Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Reevaluating Development

A lot has happened in regards to PPK this last week. First we decided that it would be better to continue development using C++ instead of XNA and then we made an even bigger change of plans. Before saying what it is, I will give you the context of the story.

PPK started as a game project with two focal points; finishing a game and making a good game. Our original hopes was to release the game in time for DreamBuildPlay, an XNA contest which ended earlier this month. As we began designing more, we came up with more and more ideas. Now PPK is a large project that instead of finishing in 3 months is going to take easily 2 years. In some regards this is extremely unfortunate, especially when considering that this is exactly what we were trying to avoid; however, I really believe that this game concept was never meant to be a small project. We reached a crossroad earlier this week with the realization that this project is much grandeur than we thought/hoped.

So I bring you news with both glee and sorrow that PPK is going to be pushed onto the back burner to make way for another, much smaller, project. Before running to your mommy crying over this news, know that we still have hopes to finish PPK in the future once we get more development experience. Also Aaron is going to continue to design the game trying to flesh it out completely so that when we are ready to move back to it we can do so at full speed. So do not fear, PPK's end is far from here.

Now I am sure you are wondering what this alternate project is that is taking precedence over PPK. A number of you already have heard of the project from when I was working on it last year - Deus ad Bellum (final name pending). As I wrote last year...

Deus ad Bellum is an original battle card game. It is a completely unique card game most similar to Magic the Gathering with several RPG elements mixed into it for good measures. It is competitive one-on-one online play with a matchmaking system implemented to set you with players of your skill level.

I am most definitely excited to be working on this project again. It has some solid gameplay elements and is something that wont take years to develop with a small team of developers. I will most likely start a development blog for Deus ad Bellum and when I do I will post a link to it here. My hopes are that we will make more continual progress on Deus ad Bellum than we have been on PPK.

I hope everyone here continues to support us as we move forward. Thank you for all of the support thus far!

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Recent News

It has been nearly two weeks since the last update. Unfortunately not too much is new. However, in the past few days I have laid out more of the code and am going to try to focus on PPK more. Work and PPK is what I am going to live in breath for awhile. So expect some more updates a little more frequently.