Saturday, February 6, 2010

Jools Watsham's Developer Diary: Great Progress and New Proposals

Saturday, Feb 06, 2010: We've seen some great progress on our new game that we started last week, Spirit. We had started with a foundation that we created some time ago. We weren't sure how much further we could push it. We need speed for this game. After many hours of adjusting numbers on my end, genius coding on Bob's side, and some great looking art from Gregg, it is achieving what I had hoped it would. It's not perfect yet, but it's close. Very exciting! We should have a rough playable demo that we can show interested publishers by the end of next week. By the end of February, we'll have a pretty awesome demo to shop around, which will have all of the presentation trappings that are so important to convey the spirit of the final title.

I had mentioned that one publisher was interested in applying Spirit to one of their IPs. Let's call that project Crew. Anyway, we got the proposal for that completed and sent out on Tuesday. Hoping to hear back on that next week. I think the proposal came together really well.

I'm still waiting on feedback for Jack, Stars, and Shapes, and the creative brief for Red. I am told that we'll start discussing Red next week with the publisher. When I hear back on Stars, it is possible that we'll need to produce a more detailed game design doc to expand upon our proposal.

I booked my hotel for E3 this week. I'll be staying at Hotel Figueroa. I haven't stayed there before, so it'll be cool to check out a new hotel. It is Moroccan in theme! It is located quite close to the convention center (one block away), which is a huge bonus. I'm not sure how well my new titanium heel is going to cope with the tremendous amount of walking required at E3... should be interesting. Going through the airport metal detectors should be fun too.

I also created a new proposal this week for a publisher that contacted us. It is a licensed title. These types of proposals are officially called Request For Proposals (RFPs). Let's call that project Warriors. I am told that we're pitching against three other developers, so I guess we have a 1 in 4 chance of getting it.

OK, I'm going to get the rest of my day started now. Hope you're having a great day. TTYL.

Jools