Hi gamocrats. This has been an exciting (and long) week here at the bearded ladies office. After first round of testing we were able to cut away some fat and polish the core aspects of the game. Some of the key decisions that were made:

• “Colored orbs” from earlier dev diary were cut as they did not play well with the rest of the game mechanics.
• Control scheme for head uses initial “x for throw/stop/retrieve”. After having been through several others the original was the one our testers liked the best.
• Energy/Damage system goes to 100. H7 becomes “charged” (abilities improved) once over 50.
• At most 50 damage can be taken at any one time. So a player who have reached “charged” mode can take an additional hit.
• H7′s default jump length/height was improved since forcing “head bounces” too often slowed down the game to much. This also led to several revisions of the levels.
• Magnet was given a slight “swing” ability (from the original idea) in order to make it feel more dynamic.
• Energy (life) is used as ammo for the arm gun, giving players even more incentive to pick up the energy crystals around the map.

Now we are once again in production mode and spitting out new levels at breakneck speed. Our goal was to have a minimum of six levels per world and it looks like we should be able to achieve this. The jungle world is almost complete and even Japan is getting some attention.

We also got the music for the US world last week and the other two tracks are soon done. Note! This will not exclude Djdkdance’s contributions, we have something very special in store for those .

We will be releasing videos up until next Thursday (before “the pitch” challenge deadline), covering the basics of the different worlds. Below you will find the first.

As you can tell the gameplay changes quite a bit between the different worlds. This is definitely our goal and we are currently working on the distinct game mechanics for Japan. We are close to submitting the game to quality assurance so soon you will be able to enjoy H7 as much as we are doing.

Over and out!

The Bearded Ladies

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Hi everyone. Here at the Bearded Ladies office we are hard at work testing and tweaking different aspects of…

That is right, we finally settled upon a name. Thanks to everyone that joined the facebook discussion and, of course, congratulations to the winner daemondd1234. So we have started work on a splash screen (sorry we took the liberty of changing your original art just slightly )

When it comes to the testing and tweaking, our main concern has been the head, which of course needs to work flawlessly. One issue that became apparent was that the head slows down the pace of the game to much if we force the player to bounce on it frequently. This has led to quite a few changes in the maps to keep the pace of the game up.

Though testing and tweaking has taken a lot of our time, we have still managed to squeeze in quite a few new additions. H7 has gotten his second replaceable arm, a cannon that makes blasting enemies a breeze, so we had to add some new ones to get in its way; below is a list of the enemy units that are currently in the game:

If you took part in the last challenge (grafitti), you might spot yourself in the images above.

As of writing this I am unsure whether we will have a video in time for this blog post coming up. However we will have several videos coming out over the next few weeks. They will be shorter clips showing different parts of the game. We want you to see as much of it as possible so that you can write an awesome sales text for the PSN in this weeks “The Pitch” challenge!

Don’t forget to keep the submissions coming in – you can enter and check out everyone’s entries over at your local official PlayStation forum: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Scandinavian languages. You can also get involved by casting your votes over at the Bearded Ladies facebook page.

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Hi everyone! The time has finally come for us to start testing the gamocracy on others then our friends. This week we completed five levels for the first world; these are the ones that will go into testing on Monday.

Testing your game on other people and LISTENING to their critique is key to getting a good game. It is our experience that it is actually very hard to get outside testers to speak truthfully about their experience with the game. A lot of the time, testers will tell you the good things and keep the bubbling frustration of that second level down. So this time around we will make sure they hate us before going into our testing room .

If you live near us in Trollhättan (I know a certain game education in the vicinity that probably has their eyes on this), just drop a mail to contact@thebeardedladiesconsulting.com and we will try to schedule you in next week to spend some time with the game. (Don’t bother if you have to travel, as you can wait until we have more of the game for you to test).

Now let’s talk a bit about this week’s challenge. If you watch the video diary down at the bottom, there are more then a dozen references to people, contributions or comments from the Gamocracy project that are already in the game. We want more! We want this title to be riddled with Easter Eggs and references to everything about this great project. So boot up your paint program and get your artwork into the final game.

Now it is time to try and make up make up for not having a video last week. So this week’s video diary is a bit longer then the previous ones and it is packed with references to the project. See if you can spot them all as some will literally fly by.

Were you referenced? (If not, you might be a gabstainer).

See you next week with some footage of the first boss, the second replaceable arm, and the South American jungle!

Don’t forget to keep the submissions coming in – you can enter and check out everyone’s entries over at your local official PlayStation forum: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Scandinavian languages. You can also get involved by casting your votes over at the Bearded Ladies facebook page.

// The Bearded Ladies

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The moment has come; the score counter has been implemented!

Hi gamocrats, time for another update on the H7 platformer.

We have spent the week implementing the core game mechanics. This sadly means our hero is no longer invincible, H7 can now take damage. For this we decided to use a mechanic similar to the one suggested by DeadBrainPL in his first week entry ‘Loki’. Basically it is the tried and proven mechanic from sonic the hedgehog where the player has a chance to collect lost life (energy in our case) after being hit. Since DeadBrainPL was the first one to suggest this mechanic he will be credit for the idea (is “director of pain” a good enough title?).

Since H7 is an alien robot we went with an undefined type of energy (hardtogettium?) as our life currency. Currently one unit is always lost when taking damage (the rest are spawned as crystals). This number might change when we get in to testing our maps.

We also decided to get a bit creative with the energy and added some game mechanics of our own (we couldn’t just sit back and let you have all the fun). The first thing we did was to design three different “surveillance” enemies. These are pretty easy enemies that we mostly use to restrict how the player can move around on the map, but they also double as pickups when you have the magnet hand. Each enemy drops a differently colored “orb” when they die. These orbs can be picked up with the magnet and then be launched as different projectiles (functionality depending on orb color).

We also added an “energy overdrive” which is activated once H7 has more then 6 units of energy. In this mode he starts to glow and his abilities are improved.

His head bounce is significantly higher (we let the player decide what height by only doing this when the player is pressing the jump button while bouncing). The magnet hand can tractor the smaller “surveillance” units, which will then turn into their respective “orb”, removing the need to kill the enemy.

We are also considering a “charge” ability which would allow H7 to run very fast (and possibly through destructible walls) when being in “overdrive” mode.

We now feel that we have enough tools to shift our focus to building the final levels. How we are doing this was supposed to be explained in this week’s video diary. However, it turns out that David explaining collision
detection schemes and cache optimizing is about as entertaining as it sounds. So we spared you!

We would also like to point people to this week’s challenge, which is to come up with a killer name for the game!

Don’t forget to keep the submissions coming in – you can enter and check out everyone’s entries over at your local official PlayStation forum: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Scandinavian languages. You can also get involved by casting your votes over at the Bearded Ladies facebook page.

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Greetings, citizens of our beautiful gamocracy!

The Bearded Ladies are back to full capacity after last week’s unacceptable sickness. (This european gamocracy should really have better universal healthcare ).

So this here is a little of what we have been up to this week:

“Programmer admits error”

The week began with me admitting to a mistake. This is the first and last time this will happen .

The mistake(bug) in question broke old maps if new tiles/entities were added to the worlds in a certain order. This was discovered a few weeks ago but I pushed it aside claiming that we weren’t really going to make any real maps for a few weeks anyway.

Sadly those few weeks have gone and the art department (Kalle) was showing its fangs. So I had to spend the first part of the week rewriting large parts of the map and editor code which was a drag; but, like always, this allows you to add a few new features as well (iterative development ftw!).

After this “boring” part it really got much better. We nailed down some core design decisions (which we will show next week) and I got to play around with the winning entry from the last challenge: “The Magnet Hand”. I implemented the core features of the Magnet Hand and have working on level designs to complement it. I think it will work out great and we have some nice plans for it. One thing we most likely will drop however is the “swinging” part of the hand. We feel that the bouncy head already has the mechanics for most challenges where this would be used and restricting the magnet hand to vertical movement will complement the head better.

“Art Department is right… again!”

Apart from finding bugs, I spent most of this week creating art assets for the first world in the game. At the moment it includes rooftops, streets and a subway tunnel. All the sprites can be combined in lots of ways to build different variations of the buildings. That way I can easily add a new type of window or wall-detail to a building later on. The levels feel a bit empty as I still need to make the background art and more “stuff” to put on the streets to make the city really come alive.

Making new art is fun… if it wasn’t for that .txt file where every single sprite (276 at the moment) needs to be manually labeled with coordinates and other data. I can’t recall that in the job description!

Taking of my whining-hat for a brief moment, I’m really looking forward to improving the H7 animations (and tweaking the design a bit) and starting working on the art for the jungle world.

Don’t forget to keep the submissions coming in – you can enter and check out everyone’s entries over at your local official PlayStation forum: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Scandinavian languages. You can also get involved by casting your votes over at the Bearded Ladies facebook page.

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