Posts Tagged ‘annoucements’
Not quite dead yet…
Monday, January 24th, 2011
… but not quite living in the same way.
In essence, Macguffin as it was previously – a four-person full time team of developers – is no more. But after looking at ways to wind things down, and taking some time to evaluate what I want to do with my spare time once I have a job, I’ve decided to keep Macguffin around for my future gaming projects.
One of the big things I’ve learned in doing the past three or so years of game development is that I really do love creating games, doing the coding and game design. Since shutting things down and starting to look for a job, I’ve begun coding and designing again on my own – and I’ve been having a blast. Regardless of where I land I fully plan to keep working on games and blogging about it. Who knows, perhaps I’ll even have something for the market someday.
Right now I do not have plans to return directly to All Heroes Die. I say this for Therlun’s benefit (I know you’re out there!). The two big problems with AHD are the limitations of BlitzMax, and the sheer scope of the endeavor. Neither of those gets solved by me working on it nights. The most likely path forward is that at some point I do a game inspired by chunks of AHD, or redo the game with a slimmed down design in another language.
In the meantime, I’ve been working in Unity using C#, and may have some upcoming posts about how that’s been. It’s also near time for the IGDA to begin its elections, and if I can get some help, I plan to cover the candidates again. More on that shortly.
Announcing Mustache Mercenaries!
Friday, 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.
More Art From the New Macguffin Game
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
… and here we have a picture of Abe Lincoln and his giant pot-bellied robot.
A couple tidbits on the new game…
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
(And yes, it’s for Facebook.)
Suspending Work on All Heroes Die, The New Project
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
It is with very mixed feelings that I announce we are suspending development on All Heroes Die.
The quick summary is that AHD is a huge game, and we are nowhere near done. With the resources and time we have, it’s also one that currently can’t support the company. Graham and I have both been working without drawing any pay for our entire time on the project, and we’re at the point where we can’t continue doing that.
We very much want to return to it when we can, but we don’t know when that will be. Right now, we’re just going to take things one step at a time. We still believe in AHD, and we want the finished game to see the light of day.
This isn’t the end of the road for Macguffin Games, either. In fact, the reason we’re halting development is so we can work on another game – this one in the Social Media space. I’m sure some of you will be disappointed to learn that; I understand. We think there is an opportunity to make great games there, make enough money to live, and to do it in a reasonable time frame. Our creative goal with this new game is to make something that we can be proud of, something unlike most of the offerings out there. We’ve begun prototyping the design and art direction, and we are all extremely excited by it. We hope you will be, as well – more details will follow as things shape up.
Thank you so very much to everyone that has supported us for the wild ride that has been All Heroes Die. I started development on it just a bit over 2 years ago, teaching myself how to code, alone in our guest bedroom. Since then, I’ve met literally hundreds of people whose support, enthusiasm, and good will made it possible to keep going. Two people in particular must be mentioned: my wife Anya, without whose support (both emotional and financial) this never would have happened, and Graham Sternberg, the man who created most of the AHD setting, most of the art, and who talked me off the ledge on more occasions that I’d like to admit. I’d also like to mention Heather Wilson, Mike Faulk, and Phil Krzeminski for their work on game events, game events, and art respectively; thank you folks for all your excellent work.
Finally, thank you to all of the wonderful people in the Boston Indies community; because of them, I seriously believe that Boston is the best place in the world for someone to be an indie developer.
EDIT: When I originally published this, I forgot to mention, we are planning two more builds for now – one to fix a number of bugs that came up in the last build, and another with Warfare in it. The first will happen sometime in the short term – the next several weeks – and the Warfare one some time before or around fall. I’d like to give a better estimate, but it all depends on how everything else is going.
EDIT EDIT: I’m an IDIOT! I didn’t thank Whitney. This game would not have gotten 1/4 as far as it did without her, and it sure as hell never would have launched for PAX. Her fantastic and awesome coding skills were all that got us to that first Beta build. Whitney, thank you so much for you amazing work.
Macguffin Games Welcomes Joe Freemer to the Team
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
I’d like to officially welcome designer Joe Freemer to the Macguffin Games team!
Joe is a great friend of mine from our days at Blue Fang Games, where we worked together on many zoo-related games. He is bar-none one of the best and brightest designers I’ve ever worked with, and digs RPGs as much as I do, if not more. I’m incredibly psyched to be working with him again. For a while now Joe has been excited about All Heroes Die, and has offered me advice here and there… and every time I took that advice it made the game ten times better.
Joe is coming onto the team to to help continue our push through Beta towards v1.0; the hope is that him jumping in on a lot of the design stuff will leave me more time to talk with our players, update the blog more often, and deal with the marketing and PR that will be so important to the game’s success.
Welcome, Joe!
Skipping the IGF
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
It’s been an interesting day.
We’re going to skip entering the IGF this year. In short, the game just isn’t ready. Even with all the ass we’ve been busting, we’re juuuust now about at a first-playable state. Going through our to-do items left for the 11/1 deadline, there are just about as many high-level tasks left to do as there are days left in the month.
We could submit no matter what, and then update the build over the next few weeks after that. The downsides there are that it would be a poor initial submission that doesn’t technically meet the rules of the competition (you’re supposed to be feature-complete), and that I’d pretty much kill myself for the next 5 weeks getting a build I could live with. After talking with Graham, we decided that the best course of action is to keep focused on bringing the game along as best we can, as fast as we can – but without crunching like crazy to come up with what we would consider a substandard entry.
I’m pretty disappointed, frankly, that we’re not going to be able to make this work… but as all good project managers know, it’s not about what you get in a perfect world – it’s about the choices in front of you. And I still feel our longer term deadlines are realistic.
Tomorrow Graham and I sit down and do a soup-to-nuts review of the game. Our goal is going to be to set a deadline (probably 12/1) where we can have a fully playable alpha to pass around in the Boston dev community and get some feedback. I feel really confident that we can make that kind of schedule work – but we’re going to put in some good planning and analysis to make sure.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly psyched about everything that has been getting done on the game to date. We’ve come a terrific distance in less than 11 months – especially considering this is Graham’s first video game project, and the first that I’ve programmed or designed. I think our issue with the IGF deadline was in my not realizing we were biting off more than we could chew. As my good friend Patrick said to me today, “Think of all the ways you could have f***** this up, and didn’t!”
He’s got a great point.
So, yeahhhhh. Interesting day. It’s weird to have the excitement I’m feeling with how fast the game is coming along but head-to-head with the frustration of missing a deadline. I mentioned to Graham as I was dwelling on the whole thing today – I realized I had never missed a deadline in 8 years of making games. Every milestone I ever was associated with, every game, shipped on time. I’m not sure I was prepared to actually fail at getting the game into the IGF – I don’t think I’d ever really considered the possibility.
But, that’s fine. A good bit of the reason I wanted to go indie and start my own company was to learn about doing this all from top to bottom. And you can’t learn very well without failing a couple times here and there. So, learn we will.
And this game is still going to be pretty spectacular.
Announcing the first Macguffin Game, “Heritage”
Friday, March 13th, 2009
I’m very proud to announce our first game – Heritage.