Development Kickoff!

Serpentine Development is underway!

Actually I have been working on it for a few months, but we are now posting our development blog on Itch.io .  I will be posting the game design notes to this blog from the current home at www.millsgamedev.com/serpentine with updates as they happen.  This project was originally to be a Udemy course on making a game, but it kind of snowballed into a full fledged development effort. Now I am committed to finish this project and deploy it for desktops and mobile.

I just noticed there are a few other projects out there with the name Serpentine. I took the name from the original Broderbund game. I asked about it from the current holder of Broderbund IP, but they did not have any issues with it. Maybe I need a new name. I am open to suggestions!

I started this project in April of 2020 as a quick recreation of an old 8-bit game of the same name. I had a few friends try it out and they told me it would not be accepted by current gamers especially casual ones since it was too hard to learn, it didn't scale up or train the players. They were correct of course, I was too into my nostalgia to see it when I made it so faithfully to the original. Arcades games were designed to be hard from the get-go, to eat up quarters. At this point I thought the original would not work but the concept was good. In order to make it palatable for casual games it needed to bring in features slowly and ramp up difficulty slowly. There also needed to be some kind of rewards along the way so the players get that payoff. 

Operant Conditioning - "A technique used to modify behavior by reinforcing desired behaviors, and ignoring or punishing undesired behaviors'

This is pretty much how advertisements work, and slot machines, and any kind of amusement game. The game must reward successful steps more than punish them for failure or they won't come back.

The video at the top of this post is the test video I did on July 1. I was testing out a shader for some drop shadow effects. The video shows some training levels and test mazes. I hope you find it interesting.  Please comment, check out my website or my YouTube channel. 

MGD - Stay Nerdy my friends

Here is a quick overview of the development Setup:

• Development Environment: Unity 2D URP 2019.3.13f1
• Editor: JetBrains Rider
• Tools: Photoshop/Illustrator/Garage Band/Audacity
• Development Platform: Windows 10 64bit / Mac OS X El Capitan