers.

Would you like to play Blendimals before everyone else and help shape the game? Then drop us a line.

This week the original Blendimals student game will be at Roskilde Festival, free for all to play. We’re hoping to promote the iOS version there, so if you’re at the festival drop by the game tent

Our website is up and running and so is the production!

So far we’ve done a lot of hard thinking, held a lot of meetings and had way too much coffee trying to figure out exactly how we should turn Blendimals from a one-month-student game into a real fullblown (and awesome) game-game – and I’m happy to say that we’re definitely getting there!

Digging deeper into the game mechanics and finding the game’s full puzzle-potential has been a blast so far. Look forward to a whole lot of mindbending levels and even more exploding blendimals …Be sure to check out our website for updates as we move closer to the early september release!

-DN