Blog

Camera Obscura Early Gameplay Video

As promised, the game now has all the significant animations implemented, so here's a video!

Camera Obscura Screenshots

Got some screenshot of Camera Obscura with our new player sprites. I plan to show a video as soon as all the frames are done.

In other news, the Video Game Development Club just released its first for-sale game on XBox Live! The game is Nucleon - it's a pretty intense puzzle/arcade/action game and several of the people on the Camera team are addicted to it. Check it out here (it's only a dollar!). We've very interested in seeing how it does - personally I think that XBox Live gives indie games the short end of the stick. All indie games on the marketplace are only a dollar, which puts some honestly bad games on par with well-done ones like Nucleon and the surprisingly addictive and interesting I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1, but we're still interested to see how Nucleon does.

Camera Obscura Update

Thought I should post what kind of progress is being made on Camera Obscura, as that is my focus as far as game programming right now. We just won $100 at UCI's Game Jam Popular Choice competition, at which 40-something people voted our game as one of the best shown (the second place team received 27 votes!) This should cover the fees associated with the game's eventual publication to XBox Live. Programming progress is quite good - we've fixed almost every known bug, and polished up a lot of the early levels to help teach players the game's mechanics.

Inspiration for this part of the game is coming from games such as Portal and Braid: we want to ease the player into each of the game's mechanics, making him or her figure out how they work, guiding them to the solution and slowly giving them more and more to think about on their own. And we want to make absolutely minimal use of text boxes: show, don't tell.

Nonfunctional Games

It seems that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 broke all games made in DarkBASIC Pro, which would include all of those posted here. I'll need to recompile all of them with the fixed DBP compiler and reupload them. If you get an error saying that the "parameter is invalid", try downloading the game again.

Game Jam Press and Camera Obscura Download

The UCI Game Jam was featured rather prominently in the Orange County Register this week, and my team (Rainbow Dice Games) was interviewed for the article (though I was at class). They provided download links for the four completed games that came out of the competition, so I guess I can't hide that any more: link! Remember that this is one week of work, and we plan to continue improving our game possibly into something saleable.