Sept 4: The Big Crunch Countdown, Episode 4
The small things you leave to the end are always the ones you dread most, the very nature of those items are assured to both horrify and disgust even the most seasoned developer. Today, my small thing of a horrific nature was the polishing of the user interface. One afternoon is enough to make leaps and bounds of improvement, without adding more than a few K to the download. All that means is our user interface is pretty minimal, but deservedly so. The game isn't about configuration, it's about puzzling. The less time you spend in the interface, the better. Even so, I'm moderately proud that it looks to be one of the nicer ones out of the WiiWare games out already.
Since I finally got the Home Button Menu to work correctly (thanks to Nintendo's developer support team, who have proven invaluable over the past 6 months), there's only a handful of Lotcheck items I have to worry about before we can put Bruiser & Scratch through final testing.
Oh yeah, and final audio. Once the last few pieces of the content are in, I'm going to push very hard to crush down the assets to fit. Hopefully a week or less before that happens, but don't hold me to it!
Current memory footprint: 61mb and holding.
Aug 31: The Big Crunch Countdown, Episode 3
We've been doing Spousal Playtesting. So far so good. They haven't played the game significantly, so this was their first chance to sit down and dig in. Positive reviews, although the easy puzzles for one person are sometimes the hardest for another. Smoothing out the spikes is proving to involve not only the puzzle but the player--some folks will not do as well as others. The sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing the game will apparently carry some real weight. Most of the art is done, we're just lighting and tweaking cameras and so forth. One last model to put in, and a heap of Nintendo requirements for the programmer (hi!) to get straight.
Today was good. I removed a handful of screens that we didn't have a real need for, which brought our package down a bit. Some content will just be moving from a splash screen to the intro banner, so it's not a total win, but any improvement is noteworthy. We haven't turned on texture compression yet, which is probably what allows us to ship.
Current memory footprint: 61mb. 40mb looks sort of do-able.
Aug 30: The Big Crunch Countdown, Episode 2
Some of the puzzles are too hard. A couple of them took Alina, our junior artist, over 50 attempts. A little minor shuffling of puzzles and it's no longer blocking story mode for weaker players. Some of the puzzles may be too easy--hard to judge with such a small sample. It may be a good idea for us to put up spoilers on our web site every week or so, allowing stuck players to continue. Although that kind of defeats the intellectual purity of a puzzle game, I would be sad if there are players who love the game and the characters, but are precluded from enjoying the story. Then again, I don't want to dilute the sense of accomplishment that comes with finally defeating that level that you find really challenging. It's fun playing with a group, surprisingly, because in any crowd there will be someone who immediately sees a solution to any given puzzle, but can't figure out the next one.
I shared a bunch of textures across levels today, which brought our package size down a bit. Also trying to get the Home Button menu to work.
Current memory footprint: 68mb. Marching down to 40mb.
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