Where the squid at?

Oh, you squid so hard…

Distractions and troubles galore.

As regular readers will no doubt already be aware, I’m currently working(ish) on the follow up to SYNSO:Squid Harder with the blessing and contributions of the esteemed Mr Kevin Toms of Football Manager fame. Kevin has been kind enough to not only let me use an approximation of his visage circa 1982 rendered via QBlock but to also contribute some fine words to the game, all of which is absolutely fantastic.

I’ve mentioned it before but part of what I want to do with my games is to pay it back to the folks who inspired me. Which probably means at some point you’ll get a DesignDesign tribute too but that’s by the by.

I started putting the ideas and game together in September. What I didn’t count on was life going a bit crazy afterwards. Which given my life, you’d think I’d learn to account for.

So progress has not been so much slow but at a crawl for quite a while.

So, what happened…

Well, first up – the Eurogamer Expo was due round. There were a few small things Squid Harder related I was unhappy with, so I decided to have a tinker and change them. A few bugfixes here and there and a new title screen to attract a bit of attention. Throw in the slight panic over the Show & Yell (which was, admittedly, fun) and I found I was struggling to find the time to work on the follow up.

Then SYNSO360 dropped a week later. Suddenly, I found myself with the obligatory run of promo duties to do – videos to make, websites to makeover and lots of folks to mail. As anyone who’s ever tried to plug a game will testify, you can’t really go into these things half heartedly so once more with gusto it was time to crack out the Promomobile and spend some time contacting folks and things. Run through the sales stats to see if there’s anything that gives the game a leap up, trying to see what works and what doesn’t.

I’m pretty used to plugging PC games by now but the scope for plugging an XBLIG game is sadly smaller. That took some work.

Then to top it all off, a fortnight ago I ended up in hospital for emergency surgery after my appendix decided to throw a wobbler. That’s gone now (wahey) but y’know, I’m still in a bit of pain post op so working on stuff right now for more than a couple of hours isn’t very pleasant. Throw in my mind not exactly being in the right place and well, the amount of work I’ve done on the game has been negligible. Worryingly, it’s been a tiny amount a week since the week after I started it.

There’s also the small thing of writing it in GM8 so I can have easy access to the transparency stuff. GM8 still isn’t out of beta and I’ve had to work around timeouts of the beta version which has meant enforced breaks regardless.

In short, it’s all been a bit titsup the past few months dev-wise. Not without it’s fun moments (getting a mail from SCEE asking me to develop for the PSP being one of them, sadly I don’t have the cash or the resources to go headfirst into it so I can’t see SYNSO making an appearance on Sony Hardware in a hurry, sorry. If anyone who is set up for that sort of thing is interested in running with SYNSO, drop me a line for a chat)

Where to now?

Last night I threw together a build of what I had so far to chuck over to Kevin and got the shock of my life. I’ve not really been paying too much attention to the filesize but I’ll admit, I was quite gobsmacked when I went to upload the game so far and found it was 20 meg already. That’s without any levels built, no sound or owt.

I knew it was going to turn out a little bit larger due to the amount of artwork in the game but not a 13/14 meg leap when there isn’t even 1/4 of it put together.

Nnnnng.

Clearly, stuff isn’t quite working out here. So there’s only one thing for it – time to start again.

As I’m feeling a bit better these past couple of days, I’ve started drawing up some better plans for the game. It’ll still be bright, smiley, happy and look uncannily like the pictures I’ve posted here but due to the amount of time stuff has taken to bodge together to date, I’m already well onto the road of “what the fuck am I doing with this lot?” and y’know, best to kill it now and rebuild it before it all goes too far.

Naturally, this means that we’re going to be looking at an after Xmas release date for definite. Probably February before it all comes together proper. So y’know, sorry about that. If it makes folks feel any better, Squid Harder got off to around 30 aborted starts and prototypes before I settled on the one I wanted to run with proper so it sort of all works out well in the end.

Whilst you wait, you can always buy yourself a copy of SYNSO for the Xbox 360 and help buy me and Andy teabags.