A big blue whale #
Hope you like this big blue whale! The next assets will be of a more alien theme…. visit us from time to time and follow us on Twitter!
Desk Dragons welcomes Revena Rield #
I’m delighted to announce that my good friend Revena Rield has been collaborating with me on several projects over the past couple of months, and we’ve decided to make it slightly more official and formally add her to the Desk Dragons team.
Revena is a talented artist and designer with a wealth of experience across many different industries, giving her a very unique insight into her work. At DD, she is currently acting as Artist and Designer, working on Unity’s assets and another currently unannounced project that we are both very excited about.
Unfortunately, due to the realities of our financial positions, DD remains a side project for both of us, but we’re eager to show you what we’ve been working on! For now here’s a very quick taster of one of Revena current assets.
We’ll tell you more about what this is and what we are going to do with it soon!
Our first asset is now available! #
We are now officially publishers in the Unity Assets Store!
We hope to publish more maritime themed assets in the coming months, so if you are interested… visit us from time to time and follow us on Twitter!
Desk Dragons Scores an Assist on Bodycheck by Ludometrics #
We’re delighted to announce that we have recently been working with Glasgow-based developer Ludometrics on their forthcoming game “Bodycheck”. A title reminiscent of the 90s classic Speedball, with some inspiration from Blood Bowl along the way, Desk Dragons has been consulting with Ludometrics to enhance the AI systems used in the game.
Desk Dragons Goes Back to School #
The start of March saw Denis and Ajay both boarding flights and heading off to San Francisco. We had found out just a few weeks earlier that Desk Dragons had been accepted into the Chartboost University program, which was a great honour. One of only nine teams chosen from more than 150 applicants, we arrived tired and jet lagged and reasonably unsure what to expect.
The CBU program consists of an intensive week of classes taught by some of the Bay Area’s finest mobile game developers. With sessions covering topics ranging across game design, user interface design, art, audio, marketing and infrastructure development, the amount of content was staggering, and the whole program was structured so that after listening to a lecture from someone, there was time set aside for each team to have some private time to discuss their game and specific issues or questions. When we weren’t in meetings or lectures, we were at our assigned desk, working hard developing Easy Money.
The amount of knowledge being thrown at us was at times quite overwhelming, but we both were able to get a huge amount out of the content and have meaningful discussions both with the mentors who made their time available but also with each other. Being part of the same conversations throughout the week put us in a really good position to be on the same page and have a shared understanding, which made things so much easier, but also meant we were able to start incorporating some of the advice we were getting then and there and make decisions.
One of the constant things that we heard throughout the week was that the only way to succeed in the current climate was to make our game free-to-play. We spent a lot of time and energy on this, trying to figure out a way that we could incorporate the freemium strategy without either spoiling the experience with extra tacked-on stuff, or making a game that was fundamentally pay-to-win. We came up with a few strategies for how we could go about this, but none felt right to us. In our final mentor meeting, we sat down with Arash Keshmirian and explained our predicament, hoping that this conversation would provide a solution where all the others hadn’t quite. And it did! Limbic Games has only released premium products to date, and even those that have not enjoyed significant attention have proven profitable. This was the information we needed, at the time we needed it and we’re happy to say that thanks to Arash, Easy Money will be a paid app.
That’s not to say that we won’t ever release a free-to-play title, or that we’re not appreciative of all the advice and brainstorming help we received while trying to incorporate this into Easy Money, but sometimes you just have to accept that some designs don’t lend themselves to some business models – it feels contrived.
We had an amazing time and we learnt so much and came away with pages upon pages of notes. We’re grateful to Chartboost for this wonderful experience and we’d encourage any developer who wants to get ahead to consider applying! Of course, that’s not all we got up to in San Francisco – once CBU was over, it was straight on to the Game Developers Conference but more about that later!
Conway’s Game of Life #
I’ve not had much chance to do development recently, but I did want to keep my practice up with Unity, so last night I whipped together an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. This is a great toy AI demo, or technically Artificial Life. The rules are pretty simple, at each iteration a cell will either be alive or dead based on its current state and the number of neighbors it has.
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
This is the most common implementation of a class of systems called Cellular Automata, which are very cool things to study.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this implementation, but I whipped it up last night and it’s relatively feature complete so I wanted to share it with you.
Desk Dragons Welcomes Ajay Kari #
I’m delighted to announce that my good friend Ajay Kari has been collaborating with me on several projects over the past couple of months, and we’ve decided to make it slightly more official and formally add her to the Desk Dragons team.
Ajay is a talented artist and designer with a wealth of experience across many different industries, giving her a very unique insight into her work. At DD, he is currently acting as Artist and Designer, working on assets for the store and another currently unannounced project that we are both very excited about.
We’ll tell you more about what this is and what we are going to do with it soon!
Desk Dragons Has A Logo! #
I promised that I’d launch the logo separately like we did for the DD logo. So here it is!
Once again, Ajay has excelled herself, capturing the core aspects of the company’s design and fitting it really well with the aesthetic.
I’m really thrilled with the logo, and I’m really pleased to be able to post it up here! You’ll start to see us using it a lot more around about in future.
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