Mommy's Best Year in Review: 2023

I have two and a half BIG stories from 2023 for Mommy's Best Games. 

The first is that I bought the back catalog IP from another game company!

The second is a secret, but it involves the next HUGE, original Mommy's Best Games production.

And the half story is that I built a full-sized arcade machine, from scratch!

Yes, back in June I announced that I bought all the game rights from the company Occidental Designs.

 

Occidental Designs office in St Louis, circa 1985

Most people haven't heard of them, but they made some truly excellent arcade and console games in the 80s and 90s. I want to right that historic wrong and get Occidental Designs the attention and respect their games deserve! 

One of their best games was Bumpy Grumpy, a fast-paced racer in which you are trying to get to work through loads of traffic. It's super fun, has a familiar, yet original gameplay, and is white-knuckle excitement.We are currently putting together a port of the game and will be releasing it this year to Steam!

 

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2411970/Bumpy_Grumpy/

Please wishlist the game on Steam and let me know if you would like to playtest the port before it releases! Just email me, nathan at mommysbestgames dot com.

In related Bumpy Grumpy news, I ended up actually building an arcade cabinet to showcase the game. It's based on some designs we found of the original machines, even though we couldn't actually find an in-tact cabinet from back then. 

I plan to do more blog posts about the building of the machine, as it was a tough but fun project to undertake. In the meantime, here's the final result!

And finally, the reason I've not posted much on the blog this year, and for the past few years is that I've been working on a secret, new project. It is a new, proper Mommy's Best Games project that is dear to my heart. I love run n gun games with awesome monsters and insane gameplay. And in 2024, finally, I get to share with you our next project. 

Time to get pumped for 2024!

Mommy's Best Year in Review: 2022

What did I do, in public game-dev view, in 2022? 

We released two entire games!

I know, I know, they might not be what you were hoping for from Mommy's Best Games, but rest assured, there was plenty of behind-the-scenes work going to prepare for big games to come. 

But come on, these are still pretty great games!

Spring Time

In the spring of 2022 I finished work on a contract I had with Girls Make Games. They had a very nice concept from a young team, of making an underwater exploration game. It's called What They Don't Sea, and it's about finding life in ocean, but also realizing that trash is clogging and harming all that life! I spent several months doing game and level design, and coding, and helping the team bring their game to market. It was released on Steam in November of 2022. Check it out!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2152030/What_They_Dont_Sea/

I worked on "What They Don't Sea" by Girls Make Games

Summer/Fall/Winter

The rest of the year was working on secret projects. But I also worked here and there, touching up Game Type DX. As I detailed in previous posts, it took a long time to get it to release to consoles, mainly because the game started its life as a mockery and commentary. As such it has lots of details about the Xbox 360 in particular. Which means Nintendo and Sony really flipped their wigs, reviewing the game. It took forever to get the game approved, but I love how it turned out. 

http://mommysbestgames.com/GameTypeDX/index.html

Our own Game Type DX, out now on all consoles!

 I spent a good amount of time adding new enemies, levels, and modes to the games. If you love a quick, high-score shmup with some serious 'tude, give it a play!

And into 2023

And now in 2023, I can say I am starting to talk to publishers about our next big game! It's super scary to be reaching out to people finally, but they are liking it, so that's encouraging. With any luck we'll have something to reveal this year (I hope!)

Thanks for a great year!

Mommy's Best Year in Review: 2019

Hey all, welcome to 2020! 

2019 was a monumental year for Mommy's Best Games.
We finally,
Finally,
FINALLY
released Pig Eat Ball!

Completely! It was finally released to all major consoles: PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
(Yes, it's true that it was released in 2018 to Steam, but the nice news is, the super-duper balanced polished version is out everywhere now!)

Thank you again to all who supported us through the development of the game. I've been working on it since 2013. I've always been very excited to create a true "arcade adventure" game, one in which it felt like you were playing in an extended arcade universe--and I think I've hit the mark with Pig Eat Ball.

The reviews have been great too!
We've got an average 80+ on Metacritic across all platforms, which has me beaming.

Alright I did get ahead of myself though--Pig Eat Ball hit consoles on October 18th, but let's take a look some other months.

January 

We had a big month to start off last, year--we released the 'Speedrunners' update to Pig Eat Ball. This had lots of tiny fixes to improve the flow of the game for experienced players, but also added some nice polish in general.

The work that went into this paved the way for great ports to console, later in October.

February

Testing, testing, 1, 2, ...3 consoles??
February was all about more testing and fixing console specific bugs for Pig Eat Ball.
For instance, we had a nasty hitch for a while, on Xbox One when you registered Achievements. It would slow down the game when it popped certain Achievements. Finally got it fixed!

March

Continued testing for all consoles, plus all the "fun" of submitting announcement trailers and store information to all 3 consoles for release later on. It takes a lot of work to get a game ready just for the digital storefront!

April

Excerpt from my work log during a random day in April:

"Nintendo complained about the controller descriptions, and some of the localization was broken because umlauts and other special characters were broken by importing with Unity."

Porting continues through April! Had to keep those umlauts from getting me down :)

 

Also big for April - we officially announced Pig Eat Ball would be released to Switch!

May

I developed and shipped two games in May!
Yeah, hard to believe, but in the background, I took a contract job to develop two educational games for Legends of Learning.
One game taught and reviewed probability for 7th graders (I named the game "Probably Fun" :), and the second game reviewed Scientific Notation for 8th graders (this game was called "Gobble").

Contract work like that helped even out the money before shipping a bigger title later in the year.

June

I did lots of art and code for the next BIG MBG game! Pretty much for the whole month.
Might not use any of this art, but it helped pave the way for the future of the next game.

July

 Worked on launch trailers for Pig Eat Ball. Very close to approved for all consoles.

August

PS4 Europe finally approves the game this month.  Pig Eat Ball is now certified for launch on all consoles. It is sitting in the hopper.

September

I secretly start a new contract on TWO more games! Yikes!
These are mobile games for the company Girls Make Games. Except.. I'm not a girl? Turns out they had some prototypes designed by girls in their summer camps and wanted to polish them up for launch. Here I come!

I helped design and program "Yume" and "Good Dogs Bring Joy" for Android mobile.
Google even featured the games on their store and we had some cool blog posts!

It took 6 weeks but we developed and shipped these games in late October.
(Yes as PEB shipped!)

October

Hold on to your hats, and try not to barf in them--Pig Eat Ball launched this month!

November

I start level design contract work on a secret game for another developer!
It's a paid gig, and not full-time, so I am happy with it as I can work on my own MBG games too.

December

I begin in earnest on a NEW game for Mommy's Best!
This feeds off the research I did in June.
I also continue level design for the other game.

2020

What's up for 2020?
I have an exciting, MOMMY'S BEST ACTION announcement hopefully coming this year!
All fans of run 'n' guns are going to be really excited to see it.
Talk to you soon!
-Nathan

Mommy's Best Year in Review: 2018

2018.
Finally.
The year we finished Pig Eat Ball!
I started the game in January of 2013, as a game jam project for the Ouya.
And in 2018, after massive design changes, and growth for the game, we finished our biggest game
yet!

Sit back and put yourself one year ago, and let's look at the wacky details of what Mommy's Best Games was up to in 2018.

January 

A secret is brewing!
We are approved to do a Fig crowd-funding campaign! But we couldn't tell anyone yet.

The soda-pop cans could cause you problems, but you could also solve puzzles with them.

We spent most of this month working hard on polishing up World 4 in Pig Eat Ball.
There are 5 GIANT worlds in Pig Eat Ball.
Each world in the game has many necessary parts:

• 4 Overworlds
• 40+ action levels
• Boss
• Mid-boss
• 4+ NPCs and their puzzles
• 4+ Disguises in overworld puzzles
• Pillbug centerpiece gameplay/puzzle

For this month we were bouncing around, finishing up the NPCs and the bosses. Here's a detailed post I did about how I design each gameplay object to have at least 2 uses/puzzle elements in the game.

February

Work continued on World 4 "Kitchen Chaos".

And the big news internally was us getting everything ready for the Fig campaign to launch.

The Fig campaign had many tiers and rewards

It takes a long time to create all the art and assets for a crowd-funding campaign! I'm sure you've read that before, but if you're in development, believe it! It will hurt your development productivity on the main game. File this under "marketing time". It's a lot of work.
At the end of the month we launched our Fig campaign!

March

While development kept happening, there was a lot of "promotion and marketing" work this month.
The Fig campaign continued, and it was hard work asking for money and getting everyone excited to fund it.

I detail my ideas for a nice difficulty curve. It should not be smooth!

I traveled to GDC was selected to give a talk on Level Design and Difficulty Curves. It was very fun, and I loved getting into the nitty-gritty details about design. It takes a long time to get a talk polished and ready for a big show like GDC though! I think I worked on it off and on for a few months! Here's the full talk on the GDC Vault.

April

Great news this month--the Fig crowd-funding campaign was a success. We hit our goal!
I rested easy for a bit there.

I also showed the game at PAX East in the Indie Megabooth for the first time! That was a good connection to make.

Stylish picture of my PAX East booth

We continue work on World 5.
Turns out we cut a lot from Pig Eat Ball, as it was simply too big already!
There was going to be a World 6! It's about half done. Maybe I'll release it as DLC some day or in a free update.

May

As we finished up World 5 core work, all the details still left to complete come in to focus.
Localization is a huge amount of work, and I find it to be a pain. I tend to develop in a loose style, adding a new hint, or bit of dialog here or there, to improve the game. That won't fly if you're translating the game to multiple languages! You have to translate all those bits. We had thousands of lines of text to translate for Pig Eat Ball.

We spent a good portion of the money from the Fig campaign on localizing to 5 languages! And now thanks for another deal, the game is also available in Chinese.

June

"A level called Dead Space :) one of the challenge levels in World 1"

More details to finish in the game include: cut-scenes, and "challenge" clams. Gold "challenge" Clams are to ensure the game has extra tough levels once you beat the main game. I love that feeling a big, full action-adventure game. You've maxed out all your abilities, and now you want a REAL challenge! This month was spent making extra tough levels, and fitting them into all 5 worlds.

July

We were finishing up Achievements, balancing all level "medal times", and generally playtesting and polishing. Each level has a goal of eating all the balls, but they are also timed, with online leaderboards to give you great replay value. Each level has an amount of time to beat, to get a Silver and Gold medal.
We spent some time balancing all these times this month, and finishing up the challenge levels.

August

Alpha Pig!
We announce the game has officially hit the Alpha stage, meaning all content is in the game, and now only bugs remain.
It's a mad dash to the finish!

September

I travel to PAX West again with the Indie MegaBooth and show the game.
The decision is made to limit the initial release to PC/Mac/Linux, instead of also consoles. Keep in mind, this is the first time we've supported Mac and Linux for a Mommy's Best Games release! It is still 3 platforms and takes extra time to support.

 
Many more bugs were fixed, and on September 28, 2018, we finally release Pig Eat Ball to Steam, itch.io, and Green Man Gaming. Humble Store followed later.

October

Reviews are coming in...

...and they're loving it!
I'm so happy and excited.
Reviewers are coming into the game cold and loving it. This is amazing!
I continue marketing and outreach for the game.

Some players are getting through the game, and asking for some balance changes.
Early in October we release the first major update, complete with a new Disguise to reward expert players!

November

We finally end up with an incredible 83% on Metacritic!

I continue to promote the game, but now we switch over the console development.
John Meister and his team at Super Soul, in nearby Lexington Kentucky, work hard to get the framerate up and the load times down for the PS4 and Xbox One versions.

Meanwhile... a secret, new game starts development.

December

Most of this month was spent to continue optimizing the game.
It takes a lot of work and focus to optimize the game for consoles.
For instance, when the game launched on for home computers, the framerate was generally rock-solid for everyone, 60fps and better.
But for consoles, we had to work hard to get 60fps.

One type of optimization was with the breakable crates, of which some levels have hundreds.
Originally the crates would draw their shadow, then draw the crate. This was found to be slow. So I reworked the art for the crates so they now have the "shadow" built into a single sprite. This allows them to be drawn with one call to the process/graphics card, which is great!
Dozens of optimizations like this, allowed for the good framerate we now have on consoles.

2018 Wrapped

Thank you so much for the support! I'm thrilled to have finally released this massive game.
Stay with me, and please do continue to help cheer us on in 2019, when we'll be bringing Pig Eat Ball to consoles. PS4, Xbox One.. and maybe one more console!

Mommy's Best Year in Review: 2016

Another year older, and what did we learn? Or better yet--what we did we make?

January 

Pig Eat Ball work continues. In January the work was focused on new gameplay objects and obstacles for world 5, the "Astro Farm". We worked on a sneaky gopher that can pop up and steal your balls, as well as a 'ghost dimension' that you can warp around in, to escape trouble.

February 

Matthew (programmer) continues work on the world 5 objects such as a balloon to pop and a 'suction modifier'. I work on the "game feel" for the getting-stuck-barfing mechanics. These are super important, so I spend most of the month overhauling them.

Also our mobile, horse-racing game Finger Derpy was nominated *twice* for IMGA awards, so that's pretty amazing!

March 

In Pig Eat Ball, I continue to improve the menus and the 'intro' for the levels. This now shows a special, super-low-res animation for what the goal of the level is about.

I also worked on the pillbugs in the game so you can knock them in arbitrary directions (not just up/down/left/right) so it'll be more fun to bump into them.

John Meister from Super Soul travels in my stead to GDC and helps show off Pig Eat Ball and represents Finger Derpy!
Here's the video of John playing with a group from IGN.

April 

For the first half of the month I continued to work on making the pillbugs fun to play around with. During the second half, I tackled the world 1 boss the "Accordion Centipede"! He took a while to make, but the extra time paid off as he's amazing!

May

Continued new work on the 'game feel' for getting stuck. Still working on making this great! I added new face animations to the main character to make her more expressive during this gameplay.

June

Added improved stretching and squishing effects to the main character when being stuck or bumping into things.
Added a 'Pac-Man' homage level to world 1 that I'm very excited about to have people play!
Traveled to E3 to show the game to various publishers and get feedback.

I think 'world 1' is finally finished!

July

Matthew started work on the world 2 boss. He's giant and complicated so this took a while! I worked on boring things like improving the in-game talking menus between characters. I also fixed a lot of bugs regarding switching between worlds and levels.

August

World 2 boss "Octo Tako" is finally finished and he's a doozy! Three stages of attacks with special animation for his various changes. He's a blast to play!
I worked on interlude story scenes. I also added more gameplay fixes the basic levels in world 2.

September

Work on world 2 continues. There's a new 'floor tile flipping' puzzle element to some levels we've introduced. Also the pillbugs can sit on bleachers and chairs and the player can of course knock them off! I added some mini-games to world 2 and special NPCs.

October

I added new 'inter-level' transitions to the game to improve the player's understanding of where in the game they physically were and where they are going.
Finished up world 2!
Also showed the game at the first ever "LexPlay" gaming convention down in Lexington Kentucky. It was a lot of fun!

November

Work starts on world 3. There's a brand new boss to be created for this world, so it takes several weeks to make him.
Also worked hard on the Pig Eat Ball announcement trailer! That was tough, but it came out great. Check it out!

December

We released a brand new, shoot-em up game! Yeah, it's a bit crazy to make another game while you're in the middle of a bigger game, but it's also very cathartic.
Emoji Scream is a shooter, but it's only controlled by screaming. Or talking, or laughing, or clapping, or any sound you make! You can find it now on mobile iOS and Android and PC.
Also please vote for it here on Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=817468967
Thanks!

2017 Here We Come

My plan is to actually release Pig Eat Ball in 2017. Things are looking good and we are currently working to finish up world 4. But there are 2 more worlds to polish! These two other worlds have the main gameplay and levels finished, but still need work.
So stay tuned, keep playing our games, and thanks for the support!

Development Year in Review 2013

Time to take a look back at last year and see what we got done! I encourage other indie developers to do the same. Really interesting going back through my notes, and seeing where I spent my time.

January 

From the 14th to the 23rd, I participated in the Ouya CREATE game jam.  In it, I created the initial concept for Pig Eat Ball. It started out as a simple, 4-player party game, but has evolved into a full-blown, puzzlish-action game. I worked on Pig Eat Ball throughout the year in between other projects and plan to finish it this summer (2014).

February

February 20th, Serious Sam Double D XXL launches on XBLA! Our first game for Xbox Live Arcade, and our fifth game for the Xbox 360.  I recorded several videos explaining the gunplay in the game, in an effort to get the word out. The game was published to XBLA with the help of Mastertronic and Devolver Digital.

 

March

We had our launch party for SSDDXXL at an event we ran called "Shave and a Haircut 8-Bit" in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. The show was great and we had an amazing turn out from the public. We invited other local game developers to show off their games, in addition to showing our own games.

April

Microsoft published Shoot 1UP for us on Windows Phone 7 back in August 2012. Since then Windows Phone 8 came out, but Microsoft couldn't give us a WP8 on which to test during the port. They said they checked it and the game ran fine. Turns out the game ran fine, unless you wanted to beat level 3. SIGH. Cue the bad user reviews for our game, after Windows Phone 8 launched. (Plenty of "crashes after level 3...1 star", etc)

So with that, I bought a Windows Phone 8 myself, retail, got the game running and found it was as simple as specifying a certain memory flag in a manifest file. MS helped us get a hotfix through. Good ding to our review score.. at least it didn't go below 4/5 stars.

May

Pig Eat Ball's early overworld map, that's since been scrapped

Pig Eat Ball continues to evolve.  At this point, a human player can control the first pig (Bow) while computer AI controls 3 other pigs as they battle it out in different game modes. I added a lot of game mode variety this month.
Also began work on an overworld similar to Mario 3, where you move around with tiled-based movements, as opposed to the free-flying in the regular game. This game has been very experimental for me, in terms of design. I've been working out a lot of prototype ideas, to see what's most fun.

June

Started intermittent fixing, menu clean-up, and port changes for Serious Sam Double D XXL with the eventual goal of bringing all the new XXL content to Steam again. The XXL content was added to the game on XBLA. But along the way lots of hacks were put into the code to make it work on the Xbox 360 (leaderboards, hard-coded buttons for menus, etc). It takes a while to clean them up.

July 

Starting to add the "single player only" levels, that we now have--much more fun to play.

Gave up on trying to make the game work always with three AI characters. Competing against them never felt satisfying enough to make a whole game of it.
Switched to "eat all the balls" as a single player game mode and it's instantly a lot more fun. It's got action, but also a slight puzzlish element.
Eventually dropped all the work done on the 'music world map'. It was cool, but did not fit.

August

Had a new coop, Matthew Barnes, start programming this month on the editor for the game. Prior, we only had text editing for levels. I've got him working on a visual editor for Pig Eat Ball, and he's turned out great.

September

Work continues on the SSDDXXL Steam port. Very tedious, but necessary to continue to diversify and revive cash flow.

October

October 21st, Serious Sam Double D relaunched on Steam with all the XXL content!
In Pig Eat Ball news, we hired a level designer for the game named Andrew Curry. He worked on some previous student games and impressed me with his design skills and concepts. He's since made dozens of great levels and turned out to be a real asset.

November

We got to travel down to Orlando to show Pig Eat Ball at Minecon! It was a pretty great show. Well done, plenty of people. Good playtest feedback on the game, seeing where people had problems, also seeing what they enjoyed.

December 

Still helping people on the SSDDXXL Steam forums with requests. Released update v1.0.2. Gotta support your games after launch. No fun working on "old games" when your new one beckons you, but it's good for everyone.
In Pig Eat Ball, after lots of reviving old code, the visual editor now supports all the single player levels, but also the cool game modes I had working months ago for multiplayer. Tons of new content being added.

2014

And now, on to finishing Pig Eat Ball. Hopefully by early summer this year. The game's evolved so much, it's been hard to keep the game page updated with the newest look.

Hmmm..updating the game page...that should probably be next on the list...