Just a little update – I’m poking Reels of Steel again, experimenting with music and the general feel of it. I’m borrowing a trick from Rez and the way the music builds up in the first stage, building from a simple regular kick thud up to something more complex. Flash doesn’t actually allow you to stitch together procedural tracks in an interesting way, like Rez does, but I can combine basic drum beats and bass drones with occasional musical stings. So that’s what I’m doing!

I also now have Suicidal Torpedo Robot Fish.

In Vigilance news: I’m going to be releasing without a sponsor, so hold on while I drop in some ad code and set up a home page for it 😀

And one last thing… if you play Starcraft II, I’m working on a little pet project: a rule set for handicapping which lets stronger players play with weaker players without throwing everything off. I’ll be looking for beta testers soonish, on EU.

Maybe the biggest problem with not doing the art for a project is, I don’t get to make posts with cool screenshots all the time! I have to use placeholder stuff occasionally while I’m working, especially when I’m trying out new ideas. Like this placeholder font here:

There are conversations between the fisherman and tiger in this game, one per level. We started off trying something unusual; when you finished a level, the camera would pan left and up and text bubbles would appear above them with their conversation.

The problem was, this wasn’t really providing a good sense of closure when you finished the level. I had the conversation synced to a bit of ambient music to make it more interesting, but that just meant it was unskippable! That’s no fun when you have to replay a lot.

So I’m trying something more conventional now, with confidence in the knowledge that it’ll sort of work. I’ve shifted the conversations to the start of each day/level, and reckon the end will work better with a dramatic “clear” splash to punctuate success.

It’s a less original structure, but don’t knock it if it works, right? 😀 Now I’m building the game back up in this style, and it should come together more easily.