Little Bugger 1.0 [Gameplay/Features]

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

This shows what you can expect from the first version of Little Bugger. I’ll be submitting this build to Apple within the next week and will hopefully be live in the App Store relatively soon. (more…)

Why I’m glad Little Bugger isn’t finished yet.

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Just thought I’d spit out a couple reasons why I’m actually happy that I haven’t had time to finish Little Bugger yet. I’ve made a lot of progress but not enough to warrant a release.

The first reason is the leaderboards. Right now I’m using the cocos live leaderboard solution. While this is a great solution, there’s something to be said about using a solution which translates across many other games such as OpenFeint. So I’ve decided to implement this solution instead so if you’ve already played a game that uses OpenFeint and you’ve connected your device to the service the high score submissions will be automatic and require little to no effort on the users end. This solution also requires less custom coding on my part to handle all the score submissions. So if I did manage to finish the game months ago I probably would have kept the cocos live solution and wanted to switch it over at this point which would mean all the high scores up to that point would be lost.

The second reason is motivation. When I do manage to find some spare time I don’t always feel like working on Little Bugger or for that matter coding at all. So the best thing to do in this mindset – don’t code. The work will only suffer if you’re not totally into what you’re doing. When I really feel like working on it and get excited, that’s when I do my best work. So following this small personal guideline will only make the game better in the long run.

So those are the main two reasons why I’m glad I haven’t released the game yet. Whether you care or not I’m not sure but I just felt like writing about something. More Little Bugger and new game project updates to come.

Little Bugger Development Update

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I just wanted to give an update on where Little Bugger is in its development since it’s been AGES since I posted that first gameplay video.

I started working on this game back in March and after almost a month I had a rough version of the game completed.

At that point I put it out in the world and got feedback from a handful of people. That feedback basically confirmed that the game needed something else and more than just a quick play mode (which was just play at that point). So I went back to the drawing board and decided to add an extended play mode where you progress through 16 initial levels.

This was all fine and dandy but then “life” happened. By day I’m a Technical Director at RED Interactive Agency in Santa Monica, California. As anyone who’s worked in the interactive industry knows, this can consume a good amount of your time, including spare time which I would normally use for my personal projects and relaxation with my wife.

By the time I did have some spare time again I decided to put out an update for Closet which needed some issues addressed and new features added. So anyway, the moral of the story is I got distracted and I’m now back on it in my spare time and going strong.

I’ve decided to ditch the different difficulties in favor of one difficulty setting for quick play and a difficulty which ramps up across the 16 levels that will initially be in the extended play mode. There will also be a stats section which tracks various stats both for “all time” and on a per game basis. High scores will be saved for both quick and extended play. I’ll also be adding more bug types and possibly different ways to kill them if it doesn’t interfere with the frantic gameplay.

I’ll be posting more info as I get closer to the “for real this time” beta launch.

New Little Bugger gameplay video

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Creative Applications has posted a new gameplay video for Little Bugger. Thanks to Filip over there for the post.
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Little Bugger gameplay video

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

Here’s a video of an early, unpolished version of my upcoming game Little Bugger. Excuse the video quality…
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