Check us out! Just before Eurogamer this year we were visited by the BBC pixies here at Tuna. During Eurogamer we made it on to the BBC Look North section on the BBC news. Aren’t we a pretty bunch.

We had a total blast at Eurogamer this year. It was really exciting to see people playing the game and receiving all of the positive feedback that you lovely chaps left us. We displayed Cletus Clay at both Leeds and London events and although we were a bit tucked away in London a lot of you made it to our stands and had a good old natter with Sarah, Alex and Andy which gave the day an extra pinch of awesome.

Recently I’ve been playing with ideas for a tutorial area. I always had a rough idea of how this would go, but as usual it comes out a little bit different once you actually sit down and try to work through all the details. The idea is that Cletus has a barn decked out with combat training equipment that he uses to prepare for Armageddon…or trespassers.

Slice! Splurt! Splat!

After turning out hundreds of animation frames of the aliens performing all kinds of actions, this week I spent some time working on things for them to do while doing nothing. Because at the moment, when they do nothing, they really do nothing. They just stand there, and maybe blink a bit.

I hadn’t really given much thought to what they would do when they were doing nothing. I assumed they would be pretty busy doing stuff most of the time. But it turns out that it’s actually desirable for them to be idle quite a lot of the time, at least when they aren’t actively pursuing the player. Otherwise they just tend to pace around the place in a fairly unnatural-looking way. Either that or they just stand there, blinking.

So this week I got out the old alien model and added some fearsome new moves to their repertoire. Now the Aliens have such fancy moves as flexing their hands, folding their arms, putting their hands on their hips, gesticulating, and scratching their arses.

ooh look, the Cletus level editor - looks, erm, fun?

This week Anthony has mostly been going over the level design for level 1. He has been deciding where to place any pesky traps, where you will be able to pick up Cletus’ weapons and figuring out which enemies are going to blow you to bits. As Anthony has pointed out, because this is the first level of the game, it is probably the trickiest; it needs to introduce the core elements slowly, as well as hook people in so it has to be both exciting and easy. It also establishes the rhythm of the game. Whatever else we do, it ultimately depends on getting this part right. Or at least not wrong.

Nice shrubbery…………………………………………………..Melt your face off shrubbery

Recently Pete has been working on some deadly shrubbery for one of the Cletus levels. When asked to describe how exactly the player interacts with this particularly heinous shrub he said: ‘Oh look, a lovely and completely innocent looking bush. No wait it’s trying to kill me!’
Death by violent undergrowth has to be one of the best ways to die in a video game.

This week I discovered the iPhone/iPod Touch. Not by actually using one - the only time I actually had a go on a real one was briefly at GDC when the dude who had converted my old game Platypus to the iPhone was showing me how it turned out. But because we’ve been kicking around the idea of making some small games for the iPhone, I’ve been looking at reviews and videos of iPhone games, making mock-up images in Photoshop, and imagining what it would be like to hold the thing, tilt it and control a game by pressing on it.

That’s probably not the ideal way to experience the system, so now I’ve started looking for a second-hand iPod Touch I can pick up for cheap (hang on, this was supposed to be a way to make money, not to hook me into buying another game system!)

Apart from the juicy big screen and the novel control interface (always fun for a game designer to consider), I really like the low price-point of the games. Maybe they are priced TOO low, but what is cool about it is that developers have been compensating by making games with extremely small scope. Very small and simple games, with short development cycles, that get right down to business. No time to mess about, just straight to the fun.

If they are fun? I don’t know. Like I say, I’ve only been imagining them, not actually playing them. But there is something about tiny games that really appeals to me. It’s more like the games that were made in the early 80s, when I was first getting into video games. Back then, it was totally acceptable to make a game built around a single, simple mechanic - so long as the mechanic worked.

In more recent years we have all been expending so much energy trying to make our games bigger, longer and more impressive, and I think that can actually be to the detriment of the games - to say nothing about the poor developers. We do it to try to one-up each other, to make our game that little bit more appealing than the last one that came along. And we do it to try to convince people that what we are offering is still worth the money. People won’t pay $40 for Tetris any more… but maybe if you add in a story mode, RPG elements and everything else you can possibly think of to try to deliver the magical "twenty hours of content" that supposedly represents adequate value-for-money, they might do?

Of course it doesn’t really make Tetris a better game. In fact all that cruft you added has probably made the game considerably worse. So now you’ve spent a whole lot of money and wasted months of your one and only life, to make something that doesn’t work as well as a game you could have programmed by yourself in a day. Just to make people feel like you’re trying hard enough.

Or you could try making games that are just as big as they need to be, and no bigger, and sell them for a price that people will pay. The iPhone game developers seem to be doing just that. I don’t know how well this will all work out; it sounds like finding success on the iPhone is a bit of a lottery and there are some problems with the way the store is set up that need addressing.

But I’m happy to see the return of the small game, at least. It’s been a long time.

It has just been announced that we will be showcasing Cletus at the Eurogamer Expo’s Indie Arcade this October. As you would expect we are very excited to get the opportunity to show off all the hard graft we’ve been putting into Cletus. For those that attend it is your chance to see and sample what we and the lovely Dyson fellas have been up to as well as Introversion and other indies.

This is a great model to make if you are creating a beach scene. This is a bit of a fiddly model to make so don’t drink lots of coffee first. Steady hands are your friend.

1.Start by making the base of your sandcastle. The bigger your base the more towers you can fit on it so it is up to you how epic you want your castle to be. I stuck with just a couple of towers but there is no reason why you couldn’t build King Arthur’s dream palace!

2.Create your first tower by rolling quite a fat little sausage. Put it vertically on to your base and attach it with a bit of extra clay or just by pushing the end of the tower into the base with your fingers.

3.Roll a smaller sausage. This should be as thick as you want your turrets to be. I made the mistake of making this sausage too small the first time I made the turrets which meant I had to chop off the top of the tower and start over. If you aren’t sure about the size of your turrets, make a test tower that isn’t attached to your base. This is also useful to have if you want to practice making windows and doors for your castle. Once you have your smaller sausage that is the right thickness for your turrets, wrap it around the top of your tower. Blend it to the tower with your fingers.

4.Now you need to mark out your turrets. Check that you can remove every other turret without leaving a huge gap or two turrets together. Once you are ready you can remove every other turret which should leave you with a real castle like tower.

5.Next step is adding any doors and windows. All you need here is a pen. For the windows you just need to stick the pen tip into the clay and drag down very slightly. Any doors can be done the same way although you will need to scrape away any excess clay.

6.No sandcastle is complete without any flags. Wire is the best way of making the flag poles. Simply cut a small length of wire ready for your flag. Make a small triangle of clay and attach it to the wire. Then just place your flag on top of a tower, just like you would with a real sandcastle.

Your sandcastle is now ready to sit majestically on the beach.

Sarah and I are the middle of putting together another big collection of artwork for the game. Lots of little overlooked bits and pieces; targets for the tutorial area, extra bits of scenery, the odd minor enemy or trap that we had neglected to deal with earlier. Once that’s done, the majority of the core game should be 100% artwork complete. I’ve been going over the game design document we wrote, so long ago now it seems, and lots of old lists I’d made of things I had to do. There were all kinds of enemies, traps and effects, and hundreds and hundreds of individual pieces of scenery.

A danger sign to go next to the boiling mud. A wooden ladder. Tractor (plus two wheels). Tree stumps (3-4 variants). A haystack. A window frame. Blades of grass. A butterfly. Bits of fence. Mountains. A turbulent sea. A waterfall. A pile of old tyres. A robotic octopus. A life preserver. A can of cola. Every individual element in dozens of different scenes, all written out in endless long lists. It would be depressing to look at all of those hundreds and hundreds of listed items if it wasn’t for the fact that we have already completed the great majority of them.

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