It's Games Development, Jim...

...but not as we know it. We're approaching the tail end of the development of "Kahoots" and I promised a bit of an update as to what the game involved, but quite frankly that's all going to wait until the end. At this precise moment we have the games dev equivalent of Noel and Liam (that's Ricky and his brother Rob) penning lyrics for the tutorial songs (that's right, songs. Not text and carefully scripted level design, songs. Take that, well utilised and respected gaming traditions). Today has been one of those mad days where not only have we been insanely busy trying to chuck everything in, but cos of the home made style of the game, the stuff we've done has been very bizarre. I've spent a period of the afternoon cropping images of fridge magnet letters, and helping Nat sort out capturing images of cotton wool balls.

Talking of our diminutive design queen, she's finally finished slaving over a hot desk lamp, animating the main character and its main enemy, the terrifying CardBorg! Hopefully once she's broke the back of the remaining design issues, she'll be able to explain on here how she's done it, but in the meantime, here's a nice picture of the character anims in full.

There's still tons of stuff to be done, the map screen, title screen and achievements still need sorting. Our Honeyslug logo, the unlockable reward and the end sequence will require trips to various locations in the capital. Then the whole thing needs the hell testing out of it to make sure it all hangs together and the dependencies on the hosting site all work fine. It's gonna be very tight indeed, especially as we have another two games in the pipeline.

As for what "Kahoots" is all about, well, you have to steer your Kahoot to the safety of the exit door by moving the floor around it (Kahoots walk perpetually or until the fall/die, obviously), certain floor has specific properties, so there's trapdoors to drop to lower areas, boing blocks to jump gaps or onto higher platforms, cannons to get fired to another location, etc. Along the way, the CardBorgs, enemy of the Kahoot, will do their best to stop your progress, though they can also come in quite useful for helping you advance through seemingly inaccessible areas.

Right, got to stop now, listening to Ricky and Rob write the song for the Peg Beast (don't ask) is about the funniest and surreal thing I've witnessed in quite some time. Here's some more pics of us feretting away this week. Also a first appearance of another art conduit Adam, whose game we will talk about next week (intrigue!)