Hey everybody, I thought I'd give you an update on Beat Me Up Too's status. The game is effectively finished. It's currently open to the public for beta testing so if you want to check it out you should head on over to Andrograde.com and take it for a spin! We have a comments section up and running so feel free to share your thoughts. Will especially wants to know about any glitches. If something freaks out while you're playing or level building, see if you can reproduce the glitch and tell Will what you did to make it happen. You can put it in comments or e-mail the web master. Eventually, you'll be able to find Beat Me Up Too on sites like My Space, Facebook, Kongregate, and Addicting Games. Oh, and if you like what you see at our little budding game studio, feel free to share your love through the donate button. Every little bit helps pay Will's rent.
Now that the plug is over, I thought I'd share a little end development info with you. At the beginning of any development cycle, there are a lot of ideas tossed into the pot, but not everything makes the final cut. Sadly, the backgrounds I made for the game can't be used. Will has a really tight budget for the game's file size to assure it loads and runs quickly. My backgrounds just took up too much space for this particular game. Ahh well, here's a sample of what I put together.
Another section of art work that was cut were my environmental objects. In level build mode, players get to literally draw in the environment. Objects can even be made to twirl and swing. In addition to this, I had planned to create pre-made zany objects that could be placed into the levels as part of the environment (I already made a pile of weapons and zany items that can be tossed around). Alas, there wasn't time to insert these sorts of objects into the code, so they were dropped.
When making a video game, developers always need to keep sight of the ultimate goal, that is, actually finishing the game and not letting it hang in development forever. Sometimes this makes it necessary to cut features you really think are cool. But hey, there's always hope that those ideas will make it into a sequel!
Related Links
Developer Journal part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7