Yes, we are making a game

First of all i would like to welcome you to our Indie game development blog. Unlike other dev blogs, we won't try and put up frequent updates about our development :P

Here is a list of team members:

Div - Designer
Hank (Me) - Programmer
Joe - Artist
Yorrick (Need to find shorter name for you) - Programmer/Game Designer
We might need other people to help later on in the development.

So far we have been working on the game for a year (although it was an on and off affair). We are professional games developers (well we were, only Div has survived :P). It originally started with Yorrick and I deciding that we wanted to learn about other areas of games development, and so selling the game was last on our agenda. We also decided to use the XNA platform, since we had heard that it was a quick way to get up and running and also we can develop for for the Xbox 360. Now though, learning has been pushed down and selling has been pushed up. Although, Selling still isn't out major goal. Our major goal is to make a great game that everyone will enjoy.

Joe joined us when we realised that we needed to get some art done. Now at this point in time, we learnt a very good lesson, which is, the art process takes a long time! It took even longer since Joe refused to make textured boxes for the environment and a few simple 3D characters (ie Programmer Art). unfortunately for Joe, by the time he was finished with one of the character models, we decided that the game idea wasn't as novel as we had hoped for.

Our current game idea came about after a few days of throwing ideas back and forth, and finally we landed on a similar idea that Div and I had come up with a few months back. Our current game idea has been in the design phase for the past couple of months and we have just started the actual development process. We are still working on the story and level design of the game.

A few things to mention about the game itself. (we'll be letting go of bits and pieces of the game design here)

- Novel (very important). The primary game mechanic is original and being original, how much fun it is, is yet to be seen. Braid for example used elements of platforming and puzzle which are pretty tried and tested. Before World of Goo there was tower of goo, which was a small flash version of it. (Hara-kiri if some game comes up without our concept before we release, like one of our previous designs)

- In First Person mode but we could probably develop it for third person to. Which it is not a twitch FPS for sure i.e. cs. Remember Elder Scrolls could be played in FPS or TPS. But don't assume we are making an RPG.
- Single player and Multiplayer, but we're concentrating on the single player at the moment. It seems like most games should have a little Multiplayer now to prolong the games lifecycle and to justify prices. Unless the Single Player is REALLY good i.e. Elder Scrolls, Assassins Creed.

What we currently have is half a game engine, half an editor, a cool 3D model (which probably won't get used) and two design documents for 2 different games and a further 2 game ideas still lodged in our heads.

I think that's enough for now, we will be posting more details about the game so make sure to check often.