It's Been A While

Would you believe it - turns out it's been over a year since I bloggerised anything here. How rubbish! And also thoroughly unsurprising if you look at the Hungry Software news page. But there you go. If memory serves, I actually got half way through writing another article about Out Of Order but didn't particularly like the way it was going. It was about the puzzles in the game, which made it interesting (in both theory and my mind, at least) but which was also a big part of the problem... when coming up with the puzzles I'd tried to be very varied, so anyone playing the game wouldn't wind up thinking "Oh, another one of these..." and so it was pretty tricky to talk about them in broad strokes. Oh well. I've still got it saved somewhere on my machine and can revisit (and perhaps even finish) it at some point if I, or anyone else, thinks there's a need for it.

If you can't wait that long, then here's the concise version: most of the puzzles in Out Of Order were based on me thinking about a problem the player character would face, working out how he could solve the problem, then providing the things he needed somewhere in the game world rather than thinking "What's the player going to have on him at this point" and then coming up with a bonkers way of putting it to some use. Which is why he spends a great chunk of the game wandering around with an empty CD case and a doorhandle. In some cases, puzzles were directly taken from the real world. I genuinely worked somewhere with a numerical lock on the door which went 'click' when you pressed the right number and 'clunk' when you got it wrong and the device reset.

Anyway, I digress. It's been a while since I wrote about anything gamesy here because it's been a while since I did anything gamesy on my own worth writing about. But that's just changed. Because since around Easter 2010 I've been putting a few hours a week of my spare time, with the TV on in the background, working on getting an iPhone game made. And now it's been released. It's called Ballpit. It's available here. You can play it. It's very good.

More Ballpit stuff may or may not appear here in the near or far future, depending on whether having a new product to talk about makes me want to waffle any more regularly than Out Of Order did. Stay tuned! And in the meantime, play my new game and let me know what you think... any and all feedback is much appreciated.