November 1st, 2010
We’ve decided to push out the update to Wednesday – we want to get some more of the kinks worked out before it goes live. Thanks very much to everyone that’s been sending in bug reports!
To tide you over, I give you this picture of our lead programmer Justin from this Halloween weekend:
October 28th, 2010
Sometime near the end of the day Monday, we’ll do our first big update to Mustache Mercenaries. Here’s what we’ve got:
Friends Bar!
Now you’ll be able to see all your friends that are also playing Mustache Mercenaries on Facebook. Not incredibly exciting in and of itself, we grant you that. But! It leads directly to…
Dueling!
You can now duel your friends. Each duel costs you one point of Energy, and you can duel your friends once every six hours.
This is a first pass on dueling so we can get your feedback. We are planning on a bunch of additions to it after Monday, including the addition of NPC allies on one or both sides of the fight based on differences in the power level of the robots.
Lots of bug fixes and tweaks!
We’ve also done a ton of work to make tweaks and fixes. Such as:
There’s more than this, but we’re still doing stuff – we’ll have the full set in the patch notes on Monday.
October 19th, 2010
We’ve just pushed a new build live that fixes some of the biggest bugs we had on the launch. Namely:
Since our team is pretty small, it is difficult with some of these fixes to be 100% sure we nailed it – if you see anything that is still borked (another technical term), please drop us a line at <email redacted because of spammers!>. Thanks!
October 16th, 2010
Mustache Mercenaries is now live! Welcome to the Beta!
We’re sure there are tons of bugs – we’ll be sorting them out as fast as we can, as well as adding new features. If you run across bugs, please feel free to put them up in our discussion forum on Facebook, or to email them directly to us at <email redacted because of spam!>.
October 12th, 2010
Here are some screenshots from our just-announced-last-Friday Facebook game, Mustache Mercenaries. A lot of this stuff is still work-in-progress, but it will give you a feel for where things are at.
First, our wonderful logo screen. We feel this one is self-explanatory.
Then, to the lab! The lab is your hub for all activities in Mustache Mercenaries. When the beta launches this week, the two big features that you access from here are going into fights (via the glowing yellow map screen), and reconfiguring your robot (via clicking on the glowing green door).
You’ll also notice our genteel ambassador, Mr. Brain. He’ll be spouting advice and nonsense for your benefit whenever you’re in the lab.
Finally, a battle! Here we have Abraham Lincoln in a borrowed mech, fighting against some of John Wilkes Booth’s henchmen.
A number of the items here are placeholders – that toolbox in the lower part is a help button (Use your imagination! Tools are helpful!), and the big black square there is our placeholder art for Battle Cards. Both of those will be replaced by Friday.
What are Battle Cards you ask? Find out tomorrow!
October 8th, 2010
On the tail of our announcement of Mustache Mercenaries earlier today, Macguffin Games was featured in an article on Mass High Tech about social media companies in Boston. You can read it here on MHT’s site.
We think there’s a ton of room on Facebook (and in the wider social media world) for quirky games that appeal to people already identifying themselves as gamers. People that think all Facebook games are just like Farmville. People (like myself) that just don’t have the time to play anything for hours at a time on their XBox… but still want to play a good game.
And in the end, who DOESN’T want to have JP Morgan in a giant robot with spats on?
October 8th, 2010
(Hello, folks coming from Facebook! We’ll be live in the next couple days – in the meantime, please Like the game on Facebook and join our mailing list!)
We’re extremely pleased to announce the new Macguffin Game, Mustache Mercenaries.
Mustache Mercenaries is a turn-based game of robots. Robots powered by steam! Robots fighting each other! Robots with pilots! Pilots like… Laura Ingalls Wilder?
Well, yes. In fact, Laura has been interrupted one too many times by people that want her to keep crops 
from withering and to build general stores, and she’s had it up to here. I’d stand back if I were you.
Mustache Mercenaries is what happens when you decide that what the Little House on the Prairie needed was steam-powered legs and the ability to thrash someone with a mailbox. It’s what happens when The Emancipator doesn’t refer to Abe Lincoln, but instead to his handy axe. Said axe happens to be inscribed with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that might just be coincidence.
At launch, we’ll have the main single player component of Mustache Mercenaries live – a series of campaigns where you can play Laura Ingalls Wilder, Abraham Lincoln, J.P. Morgan, and Harriet Tubman as they pilot their giant robots through old-timey America. John Wilkes Booth doesn’t stand a chance.
And once we get done with the initial launch, we’re going to be working full time on adding new features and new content into the game at an astounding clip. We’ve just scratched the surface of what we want to accomplish with the game – we are planning new modes of combat, expansions to the functionality of your lab (Oh – yes, you have a lab. It’s where Mr. Brain hangs out for the most part.), new mech parts you can purchase or find in fights, and a pile of other stuff. We also plan to bring you folks into the loop – we want your suggestions on what pilots and features you want next, and anything else you want to tell us.
We’ll be launching the beta of Mustache Mercenaries some time in the next week. We won’t be publicizing it at first – we want a little time to make sure everything is working right – but if you’d like to know when it goes live, please join our mailing list. Once we’ve worked out the kinks, we’ll also be publicizing it as widely as our thin little indie pocketbooks will let us. We’ll be counting on you folks to help us spread the word. Please also feel free to Like the game on Facebook!
Our goal here is to make a Facebook game that doesn’t suck… something with substance. Silly substance, but substance none the less. Welcome along for what we hope will be an awesome ride.
October 5th, 2010
With our Awesome Art Interns augmenting Graham’s stylings, they have pulled out ahead on their schedule. So Graham has had more time to build some enemy mechs – like this guy:
September 14th, 2010
… and here we have a picture of Abe Lincoln and his giant pot-bellied robot.
August 17th, 2010
This post is part of a coordinated assault on the blogosphere by a number of indies – we’re all blogging today on the the theme of, “Size Doesn’t Matter”, either for or against. You can find a list of all the other posts at the bottom of this one.
Since not many indies are working in the social games space, we wanted to riff on that experience a little. We hope you enjoy.
Overall, the case can be easily made that game size doesn’t matter. Great small games have already been made – one of my favorites that pops right to mind is Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, a space exploration game where each game takes 20 minutes. We can also look at the AAA market, where games have been getting shorter for years, and people are still content to pay just as much for them. As indies, thank God for this. If the only way to succeed in finding fun was to crank out 100-hour experiences, few of us would be making games.
Something important changes, though, when you get into the social media space. If you want to make money in today’s social media (read: Facebook) market, you’ve only got a couple ways open to you. The biggest is virtual goods. But if your game is really small, how do you go about legitimately creating lots of content for it? If your game takes ten minutes total to play, good luck selling a bunch power-ups and decorative items for the experience.
The solution we see goes back to the basics of making a good game – come up with something with elegant, interesting, and simple core mechanics – and then enable your designers to create content that extends the game’s dynamics.
For those not familiar with the mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics model of game design, it posits that a game is made up of those three things. Mechanics are the rules the game operates with – like in poker, how many cards are dealt, if you can exchange some of your hand for new cards, etc. The aesthetics are the thematic and other elements that lend to the experience, but don’t directly impact the gameplay – such as what kind of poker chips you’re using, if you’re playing at a felt table, etc.
The dynamics – what I’m focused on in this post – are the gameplay considerations that arise with the framework created by the mechanics. So, again in poker, dynamics are things like a player deciding to bluff. They bluff by using mechanics in a certain way (for example, making a big bet), but the bluff itself is a result of the core rules, not a part of them.
With our unannounced Facebook game, we’re working on a small set of core mechanics that will support being extended as we add more content to the game.
So say, just hypothetically, that our new game was a steampunky mech game. It then makes a lot of sense to have interchangeable mech parts and a toolbox of different effects each attack and defense can have. The combinatorial possibilities of the parts help create many possible dynamics, just like deck building in Magic: The Gathering.
Most of this comes down to simply good game design. But in the social media space, this sort of thing becomes essential if your game is free, your team is small, and you are relying on virtual good transactions to pay the rent. If you don’t keep content in your pipeline, you can assume that revenue will dry up as well.
A small set of core mechanics means your development time to beta is shorter. The reliance on content to extend the game means your designer can contribute to the game’s bottom line on a regular basis with only light support from the rest of the team – something that you’ll all appreciate.
Please read some of the other great posts in this giant cross-blogging extravaganza:
