The iradescent fun mine

Things were awfully bright and glowing in the old fun mine this week.  I largely spent the week working on levels for our port of LEGO Fever to the iPhone from the PC.

On Wednesday I realized I hadn’t actually done level design in over a year.  That’s kind of a strange realization when you consider game design your profession and level design part and parcel with that notion.  The games I’ve worked on of late have largely been systemic procedural systems.  The design all happened at the global level.

Diving back into actual level design has been great, if very laborious. You really feel like you’re making a game when you’re constantly tweeking variables and checking how they impact the game.  Plus laying out the general level flow for LEGO Fever has given me the chance to explore some ideas about pacing that I’ve lately found of interest.  Namely, I’m trying to switch up the gameplay style and feel every four or five levels. I want the experience of playing to constantly shift and evolve.

None of this is revolutionary, I know, but its nice to have some time to put some ideas into practice. The frustrating thing about professional game development is how rarely you actually get to make new games.

Gigaputt on the iTunes Store

Gigaputt, our new golf game has been out for about a month now and has sold decently. We were featured by Apple for a week, which boosted our sales 10 times over. But as many app developers know, the iTunes Store is a giant haystack. It’s worse than finding a needle in a haystack. At least a needle is made of different material. This is like finding a strand of hay in a haystack. You can find the ones on top but finding ones in the middle, well that takes some real perseverance and digging.

Here’e the skinny on Gigaputt:

With the flick of a button Gigaputt transforms your neighborhood into an exciting 3-hole mini-golf course, complete with popping manholes, treacherous fire hydrants, and giant coins.

I plan to have a more detailed post-mortem on the design decisions behind Gigaputt available very soon. But in the meantime check out the game. The post-mortem will make a lot more sense if you’ve played!