We’ve got more art!  Enjoy.

The holidays are quickly approaching, and this year Ginger Magic Games is determined to get the best gift we can for our awesome fans, our first title! We’ve had a lot of funding problems with past projects, but this year we’re going to try out Kickstarter to see if we can get enough money to finish the awesome game we’ve been working on.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the concept art for the game. We’ve got several more sketches to ink and will post those tomorrow along with the details of our Kickstarter campaign. Stick around, because we’ve got several great opportunities to offer our fans in tomorrow’s post.

The untitled shmup I was working on last month now has a name and it will be making its debut tomorrow night at the Athens GGDA meething.  This will be a great meeting to come to if you’ve never made it out to a Game Developer’s Association meeting and want to hang out with local developers and meet people that love games.  This is a show and tell type meeting, so there will be many people showing off their current work and talking about design and development decisions they’ve made in the past several months.  The meeting is at the Game Day Pub in downtown Athens, GA at 7:00 PM.  Come have a drink with us and be the first to play some games before they make their commercial debuts!

It’s been a few days since my last post, but I’ve been following the rules every day and have good news.  As of today, I’ve completely finished all of the gameplay programming!  The enemy ships follow random, procedurally generated flight paths and fire bullets in many randomly selected patterns. They keep attacking in an ever-faster manner until the player caves under the pressure and goes down in fiery glory. I plan on writing a little more code tonight to save the high scores in CoreData.  I’m also going to do some FB, Twitter and GameCenter integration tonight so you can share scores with all your social networks.

Tomorrow I get to start on the fun part, graphics.  I’ll finally be replacing all of these dots with actual sprites and it’ll start to look more like a game. I’m also going to explore Cocos2D’s particle system tomorrow so that enemies can explode, powerups can sparkle, and thrusters can shoot fire.  The biggest task for tomorrow is giving this game a name!  Stick around for the next update to see some nice graphics and possibly hear a sample of the background music.  Until then, here’s a few shots of the progress.

Day 2: Bullets

It’s the second day of my attempt to work on games for the rest of the month and so far I’m succeeding.  I followed all the rules I set for myself yesterday and added bullets to my untitled shmup project.  Following some great advice from Jens Andersson, I used the Factory design pattern to create a BulletManager that is used to create new bullets and intelligently deal with memory recycling.

I also moved the code for my circles out into its own Ship class and added boundaries so that I wouldn’t keep losing the ships off the edge of the screen.  Now that I’ve moved a lot of the code out to separate classes and cleaned up the code design, I think I should institute a new rule: I must comment all of the code I write every day.  This will keep me from pulling my hair out when I switch back and forth between projects and need to remember what I was doing.

Cocos2D Tip

If you’re having trouble creating a subclass of CCSprite, you’re not alone.  When I moved the code for my circles into their own Ship class, I extended CCSprite.  I then proceeded to override the init method like I always do when creating new classes.  Inside init, I then called [super initWithFile:@"redCircle.png"]. This was a terrible idea.  It creates an infinite loop where initWithFile calls init which uses your overridden version and on and on.  To prevent this, simply rename your class’ init method to something new.  I happened to choose initShip and my problems were solved.

Day 1

I finally installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook yesterday, so I thought I’d flex my programming muscles by learning a little Cocos2D.  Inspired by Andy Schatz’ GDC talk, I decided that for the rest of March, I’d work on programming a game every day.  The rules are as follows:

• I will spend at least one hour every day working on a game
• I will add at least one feature to the game every day
• I will not go to sleep unless my code compiles

I will probably spend most of my time working on our tattoo-based project, but today’s exercise left me with a good game idea that I will continue to explore when I need a break from the other project.  Today I renewed my iOS developer account and re-provisioned my hardware.  Then, I got a Cocos2D app running on device.  So far, it features dual joystick controls that allow me to move two different dots around the screen simultaneously.

Tomorrow I plan on cleaning up the code and then adding bullets!

If you saw our awesome concept art for the iPhone game we’re developing, you probably thought to yourself, “Well that’s great, but where’s the color?”  Well I’ve got a couple of images for you.  One is from last week, and one is a brand new character. And did I mention, they’re BIG.

We’ve got something very exciting to post today, Concept Art!  Athens, GA tattoo artist, Mike Groves, is working on the character design for our upcoming iPhone title and we’re happy to present some of his concept sketches.

Over 6500 people participated in Global Game Jam 2011 last weekend and created almost 1500 games. Ginger Magic Games was on site in Atlanta, GA to help make two of them. With the provided theme of “Extinction,” teams around the world set out to design and develop an entire game in just 48 hours. We had a lot of fun and spent a good deal of time designing and planning our first game before work started. I believe this was key to our quick success (that and designing small).

Without furrther ado, here are our contributions to GGJ11.

• Game of Death
• Super Mega Turbo X64 Box

We’ve got a big stack of game designs lying around, and have prototyped many of them, so we’re going to go ahead and announce some tentative release dates for all the projects.  We have given all of the games code names, but when the time comes, the real names will be announced.

November 2010

• Project Pechin
• Project Pondscum

December 2010

• Project Paw Paw
• Project Pirattitude
• Project Parallel

January 2011

• Project Pets

February 2011

• Project Punch

Spring 2011

• Project Plecoptera
• Project Pilot
• Project Push

Summer 2011

• Project Producer
• Project Puzzled
• Project Polidori

Late 2011

• Project Philanthropy
• Project Packed