Wooji Juice

Articles for October 2009

Alert! Safety Boom! Cutscene Technology

One of the things we wanted to do with Alert! Safety Boom! was include a story, and tell it in an interesting way. The most common (but not necessarily best) way for videogames to do this is with cutscenes — full-screen video or animation. These are generally big expensive affairs, however, and beyond the means of an ickle indie developer like Wooji Juice.

A lot of smaller games get around this by having a picture for each character in the story, and simply displaying the appropriate picture with a text box over the top. This works, and it sure is cheap, but it's barely a step above filling the screen with a page from a book. How could we go further?

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Alert! Safety Boom! Mission Editing

So, how are things going here in A!SB!land?

Currently, we're hard at work getting all the missions up and running. All of them are designed, and have been created in our custom Boom Editor, but they're not all ready for testing yet — probably about 20% of them need more work done. Then we can get beta testers trying them out, making sure they're fun, making sure there aren't any bugs, and also checking the "difficult curve". Ideally, each mission is just a little trickier than the last, so that the player is challenged but never runs into a brick wall of difficulty. This is one of the most valuable things we get from beta testing.

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