ALERT! Safety Boom! is our new story-driven simulation game for iPhone and iPod touch. We'll be transporting you into the high-pressure, high-tension lives of DEEPP6 — an elite international Bomb Disposal Squad.
In a world where people have to check their shoes for bombers each morning, you'll use a unique multi-touch interface and a full toolbox of tricks to take out increasingly complicated devices, while the story unfolds through richly-drawn comic-book cutscenes.
Latest News
And Now A Quick Word From Patrick
A number of you might be wondering What On God's Earth is happening to Alert! Safety Boom! at the moment. It's been a while since we updated you with any news and I thought I could take the time to clear it up.
It's all my fault.
The beta build has been up and running for a while now and, barring a few minor tweaks and amendments, is pretty much ready to go. Ready to go without the music, that is. This has been due to a number of minor to major annoyances at my end but, sparing you most of the details, massive flooding has caused me to have to move most of my studio equipment into storage.
Meet The Team: Pasha & Ozymandius
Time to introduce the remaining team members, Pasha:
and Ozymandius:
Theirs is mainly a supervisory role, working with John to ensure the highest quality artwork for the project. However, as you can see by their suave and practical headgear, they're also responsible for fulfilling our mecha-piloting needs.
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?
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.
Meet The Team: Patrick
Hello Mr. Internets (or is that Ms. Internets? Does anyone actually know? Is there an internet gender debate forum out there? I suppose if there was then it’d probably be populated entirely by virulent feminists so I guess I know what the answer would be... hmm, I seem to have written my longest aside ever — oops!). To continue the developer blog I thought I’d write a little about myself. My name is Patrick Nasralla although I sometimes go by GomiNoSensei in a misguided attempt to stop people asking for me to spell my second name (yes, I do see the irony there...) and I’m responsible for the sound design and music in the wonderful A!SB!
Meet The Team: John
Hello, welcome to our developer diary and my first foray into the blogosphere. My name is John Steels, some people call me Steel Fox (On account of my my surname and my luxuriant ginger locks and cos its sounds like a MGS badguy), some just call me Foxy (cos its true) and some people call me a grumpy bastard (which is also true).
Now, unaccustomed as I am to typing, this short bit of prose has been the most painful few hours of the entire development thus far. But I figured that if I was going to write a little something about myself, then something that contextualises the potentially terse-sounding updates would probably be a good thing. It's not that I type slowly or have a poor vocabulary (I know all the English swear words and even some Cantonese), it's more a case of not being sure how to pitch this. First I wrote a jokey version that sounded like a hammy intro for a game character, then that was followed by a dreadfully dry "professional" version that just sounded like an accountant's CV, and finally what you see here the "honest" version. Well, they say write what you know, and I know how to make a meal of something :)
Meet The Team: Canis
Those of you who've been following along for a while already know me, but to our new visitors, hi! I'm Canis, and I'm the lead developer here at Wooji Juice. The other Alert! Safety Boom! team members will be introducing themselves soon, but I'll quickly (re)introduce myself.
I've been programming since the early '80s, and I've worked in the commercial games industry since the 90s, including lengthy stints at Muckyfoot — where I worked on Urban Chaos, Startopia, and Blade II amongst other projects— and at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe where I contributed engineering to many projects including Playstation Home.
(Pre-)Announcing Alert! Safety Boom!
It's time for us to take the wrappers off our new iPhone/iPod touch game, "Alert! Safety Boom!". We've been working hard on this for some time, and while it's not finished yet, we think it's time we showed it to the world.
If you're reading this on the main Wooji Juice blog, head on over to check it out. If you're reading this at the Alert! Safety Boom! developer diary — welcome!