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Target: Dream Build Play 2012

10 January 2012

First post of 2012!

The news that there will be a Windows Phone category in the Dream Build Play competition this year has given me a solid target for Dreamland's completion. While no actual submission dates have been announced yet, I'm fairly confident in my assumption that we'll be looking at a June date for final entries.

Six months is plenty enough time to finish Dreamland and give it all the polish it deserves. Leon, Team Mango's resident graphics artist has been hard at work producing the last of the assets and storyline required to complete work and I'm following up with getting the last of the game mechanics coded.

To give me some extra motivation - and taking a cue from some of the Ludum Dare participants - I've started live streaming of my development sessions. Using a rather neat app called XSplit, I can screencast and show the game running on my Lumia 800 via webcam all on the same stream. I can stream to the Team Mango UStream channel and record to disk at the same time. The recordings allow me to make neat timelapse videos like this one:

My plan is to record and stream most of my Dreamland development sessions between now and DBP and make a huge timelapse video at the end of it all.

I'll be livestreaming at weekends and on weekday evenings (GMT), though not to any fixed schedule. I'll always announce on Twitter before I begin. It's development, so I can't promise too much excitement but I will sometimes have the microphone on and commentate my work.

Here's to a productive new year!

New Team Mango Website

29 July 2011

It's been a long time coming, but I finally updated the Team Mango site to bring it up-to-date with information on all of our releases. The home page contains relevant content from my personal blog, so I don't have to update in two places.

I've been a little lax in blog updates, but suffice to say that Dreamland was indeed submitted to this year's Dream Build Play just in time! With that done and the website update out of the way, there's three currently ongoing projects in the Team Mango camp:

Dreamland
Dysnomia for Windows (hoping to have that out this year)
A silly little Windows Phone game. Or collection of minigames, really.

I'll leave you with the latest Dreamland trailer (Dream Build Play edition):

Crunching for Dream Build Play: 3 days to go

12 June 2011

More great progress as I begin what will hopefully be the last day of work on the Dreamland codebase for Dream Build Play. So what's been added to the game since Friday's update?

Merlin intro - he greets the player at the start of the game and gives a few hints and tips

New Figement (spell) screen. Gives info on new figments, powers and major quest items.

More NPC conversations. Added placeholder text for some characters that don't have quests in the DBP preview build

5 completable quests for DBP.

Today is all about sounds and music. I'll be adding as many placeholder sound effects as I can in the time remaining, and choosing a couple of music tracks that will appear in the final game. That leaves tomorrow evening for final polish and recording a DBP trailer video. Then Tuesday evening for final submission.