Mommy's Best Games, Inc. is an independent game developer founded in 2007. This is a view behind the scenes of our game development and marketing!

Nathan

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Blackberry Pie Chart

Recent primary distributions of my work time, past few weeks:


Most of my time is for something very special and (sorta) secret for Serious Sam Double D 
  • Game art 50%
  • Promo art 20%
  • Administration 10%
We also have two other programmers working on that, but this chart is just for my time. 
A quick readjust for the whole company is more like 50% code, 30% art, 20% everything else (I'd redo the graphic for it, but it was a pain! Probably next time.)

I'm also still doing a little clean up with Shoot 1UP Windows Phone 7
  • Final bug fixes 5%
  • Promo design 5%

Pie itself was mostly blackberry, with some blueberry. Filling was good, but the crust was a little heavy. Guess I'll try using less flour next time.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Shoot 1UP at GDC 2012

For this past GDC I was invited to attend as a speaker, giving a postmortem on Serious Sam Double D (slides forthcoming). That went great, but what really set the show off for me was getting to play and exhibit all of Shoot 1UP on an absolutely huge TV setup!

This came about quite unexpectedly and fortuitously as I visited the Expo Hall to see Xona Games and their exhibit for Score Rush on the floor. Xona Games had struck a deal with the Nova Scotia government to allow them to show their game in the NS booth space. This looked nice as Xona were showing games on a typical 32" widescreen TV.

Just across the aisle was server company Phoenix NAP, who had a large TV display showing a simple advertisement for their products. Xona Games started talking to Phoenix NAP, striking up a friendship and eventually suggested that PNAP allow Xona to show their cool games on the big screen!

Both quickly saw the benefit, the server company would get a flashy game to attract people to their booth, and Xona would get to exhibit their games on a large scale!

I happened to be visiting when all this started, and played through Score Rush with the Xona crew. After we finished it, they mentioned they had Shoot 1UP already on their harddrive, so they thought it'd be cool to play that together as well!

Lesson learned:
As I suggest in the video, an interesting, sometimes unexplored aspect of expo shows is how dynamic they can be. Make sure to make quick friends of exhibitors nearby, as you never know what benefits you all could reach within a few short days!

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Double D Postmortem at GDC


I will be giving a postmortem about Serious Sam Double D next week at GDC, Friday at 3:50 pm in room 135, North Hall.
I'll be talking about how best to work within someone else's IP, what it was like working on a Serious Sam game and what went wrong and right for Double D as a project.
I'll also probably talk about what's next for Double D and MBG!

Show schedule link
Get serious and come visit!

Sword and Sworcery

My gun-stacked postmortem is hammocked between postmortems for two HUGE games: the first is Sword & Sworcery, and the second postmortem is for a mystery game that is a really big deal!

Come for the comedy, stay for the learning!