E3 2010 Wrap Up Starring Grapple Buggy

Grapple Buggy went to E3 2010 in a secretive capacity as opposed to the press-tastic event from last year. I privately showed a brand new demo to interested parties such as prospective publishers, and sup@r l33t pre$$ such as you'll see later.

Click for a full screen view of the new, fancy-pants widescreen display!

The demo has shaped up a lot since having entered it into Creators Club playtest last year, and everyone at the show were very excited to play the entire game. I showed the game to Inkling Games owners, Lesley and Peter (colleagues from Insomniac Games), and they had some great advice for further improving things: Enemies like the Trail Fly should attack in a more recognizable pattern, no matter how obvious some of the gameplay seems, always teach each new chunk to the player before combining situations, and in our game's particular case subtitles are hugely important! When you get too "close to the canvas" sometimes it helps to hear good gameplay concepts repeated by friends.

Grapple Buggy's new cinematics feature full dialog (which has been cleaned up and processed to sound more like the characters are actually in a vehicle), camera work, and some animation, but because they aren't full animated people subtitles help give it that extra polish and oomph to get the point across.

Currently I'm getting further improving the E3 demo to eventually send off to the various publishers with whom I met at the show. They all showed great interest, so I feel good about sending the game to them. It's one thing to stand next to them while they play but a whole other level of polish and good design is needed to hand an mid-development game off to someone to play on their own. And thus I'm taking any issues that came up at E3 and trying to iron them out.

Behind the back grapple!

Finally, at the show I had the fun of letting Nukezilla reporters Brett and Justin play the 'publisher only' demo of Grapple Buggy. They came away impressed saying things like :

"The titular buggy is sleek and polished, piloted by a sarcastic blonde and the vehicle’s disembodied brain. The contrast the far-future look of your craft against the truly alien environment and creatures is successful and gives the game a special appeal."
Read the full preview here.

Just popping a zit for him.
(Eww! Yeah, that was pretty gross)