As promised, here are some gameplay videos from the finished prototype level of Pollen.
These four videos show a complete playthough of the level.
Don’t forget you can check out our other videos on our youtube channel.
How We Make Games
August 24th, 2009
Unless you’re new around here, you’ll have heard that over the summer I was working on Pollen with Digital Colony. The team of five was composed of three programmers (myself, Ian and Kieran) who had worked together before, along with two artists (Jess, and Abi who also took on the role of team leader). Our previous project, Some Assembly Required, experienced mentors had introduced us to Scrum and given us advice throughout the development process. Moving on to work on Pollen we had a fair idea of what had worked for us and areas we could improve. Continue reading »
Dare Protoplay
August 19th, 2009
Protoplay finished on Sunday, meaning that this year’s Dare to be Digital is over!
Although we didn’t win the competition, we got some great feedback about Pollen and the entire team is really pleased with our completed prototype. All the games produced this year were awesome, and it was nice to finally get a chace to play a lot of them.
It was also brilliant to see kids enjoying the game – especially to see them working their way through puzzles and helping each other choose which kind of bee to use. Even though the prototype took 15-25 minutes for most visitors to play through, almost all of the kids who started playing kept going until the completed the level.
While in general the public and judges told us they liked the idea, visual style and gameplay in Pollen, we found the biggest problem was with controls – gesture recognition using left and right mouse buttons. We’ve recieved a lot of encouragement to try and take the product forward onto Wii, DS, iPhone or through the XNA community which we’d love to do. Finding a control method which is intuitive and fun for every player, especially if we opt to continue using gesture based input, could well be one of our biggest challenges.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who supported us during the 10 weeks – it was a fantastic experience and made a huge difference to me as a developer. We should have final gameplay videos, a copy of the prototype level and a postmortem available soon.
Done!
August 12th, 2009
That’s it! Pollen is complete!
We’re just tying up a few installer and promotion related ends and then off to Edinburgh tomorrow for Protoplay.
I’m so pleased with the way the game has turned out – obviously it’s not perfect but we achieved much more than I imagined we could and the look and feel of the game has improved hugely over the ten weeks.
Look out for further gameplay videos, the downloadable game and of course a postmortem here shortly. For now though, here’s some links to Dare to be Digital (and Pollen) in the press:
and don’t forget you can check out all of the entries on the Dare Website.
Don’t forget to come and say hi at Protoplay if you’re around.