Wow, Friday almost flew right past me. I’ve been working on Outwitters practically non-stop. A lot of the major ‘components’, as I like to think of them, have been figured out and implemented in some sort of fashion. Now I have to make this big herculean effort to get it all integrated and seamless:
- 1v1 and 2v2 pass-n-play
- A couple of teams and their animations and unique powers
- The ever crazy complicated (implementation-wise) UI
- Asynchronous play using Google App Engine
Aside from team animations/powers, all those things exist in kind of their own isolated ‘prototypes’ in one way or another, and now I’m trying to get it all under one “roof”. Our 1v1 and 2v2 pass-n-play are fully functional. We’ve had a few playtests of the 2v2 game mode with family and friends and it’s been a sigh of relief to see them genuinely enjoying themselves. Sometimes, you don’t have to look at the actual game to see if the player is ‘getting it’, just looking at their laughing faces as they all play against each other is vindication enough that you’re on the right track. The bigger task at hand his trying to make this game as close to engaging as possible in the asynchronous model as it is when in a small group of players. Realistically, we’ll never achieve that, but it’s something to shoot for.
In other news, I got my standing desk in the beginning of this week and I’ve just finished my first week of ‘standing’ while I work with my new desk. I tried it out first for a week with a small glass-top high breakfast table and liked it enough to invest in an actual standing desk. Of course, I’d like to sit in the evenings so having something adjustable is extremely handy. Noel Lllopis had mentioned his foray into this work style a while back, so I took his and several other dev’s recommendations and went with a GeekDesk, and I’m loving it. With just a couple of weeks of doing it, my back doesn’t feel completely owned every morning when I wake up (I have a bad sitting posture). I find that whenever I’m brainstorming, or thinking about a problem I tend to pace around the room or go to my whiteboard to draw stuff up. While standing, this feels a lot more natural and I tend to move around a bit more during the day. Another plus, is during the mornings I’m finding I’m a little more focused on getting through some of the less enjoyable parts of the job like managing money, bug hunting, etc.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much else to share at the moment other than Outwitters is shaping up to be pretty freaking cool. Only time will tell if we’ll be alone in that opinion.