Friday, December 14, 2012

Monaco: What's Yours is Mine

A little known fact about me; I love sneaking around in games!
From cutting throats of a ruthless, yet unsuspecting samurai warlords deep within their fortress to cowering in a dark corner to hide from disfigured monsters looking to kill me, I think stealth games are amazing!

I think it came from when I was a child, running around my forested backyard, climbing trees and rocks, pretending to be a super-secret ninja warrior or setting traps while imitating "Ahneld" from one of my favorite films, Predator.

Eventually, as my teenage years crept up to me, laziness, games, and 14.4 kps powered internet took a hold and prancing around in the woods, hiding from imaginary bank guards and aliens became less and less appealing. But that void of stealthy adventure has been filled time and again by different video games. And since more games are leaning toward over-the-top set pieces and explosions, stealth has barely whimpered recently, that is until now. I've nearly lived through my 20's and 30 is right around the corner, I'd say I need to regain that youth of the sneaky-sneaky.

And that awesome sneaky-sneaky I look forward to is Monaco: What's Yours is Mine


Monaco: What's Yours is Mine is a 4 player online or split-screen co-op stealth/action game coming to XBLA and PC early 2013.

With it's unique graphics, brilliant music, a colorful cast of characters, and game play that has been described by Bytejacker's Anthony Carboni as "quite possibly the best co-op ever.", Monaco is definitely worth checking out.  

Monaco: What's Yours is Mine is created by Pocketwatch games. Founded in 2005, this indie studio was first known for creating the IGF Grand Prize nominated ecosystem-sim game Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa and the subsequent game Venture Arctic. 

I'm gonna buy it. Just sayin'.

Until next time,
-Dave

Monday, December 10, 2012

Snowman Builder Game Development

Hey there everyone!

So as some of you know, I'm a full time student and part time social media intern.

Well, my internship was initially slated for "a couple of weeks" before it was stretched to 3 months.
And then 3 months came and went and now I've been an intern for nearly a year!

In that time, I've helped develop and maintain all of their social media outlets, develop and publish contracted author's posts to their blog, completely re-worked their children's site, along with create hundreds of art assets and photo-manipulations for web advertising across all of their sites. It's been a lot of work!

Recently, while being tasked with updating their blog and site regularly, I was also given the task to create a new game for their Kid's Zone site and have a release to go along with the holiday season. Now, as anyone who has tried to make a game knows, this is no small task. And on top of that, it needs to be developed to work with mobile devices as well!

So the game that I came up with that will fit in the tight dead-line and should satisfy the requirements is a simple snowman builder game made with the Construct 2 engine. I've made some progress getting it to work the way that I want, along with creating assets needed for the game.

Check out below! It's a screen-shot of what I have built up so far!

Looks pretty sweet, huh?

Anyway, I just felt like sharing this little guy with my tens of readers! I'm using the Construct 2 engine to build it up and I'm using a personal license that I got until the company I'm interning at can get me one of those fancy business ones! 

Until next time,
-Dave
(Yay for developing simple kids games all by myself while under tight dead-lines! Woo-Hoo!)