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.
Pollen Trailer
August 7th, 2009
Just a few days to go now, and after hours of exporting issues we have a trailer video:
Even though we only recorded it a week ago, it feels like a lot has changed in the game. If you’re in Edinburgh around the 14th to the 16th of August, you can come check out Pollen and all the Dare to be Digital games.