Everyone’s been sick, especially our poor hard-working programmers. As a result we’re behind schedule. We’ve been skyping a lot from our sickbeds, trying to keep up with everything that needs to be done. On Monday, we had a process follow-up under the guidance of Sofia were we talked about how we feel working with each other. It felt really good and energizing as usual.

I’ve been drawing a lot, not feeling very confident with the result. Still, I really want to get better at graphic design and illustration and now is the time to practice. It feels good not to have to answer to client this time, everyone can focus on doing their thang.

Our game is starting to take shape: after several revisions concerning game structure, design, story, and wasting a mass amount of paper, we have finally reached the production phase. Despite these last days  setbacks – both developers ill but working bravely from their sickbed- we’re doing quite fine.  Agnes has written her hands bloody to complete the game story, Andy has worked the whole night with the Facebook database and Hanna has written several PHP functions. But what about me?

My list of tasks for today looked something like this:
- Copy: Editing mini games (those you need to play to progress in the game), there’ll be aprox. 100 of them
- Data entry: Add mini games into the database
- Graphic/UI design: Mock-ups for the game interface
- Project management: Checking with my team/progress

Can’t wait to get my hands on the alpha version.

Cheers

By: Anne Küther

The project is progressing nicely, but it’s a lot harder to develop a murder mystery game than the halloween app we made last week. I’m now in charge of plot and character design, which is a huge part of the overall enjoyment people will expect from the game. Yesterday I realized that – contrary to my previous beliefs – I suck at drawing, at least with a wacom tablet. I’ll give character design another go soon – with a pencil this time.

The programmers have had their hands full too, as the restrictions regarding app-development for facebook is arbitrary and constantly offers new challenges. As I sometimes review video games  for an online magazine, I now feel a little ashamed of the ease with which I have disregarded certain titles as “bad”. It’s not like I could make a better game myself.

By: Agnes Günther

Do developers like Facebooks apps & database?…

The last couple of days me and Andy have been working a lot on the concept for our new game, while considering what we actually can to technically in the short time we have. We’ve talked in the group and decided to cut some of the features to be able to make it a complete, playable game in time. The biggest change is probably the one from multiplayer to singleplayer. At first we were planning to make more of a co-op game, but since Facebook requries all applications to be usable without inviting your friends, we are now aiming the game at one player, with the hope of developing it further in the future.

I’ve realized that game concept and design is a lot harder that you would think. Especially for the genre we chose for our game where everything needs to fit together perfectly. It’s been fun and I’ve learned much, but it feels great to get back to programming again. We started with the development today and are continuing with it tomorrow. The biggest challenge right now is building the database using Facebooks data store. Their databases are a bit different from the MySQL ones we’re used to, but we think can use them for our game. Otherwise our solution will probably be to use our own database outside of Facebook.

By: Hanna Nygård Hollström

had a great feedback meeting with Mika Lepistö this morning

We officially released our first Facebook app Trick, no treat! this Friday, just in time for Halloween.  We decided to develop this app to learn the basics of developing applications for Facebook, since neither me nor Hanna have developed for Facebook before. Even though there is much lacking in the documentation and tutorial department for Facebook app development it has been a great experience. We are working on some minor updates to our app such as some design changes, possibly new tricking weapons and some other minor features, but our main focus will now be on the main game which we will start development on next week.

By: Andreas Miller

testing, testing, testing our facebook app “Trick, no treat”. Check it out: http://apps.facebook.com/tricknotreat/

Yeah, first tweet…score

Today  is the deadline for our first Facebook app “Trick, no treat!”. It’s already working nicely and only few bug fixes are left. This means that we’re going through heavy testing today and annoying our friends on Facebook, flooding their walls and notifications with Trick, no treat! messages. But isn’t it worth it?

Cheers

By: Anne Kuether