Blown away...

Hi all,

Another day, another post…

Before I get into all kinds of nagging I want to thank everyone who was at our official opening last Thursday. We had a couple of drinks and a good time, celebrating the Xform 2.0 office. Furthermore, I am proud to say that we have finally got our own Xform theme song!  It has a very 80’s style feel to it. Think about the intro themes for Mask, He-Man, etc. The only thing left we need now is our own cartoon… That would be awesome ;)

Anyways, on to more pressing issues. As you might know we’ve been hard at work on a couple of games. My main responsibility is getting the ‘water-game’ technically up and running. I talked about water before so I won’t touch that subject anymore. At the moment I am doing a lot of ‘boring’ stuff.

Implementing and tweaking the general flow. It is boring to make, but it is extremely important for a good user experience. We have to think about how long loading the game takes, initializing the world, when we should start a countdown sequence, in which order do we show the end results of a challenge. Do we show the game character first celebrating his victory and then show the end results (time , rewards, etc.)? Or do we show him celebrating in the back ground while displaying the result? It all sounds very boring and trivial, and for some things it is, however timing and anticipation can hugely influence the user experience. While typing this I think this might be a great subject for another blogpost, because today I wanted to talk about something else; explosions. I love explosions. I really do. I could look at and talk about them for hours,…

For this game we need more and bigger explosions! IMHO. Matthew told you about destructing the ship a couple of posts ago and this will be my test case for a new and improved explosion system. In our previous games we’ve tweaked and created some cool explosions already, but you haven’t seen anything yet. In Burnin’ Rubber 4 we had to cut our new explosion system, because it was, at that time, too slow. If you look at one of the first trailers of that game you can see some of them in action. I have been working on optimizing that system.  Furthermore, I have added and will add more features ;) The planned shockwave effect will be implemented and I want fire trails for debris. That would look awesome with all the parts exploding. Hopefully, I’ll have some ingame, instead of editor, screenshots for you next week!

Off to explode some more…

-Pieter