In the beginning
Bounce! started out as a fun project i was working on by myself, we were creating a fps game but this got closed due to our creative side got unleashed and we woke up one day and thought not another shooter. Bounce! slowly got worked on bringing in more workers from race-away and we soon had a pretty playable demo (check video).
Methods
Bounce! didn't have a great deal of design as we thought the best way to approach this game was to just hard-code features and experiment. This turned out great for us and alot of the content was just done by playing with ideas. We had a design doc about 14 pages long with ideas we throw into it but we were very flexible.
This method wouldn't work for a lot of teams as it's to risky as if your pouring money into the project you don't want to be creating stuff and scraping it. We worked to a insanely small budget on bounce! we spent very little and most resources we used were free ware.
Phases
In the video below you can see the phases we went through over the course of the year creating the game. We hope you find it very interesting as you can see that we have changed all sorts in the game recreating alot of the content over and over until we felt it looked right or worked correctly.
Our Top Tips
- Don't be scared to try out new ideas
- Don't be afraid to use Colours in your game
- Experiment with game play mechanics
- Don't release game to early (We got a little excited released it abit to early)
Best Tools
This is a small list of some of the tools we felt really helped to make bounce! look great and speed up development.
- Filter Forge 2 (Creating Textures *Costs £44)
- Code-Blocks (Coding *Freeware)
- Audiacity (Music Editing *Freeware)
- Tortoise SVN (Source Control *Freeware)
- Assembla (Source Host *Freeware)
We hope you have enjoyed reading this post and possibly gave you some tips & tricks for creating your game. I love reading articles like this on Moddb/Indiedb so i thought i would make one for bounce! :D.
We are giving away 4 free copys to the people that emailed us there user names for moddb so they can be in with a chance to win a free copy.
If you would like to win a free copy just make sure you watch our profile once we hit 200 we may give away another 4 copys or more.
Don't forget to vote or us for Indie Game of the Year 2010
Visit: Race-away.weebly.com
Vote: Indiedb.com
(To vote go to released first person shooter)
Thanks Alot for Supporting Us.
You used lots of freewares to create a nice game, really nice work with those.
Also, I need to e-mail you with my moddb user name to try to win a copy?
It's a little to late now the winners have been emailed there codes. There is always more chances to win another copy though. Once we get 200 watchers or if we get in Top 10 IOTY we will give away more copys.
Or you can just buy yourself a copy at gamers-gate or desura :D.