The game will be titled Devilish Thoughts, where the player will be playing a pshycic interrogator, entering into the evil mind of a murderer in what we are billing as an abstract, horror-themed, top-down, scrolling shooter. The player will be able to blast through multiple levels, each including a number of stages, with an AI-controlled teammate. The teammate will also have three different settings that the player can switch through, changing the behavior of the AI to either protect the player, go on an all out offensive, or to perform powerful synergy attacks with the player. We’re also looking to create some pretty interesting enemies and bosses in the game as well, that will hopefully be a step outside the norm.

While we have just begun development on the game, we have an awful lot of the basic gameplay designed out, including most all of the first level. I will have the joy of transcribing our hand written notes and drawings into some sort of usable game design document form, but that’s all good. We will also be working on turning out some art for the game as well. I’m looking forward to getting this one out, certainly.

Since I arrived in Austin I helped to form (reform?) Baygull Studios as an independent casual game development company. We, just today, released our first project, a game called Commander, which is available on Kongregate and Facebook for now. While it is certainly far from a finished, polished game, we developed it with certain goals in mind – specifically to be a test bed for our foray into development. Given the intended purpose, I am happy with how the experience has been, and I am looking forward to our first, real full project that we are starting now. But first, a bit of information on how the design of Commander evolved:

Commander began development after Ryan wanted a game to program. I had mentioned that I had a strategy game that I was developing and he suggested that I pass it along to him so he could put it into code – this quickly developed into something far more than I originally expected, evolving into Baygull Studios. This has certainly been an evolution that has made me quite happy, but it has been interesting watching the original idea for the Strategy/RPG tabletop game I designed evolve into Commander.

Commander was originally designed some time ago as a blend between a tabletop RPG like Dungeons and Dragons and a wargame like Warhammer. Effectively, you could control a character who would be the “commander” of a small army. You could give that character a number of abilities that would make them a stronger fighter and/or leader. You could then recruit units and allocate points into a few basic attributes. You could also arm them with weapons that had different effects and statistics – such as long pikes being able to attack enemies two hexes away. Additionally, you could give your units special abilities as well.

That is all quite different from the design we see in Commander, of course. This is largely because the scope is entirely different. I do not feel like I actually ported the original game into a Flash form, but I rather took the very core of it and built a new game on top of it. The original game was not casual, even if it used a very simple randomization system. We were specifically designing a casual game, so I removed much of what was stated above, so that it could be enjoyable in a quick, simple play.

What we ended up with, is a fairly traditional turn-based strategy game, allowing players to control four characters and move them around a hex-grid as they combat other units. The special abilities of the original system were pre-allocated into the six different classes that we created, each one having points assigned into the various original attributes that the system had. Each of these classes serve different roles and are useful in different ways, allowing the player to devise their own strategies.

In the end, it is a simple, straight-forward and classic design. It might not be terribly innovative in the current form, but I do believe it is solid from a design standpoint and excellent for the purpose of this project: to let us explore Flash development, get use to working on a game, and developing best practices for working within a month-long development cycle. In that, I do believe it was quite successful.

While the point I made on Twitter the other day may have been somewhat refuted , I do still believe that one of the best kinds of bugs you can get, are the ones that inspire gameplay ideas. While working on our current project over at Baygull Studios, we stumbled across an amusing bug in the code  that, oddly enough, did indeed inspire a gameplay idea for one of the bosses of the next project we will be working on. While I won’t go into detail of the specifics of that bug (or the game for now), I will point it out once we’ve actually gotten a fair bit of the work on the project done (as opposed to now, where we haven’t moved onto it yet).

It actually does make me wonder how often something like that happens. How many game developers have seen a strange bug crop up that has given them an idea for a gameplay system, or even an entire game. Of course, there is the joke about a game developer crying out “it isn’t a bug! It is a feature!”, but how often does that actually happen? You know, for real, and not covering for some shoddy code?

I know in other creative areas mistakes can lead to something interesting. I can’t count the number of times I’ve accidentally did something in Photoshop or GIMP to a photo that created an effect that I liked quite a bit. It seems logical that it should happen in game development as well, to me.

I’ve been working with my friend Ryan of late. Both of us were members of Husky Game Development in college and we worked together quite a bit there. We also were on the project involving n-Space that led to the pitch documents on this site that draws a surprisingly large amount of my traffic. He moved down to the Austin area last summer. The product of our work so far has been to create a small independent game development studio by the name of BayGull Studios , focused on creating a fun, solid, casual game every month.

Why name it BayGull Studios? Well, there’s a story behind it. Check the site to find out! (Hint: Ryan is a bit gullible).