Eitan Glinert writes, "Since the Penny Arcade post and Sony video a few days back we’ve been getting a lot of questions about our design process. So we decided to kick off a 5 day series on the iterations behind getting to the final design of Slam Bolt Scrappers! If you are at all interested in how games get made or are considering getting into game design yourself then this is the series for you. Enjoy!"
Cat writes, "After months of planning in my über secret lair, I'm more than a little excited to share that this July we will host our first ever Indie Games Month at N4G! A month-long celebration of indie developers and games, we’re giving indies main page N4G time with demos, trailers, previews, interviews, guest blogs and giveaways."
Slam Bolt Scrappers is a strange game. Strange in an interesting way. The basic premise is that you have a building area and your opponent has a building area. You then fight over crates which can be dropped in your own building area in a sort of psuedo-tetris way. When these crates are arranged into square shapes they form turrets that shoot at the other player’s turrets. Oh! And there’s different coloured crates for different types of turrets. Also there’s ninjas and giant robots. Got all that? Good.
Gamesta.com has yet another round of PC deals for frugal gamers. The latest comes from Groupees and their Be Mine 8 Bundle promotion that packs a ton of games for a low price. Just a buck will get you 4 games already, like the recently released Slam Bolt Scrappers. With $5 or more, you'll get Blood Bowl and more as well.
Eitan stopped by N4G last week ( http://n4g.com/news/723562/... ) and partly in response to the discussion here decided to create this series.
Hopefully developers (as well as those of us that just consume the games they create) will enjoy the posts!!
Also I am lurking here in the comments, happy to answer questions and feed trolls.
I have to imagine that working on a game like this and seeing it through to the final build has to be the most rewarding and sad moments when it goes gold...Since you know how much work it took to get there, but also had to leave things you probably loved behind to get to the final product. At the end of the day though these guys look at their game with different eyes then the gamers playing it do no doubt.
It does seem like the best ideas always tend to evolve through trial and error and building upon new concepts and ideas that come out of the process...rather than one stroke of genius though. Even taking the game places that they never thought it would go. Clear proof of that in this article and the other info I have read about Firehose.
Thanks for this Eitan.