Hey all, I've got a forum poll set up to vote on a challenge for the upcoming Game Jam.

ROCK THE VOTE!

Hey all,

I know I've been MIA for a bit, and I apologize. I've been a pretty busy guy lately.

That Game Jam

I nearly have the upcoming Game Jam work done, so expect that soon. I've been dragging my feet on it not because the site code is too overwhelming, but that it takes quite a bit of work to promote it on other sites and get the word out. It's possible that I'd start the jam and just let you guys spread the word. It'll be another 2 week jam, with a thoughtful challenge. 

The Stagnation

One major thing that's been a demotivator is that the site just isn't picking up much traction. I've put a lot of work into this place, and adding new features and cleaning stuff up feels like a hollow victory when site activity doesn't increase. Turns out, marketing a website is tough, tough work. 

Right now, only about 12% of registered users are 'active', meaning they logged in at some point in the last week. 41% of registered users have never returned after registering. 

Solving this issue and increasing activity has to be a priority for me. The site, being a social network, depends on an active userbase to grow. We're not exactly a ghost town, but for the site to achieve its primary purpose, there needs to be more hustle and bustle in the streets of Develteam.

What *is* the Primary Purpose?

This is a good question. I view the site have three main channels. 

1) To build development teams

2) To talk about game development

3) To show of work in progress.

TigSource pretty much dominates point 2, and IndieDB dominates point 3. It's hard to compete with these sites, especially when they already have deeply established communities. Not to mention, those sites are built and maintained by more than one person

This makes me think I should rework and tighten Develteam up to focus on point 1. However, I notice a majority of the activity here is focused on point 3.

Tightening Develteam's Focus

This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit. 

My main idea to achieve this is a drastic one. I'm thinking that I should disable the site forums (Game Projects and Devteams would still have their own forums), disable the Incubator, disable the Brainstorms, and disable the Industry News and Podcast pages. The site forums are mostly active for two purposes: reporting site issues, and classifieds. Removing the forums would mean that I'd replace it with a dedicated Classifieds engine, which would work with the idea of retooling the site to focus on forming dev teams.

These are just some ideas I'm kicking around. Let me know what you think or if you have any ideas.

Chapter 4 is coming up and when it will be released is completely dependent on how much more time we need to get all the art sorted out, but that shouldn't be long any more. I strive to get the release done between Oct 10 - 17, but as always I cannot yet make promises.

As when it comes to coding and scripting there's not much to do any more and most of the bugs are fixed by now, I can come up with the changelog:

 

• First of all a brand new chapter has been added to the game (duh)
• Two new cities have been added to the game: Felixium and Rayal.
• 7 new dungeons have been added of which one contains 4 subdungeons, making a grand total of 11.
• 13 new boss fights have been added + one optional boss, making a grand total of 14
• The "red number" bug has been fixed, now it will only show red numbers when you hit an enemy in their weakness
• A bug causing the game to crash when any of the characters reached the maximum level has been fixed.
• A few older content bosses have been nerfed, most of all because it took too much time to beat them. Too much time to beat a boss is neither difficult nor challenging, but just plain boring, so that's why I nerfed those.
• A few minor modifications have been made to the underlying LAURA engine for more optimal possibilities for me to work with.
• A new playable character has been added to the game, who will join the game temporarily. I cannot say anything about this character as that would be a pretty serious spoiler
• New items have been added to the game: Super Carrot, Super Salve and Ambrosia. All three are extremely valuable and except for a few rare occasions you can only obtain these items through stealing, so that means that Merya will have to be put into action.
• The jewel system now fully works, and they can be used to ward yourself against status ailments. This also means that the emerald hidden in the madhouse now fully works
• During battle the character for whom you are entering his or her moves will now appear on screen with portrait.
• Scyndi will now be able to get two more gods allowing her to make her list complete.
• I'm not going to list all NPCs added to the new chapter, but Scharum is a very notable one. Challenge him to a battle and if you win you can obtain a new spell/special move. All battles are one-on-one and the character you will have in the lead will fight him, and get the reward spell if you defeat him.
• Of course, the story goes on, and Eric's secret will be revealed at last. This secret also brought some work for me, but I cannot tell you about it as that would spoil the game.
• A bug causing the game to crash if you exceeded 24 hours of gameplay has been fixed.
• A load of new achievements have been added, too many to name them all here.

Some more stuff is done, but this summarizes most of the new stuff.

I'll soon make the achievement list and I hope I can come up with the official ETA soon.

The multiverse has been crushed into a ball the size of Pasadena and it's all this guy's fault. And now he's the only hope for what's left of the universe. Too bad he doesn't give a damn.

The first LampWave Studio experience, developed on Unity 3D

Play on Facebook:

https://apps.facebook.com/sunny-rush/

Android:

http://bit.ly/1uWOkMo

IOS:

http://bit.ly/1uWOnYD

Hi guys, i have an idea for few projects and looking for people who want to put in some time and collaborate towards the same goal. I myself is learning programming, and work as a qa/manager for webplatform. However, i always wanted and will want to make games. I am looking for same minded people who want to put a team together, primarily i am looking for artists. In case you want to dive into a game dev together let me know here or on skype bankai46, we can disucss future plans/etc etc. I am not going to discuss my project in here, but first few projects will be short terms and mostly educational. Hope to hear from some great people. 

It's been awhile since I updated you last. This doesn't mean the project is dead though. On the contrary actually, a lot of work has been done while you didn't see me around here. And I even worked at night to get things done.

The current state of things is that the scenario and scripting for chapter 4 is basically all done and currently I am working to search for bugs and fix them. Pretty soon I also plan to make the walkthrough up-to-date, but as tradition goes it won't be updated on the website until a few weeks after the chapter 4 release itself. 

The artwork got a bit behind as the artist went on a vacation for 2 weeks. And this is why I cannot say how long things are going to take. I don't want him to rush things just to come up with a quick release, so I must ask for your patience here. Even though this new release is still alpha, we do want to show you some improvements.

And if you've been following this project for awhile you know what it means when chapter 4 is released. Yup, that will mean the final chapter will enter the development stage. This stage of the development will take looooooong. I know that's not a good sale's pitch, but I am not a salesman, thus I value honesty. Chapter 5 itself is not planned to be a long chapter, but the extra features you can get when starting a "New Game+" will also be put in this release, and actually that release is supposed to be the "final" release, well as far as "final" is true, as I will keep bugfixing the game if I need to, of course. This means that before chapter 5 is gonna be released a few more things than with the releases I made so far have to be done. 

For starters, the game needs to be beta-tested thoroughly and this can take awhile. Next, the game needs to be fully spellchecked and preferably not by myself. I got two reasons for that. A) I am not a native English Speaker (my first language is Dutch) so it's better that the game is spellchecked by a native speaker and even if I was a native speaker, all people have a "blind spot" for their own speech or written texts regardless what language you use or if you speak it natively. I always recommend to make other people do your spellchecking for you. Trust me, I'm a novel writer, I can speak out of experience here.

Proper want ads for beta testing and spell-checking will when the basics scripts and scnenario's for chapter 5 are finished on GameJolt, Develteam and, my own SourceForge site, so if you are interested in helping me out, then keep following this project as I will write down more details when the time comes. This may take a few months before the full add actually comes to be though, so once again I ask for your patience.

And with that I'll conclude my story for today. I'll post again when I got something important to note. If it's silent for awhile, then don't worry, I just want to make full use of my time in this project. I've done a lot of work already, so I don't want it to go to waste by rushing things.

Stay tuned, folks

Toss me a Message if you are interested in making a quick game over the course of a week, ill do the art if someone can do some programming on a simple little iOS or PC game. Nothing too too big. Also need an idea collab soon.

One of the main point about my idea is to develop a game in which people is not pushed to fight themself, even if they're allowed and sometimes may be needing to: competition over domination, with a lot of cooperation too.

The world concept could be something like an entropic universe victim of unbalancement between black and white, with colours asked to fight this in order to be able to survive and stabilize the universe.

Players can choose their color and the way they prefer to play, so there should be zones for different play styles, partially interconnected in order to mix up the experiences.

Not only zones should be interconnected, but play styles too: every different style should need something from other ones, as well as colours: they should be able to cooperate and fight as well, according to their will and need, but every single colour contributes to the wellfare of the others so they need to coexist.

The project has not been defined yet, but I can outline the main characteristics I'd like to see in it.

As business plan, at the moment, I imagine it as something done for free, with the possibility of incomes when the project will be open; this may change in case we see bigger opportunities from the concept we were able to develop.

The game should be easy but with deep diversity, in order to offer a fast and accessible game experience that spans through a huge but not too heavy complexity. One of the main characteristics should be portability, even if at the moment I dont have a real idea of what it may mean in terms of work: anyway, in order to offer the easiest access to the game, it should work on smartphones as well as on computers and so on.

For what concern the game style, it's the place where I'd like to explore more in new concepts: I'd like to take all the best features of the most famous game styles and combine them into something new that allows different approaches for achieving the same goals: a massive multiplayer arcade action puzzle shooting sandbox game, or something similar. Something like a MMORPG but without all the heaviness from building a character, with still customization and growth but without barriers between new players and old ones. With PVE, PVP, RVR, and crafting as well as RTS elements fuses together with arcade and puzzle elements, in order to offer the most complete experience ever created.

I understand that such a kind of concept is pretty risky, as it tries to fuse together styles that may not sound easy to, so the main point about developing should be keeping it to the simplest form: characters may not be persons like, but maybe "colour's balls", with small differentiations between different ones; so it should be the world and its inhabitants, as well as every feature of the game. Easy and fast, but yet together intriguing and long lived.

Hello DevelTeam!

Kraden's Crypt is now live on GreenLight and KickStarter!

We also Have an alpha demo available on our website!

For those of you who are unsure what Kraden's Crypt is, here's a summary of the game:

Kraden's Crypt is a physics influenced co-­op dungeon crawler video game for up to four players. This is not a regular rogue-like game: In Kraden's Crypt, you control your weapons by changing their momentum with mouse movements (or by swinging the gamepad thumbstick).

You can wield hammers, bows, swords, shields and many spells. Each of these weapons has its own unique combat mechanics.

Swords, for example are fast damaging weapons, which require less momentum. But you can easily become overwhelmed by multiple foes.

Hammers are two handed, but can deal massive knock-back and damage to multiple enemies.

Other physics elements are also factored into your attack, such as player speed, weapon swing speed and enemy speed.

You can also use traps in the environment to damage enemies.

Feedback and thoughts on the game are welcome

Cheers,

Pete.

Freshman year of Highschool, a few friends and I decided to try to develop a video game. But nobody really took it too seriously, nor had the proper skills to carry out such a task.

I wrote a really well thought out story for the game, with a really interesting plot and nice character development, but there was dispute from the "company's leader". Pretty much he didn't like the story because it wasn't enough like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Which is silly, but overall a good point. More things need to be like that movie I guess. 

But I was trying to go for something more original. I was inspired a lot by science, history, and evolution- as well as philosophy and concepts that seemed pretty revolutionary to me at the time.

I'll share a bit of the philosophy end of it. Basically, I was thinking about Extraterrestrials and how most imagined forms of alternate forms of life seem to be humanoid, carbon based, sharing the same senses as humans do, and that really just seems kind of arrogant to me. That we as a human race believe that if there is other life out there, that it shares any properties similar to humanoid forms. For all we know there could be life more complex than we can possibly fathom with senses that we couldn't imagine. Or life that is simpler than we know is possible. I don't think we are as advanced and all-knowing as we think we are. Or something that redefines our notions of life, death, the functioning of organs and cells. Maybe instead of pumps and valves that these organisms have organs that function more along the lines of vents or maybe just stationary, completely motionless and static life.

I don't know, most of this sounds pretty crazy and ridiculous, but the main point is that I don't believe that we should limit our imaginations to that of what is scientifically possible, or already imagined.

I want to start to create a 3d world which i can eventually have the possibility of making a VR (Oculus) Compatible MMORPG. Can anyone tell me where they learned best to do 3D Designing? I would like to make a City if that's of any matter! 

Okay well, you have seen the Blade Runner movie correct? No. Go watch it come back when your done.
Now you ever hear of a old classic? Hardwar? No? Go look it up see you when you get back.
Played GTA 4? No Youtube it. Then go on.

Now think of being able to take a working browser page (supporting flash) and slap it on a object. Any object.
Suddenly you have 3D internet. Okay so are you still with me?

Okay now..... here comes the cool stuff. We got that. The possibility of taking google maps and using them to make cities in VR is not so hard of a task now. Cost you alot of time and trial and error.  But a possibility. 
The engine can be fully expanded on and the server scaled and systems divided and individualized. It's built to be converted into P2P down the road with the framework already in place.

So take every concept you have read on this page. Mix it up. 

What do you see? 

I see Virtual Reality Internet.