#toodxtuesday

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Oh man, did that not feel good. As a note, I did not break that overhead light.

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Too DX Tuesday - 10.8.13

Continuing with the idea of "the payoff", let's examine some of the goals we have for our studio.

Top of the list: make games that are profitable and fun. We are in the business of making games. It might be noble to say things like the money doesn't matter, but the money pays for licenses, new equipment and ramen. For me it also pays for building supplies, convention fees, shipping costs, phone and all sorts of stuff. So profit is a goal.

That being said, creating shitty games is a great way to not be profitable. We're pretty sure we aren't doing that. In fact, at the moment we're fixing a bad issue we've found in BF while porting it to Haxe plus tweaking some display stuff. Sportsball is in prototype + has some fleshed out design work done on it. I think both games are fun; I couldn't justify charging someone for Bosses Forever though. It fits the criteria of a good time waster, true, and has replayability, but it is niche to the extreme and is best enjoyed in very small bite sized doses (ala 1-3 runs, about 15 minutes).

After that's done we work on Sportsball, which will be our first release for sale. The (rough) timeline is:

BF done mid-october

Sportsball development goes full burn in December (Auston's other workplace is launching a game in November)

Christmas time = 3-4 fleshed out game modes

January magfest

Jan + Feb work on art and sound, have game releasable by end of Feb.

Work on DLC (extra game modes, couple features that we've decided aren't core) concurrently with prototyping our next game.

Release DLC in May, some for free, some for a buck or two. 

Count profits if all goes well and act on player feedback. Re-evaluate time schedule for releasing next game. 

See that bolded statement? That's the goal, the payoff. Everything else builds to it. That's also just the development side of things. My personal goals in no particular order, barring a few of the nitty-gritties:

develop 20 second pitches for next four games

build up fans

get the website up and running

pursue indie dev status with Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony; get dev kits

build a greenlight page for Sportsball

write a whole bunch of things for our game concepts that require story and plot, or at least dialogue

build some things, tweak some things I've built (iteration!)

throw myself into the gaming scene, the game dev scene, and internet culture because I stepped away for a while

and so on. These are all the steps to the payoff: count profit, act on feedback, repeat. By doing these things I have a job I enjoy, doing work that is both challenging and interesting, and learning constantly.

Hella fun.

Kuma Out(doing stuff, because I gotta work for that goal)

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Too DX Tuesday - 10.1.13

There are three big assets Too DX has (we've got lots of little ones though ^.^).

First, we are steeped in games and gaming. We love it. We are gamers through and through. We've built some of our strongest connections through gaming and we fully expect to build many more.

Second is our personal backgrounds and experiences. Auston's worked with some of the biggest names in entertainment and connectivity (odds are you would recognize the mascot of one of them if you grew up or are growing up in the US - we have a bit of a cultural obsession with them). He also knows a plethora of talented artists, developers, musicians and fellow gamers and that keeps him fresh on what's the greatest and latest. Finally, he's a seriously talented dude. Code, design, art, writing - he does it all. Plus he works hard.

I've got a background in business, finance and relatively boring things (like law and the administration of federal programs). I'm good with the tricky things. Where Auston is tactics, I'm strategy, to use a lovely analogy. I've worked in several fields including retail, photography, construction, accounting... I can't claim to be a renaissance man, but I have a broad depth of knowledge. I'm also snazzy and some have said I have .... swag.

Oh, yeah, the third thing: Our greatest asset is we give a damn. No, seriously, we do. We can't not give a damn. I know we both have nights where the only response to a problem is to fix it, now. I now there are days where I'm not doing anything but thinking about work. Even though I'm functioning in the present (selling things or painting minis, this past week) I'm not really paying attention to the particulars because I'm trying to flesh out scenes or I'll be doodling menus and maps. We want to deliver good things, things that are fun and exciting. If we can make anyone's life just a little bit brighter, we've done our job - and then we'll get up and go do it again. That's our biggest asset - we want that to happen and that desire won't ever fade.

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Too DX Tuesday - 9.24

Gah. I'm incompetent at life apparently. Kuma here, late, no excuses other than forgetfulness and no computer on Monday. But I want to follow the form, so four Thursday posts it is! 

Community, part deux

So, community means a couple of things to Too DX. First of all Auston and I are developers. That's a community. I'm a business guy - that has me in a few different communities while Auston is a programmer and he has a few that are uniquely his. We are also passionate about games in general, so we feel comfortable with the general gaming populace most of the time. Lastly we have the community of us as a studio and the community of our fans. 

I'll be honest here. We both love fans. Anyone who takes the time to talk to us about what we are doing, make videos about our games, review them w/e is fabulous. Mad props to all of them. This series of communiques by us is meant for them. We want to be open with what we are doing and put out content for them to read.

We also don't want to disappoint them by not getting games out. So, until I stop cracking the whip, I'll be taking over the weekly entries on this space and Auston will join me on Fridays (although not this Friday, cuz I'm in Indiana and busy). He might do a solo Friday, we'll see.

Auston is porting Bosses Forever 2.Bro to the Ouya and cleaning up some code. Then he's working on Sportsball. I'm working on ways to get Sportsball to be a big hit, to reach a variety of communities and resonate with them. Some of those communities are subgroups within the general gaming populace and some of my targets are outside of them. If you have any suggestions, feel free to pitch in.

If I like it, use it, or haven't thought of it, when the game is done I'll send you a free key. Legit. [email protected] - send a subject line with "Communities" and I'll read it and get back to you. I'm more likely to follow a suggestion if you give me contact info, but like I said - if I like it, when the game is done I'll give you a copy in whatever format you want.

Alright, that's enough about what we are doing at the moment. Onwards!

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This week is on hold

This week is on hold due to other awesome things going on. Two good friends of ours our getting married Friday. We're busy with stuff.

This week will officially be next week, when next week rolls around. Anyone with temporal problems report to the back of the line, in room 36C, on the Thursday of your choice, unless that Thursday is reserved for tea and scones.

Thank you and have a nice day.

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TooDX Tuesday - 9.10.13

Kuma

So, I frequently mention that I don’t code here at Too DX. I occasionally refer to myself as the business minded side of the studio. One might wonder what it is that I do exactly.

In brief I: set the schedule, look for tools, handle logistics, talk to people, work on our marketing, try to determine pricing, write  a lot of copy, troubleshoot problems, make lists, handle bank accounts, set up the actual company and continue to deal with administrative ties between state/fed rules and us, am the point of contact for any official questions, moderate our online presence fairly often, try to find inspiring things to show Auston and some of our collaborative partners, make food, work on design problems for trade shows, daily life and games. For lack of someone else to do it I also wrote our bossesforever.com website and am working on another one for the company main.

It looks like quite a list. Auston does more. My job is easy, then really challenging, then easy again - depends on our intensity of creation and what point we are at in the dev cycle. You’ll notice I bolded “talk to people”. That’s going to be the subject of my Wednesday posts for the next two weeks - don’t worry, it’ll be fun.

Kuma Out

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Meta Monday and TooDX Tuesday part Deux - The Auston Files

Auston wanted to express his opinions on this weeks topics too, so he wrote these pieces as well. He took a different approach to the ideas than I did. - Kuma

Monday

  Creativity is an interesting thing. Most people don't consider themselves

creative. All they see is their ideas; a stiched mass of things they have

experienced. But from the outside, the idea would look completely original. Creativity is just the combined vision of a person's experience. No one else would have your experiences, and so many people have the opportunity to wire connections in their mind only through your creations.

Tuesday

I'm constantly being inspired and influenced by everything around me. Even though I spend a lot of my time inside and making games, I have enough friends to ensure I get dragged out every so often and forced into new experiences. I'm grateful for it, as these experiences are the fuel that allows me to create. BOSSES FOREVER is pretty straightforward in its influences. If anyone is familiar with Megaman and Warning Forever, they can normally put the pieces together. But it's a little bit more than that. If some other game developer was to make BOSSES FOREVER, even knowing about those two games, that person would still build a very different BOSSES FOREVER. That person may not have grown up on Japanese console games. That person may not have the same tolerance for endless arcade style games. Maybe this person hates pixel art, and creates a whole new visual style. Although it's easy to call BF a mashup of Megaman and

Warning Forever (and that is a fine description), the game is also uniquely a TOO DX mashup of Megaman and Warning Forever.

  This is why I have no problem sharing my game ideas, a trait that's hard for many aspiring designers to let go of. They are concerned that the one thing they have is an idea. To reveal it would give someone else the power to create it. But even if an idea was stolen, it wouldn't be exactly the same. The so called idea thief would have a different background. Different tolerances for incomplete and 'good enough.' No two lives are exactly the same, and therefore no two creations of different people are the same. As a bonus, if someone takes my idea and makes a good game out of it, that's one more other idea I get to make. I'd much rather play my ideas with the fresh experience of never having touched it anyway.

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Meta Monday and TooDX Tuesday - PAXhaustion

Yo. Kuma here (Ned). While Auston was gallivanting around Seattle playing the freshest games around I did physical labor on labor day before playing Risk with some very good friends (+ a nephew of said friends). This means Meta Monday didn't happen. TooDX Tuesday also hasn't happened yet.

The theme for the week is "Inspirations". I even had a nice outline for a piece on it. It's somewhere safe (so safe I can't find it, lawl). So I'll freestyle my "Meta" and then talk a wee little bit about inspiration for Too DX - although mostly I'mma talk about Sportsball because I'M SO HYPED!

Meta Monday 

I'm inspired by almost everything I see, but not all at once. I file things away and come back to them later. Being open-minded to all sorts of new experiences while understanding what I like and dislike allows me to sort through all the cool experiences I have had to pick and choose aspects of each. Those aspects get translated into artistic projects of mine, whether musical or writing. I springboard off of things that inspire me to hit the ground running or refuel when I'm low on energy - maybe it's throwing on a dubstep playlist while writing a club scene or listening to some alt rock before hitting the drumset. If one took a look at my personal library you could see most of my literary influences but you would have to walk in my shoes to find all of the things that inspire me. YOU, the person reading this, the concept of you inspires me. You've invested in me something of your own (time, energy, money perhaps) and the thought of that is humbling, gratifying and inspiring all at once. Thank you.

Too DX Tuesday

Auston might disagree with me here on some of this. Kuma's thoughts only from now til he's out.

So, I'm going to be a little nitpicky here. There are inspirations, influences and derivations. In my view an influence is a work that you respect enough to model parts of your own work off of. An inspiration is the thing that keeps you moving forward and a derivation is copying someones work while altering it enough to be unique. Derivations ARE NOT (necessarily) BAD. Very few things are inherently bad or good - they must be judged on their merits.

BOSSES FOREVER 2.BRO could be considered a derivation of the classic series, Mega Man X. It certainly takes cues from it. The controls are somewhat similar. It also borrows heavily from some concepts of a fighting game - limited character moveset and skill = progress, limited playthrough etc. etc. I could add that hottest of new buzzwords "roguelike" to the list but I hate that term so I won't. Let's just say that death is more or less the end of a session. 

The upcoming Sportsball is much less a derivation and more of an amalgamazingation of awesome things. First of all it is heavily influenced by the idea of a party gaming session. Y'know, where you sit down with some buddies and thrash them at something for a little while (and get thrashed a little bit yourself).

There are multiple multiplayer modes in Sportsball, most of which are variants on standard multiplayer game modes. CTF is a standard game mode (there is no CTF mode in Sportsball, although if demanded we would totally make one). King of the Hill is another standard multiplayer match type. We have a super-fast King of the Hill-esque type in the works (pro-tip: esque is the most fun word to say while pretending to be a snake). 

Ok, so multiplayer focused game. How's it play you wonder? Easy. Win by crushing all opposition and pulling off a magnificent dumptruck run to victory.

Not clear enough? Alright. Sportsball basic mode is team based. 2+ teams compete to score points. Points are scored by depositing balls into goals. Goals are static objects. The game starts with 1 ball on the screen. When a player is eliminated, more balls are created before the player respawns. Players may carry as many balls as they can handle at once. Dumptrucking is scoring a metric-whoop load of points in one shot (dumping them all in) while relegating your opponents efforts to trash.

That's 1 game mode and what we lovingly refer to as Sportsball Classic Mode. Come see us at APE in San Francisco next month and we'll show you how it plays!

Did I mention that players can fly? Boo yeah.

Kuma Out