Adult Female in the industry

I know that title is a bit strange. Let me explain...

Today my Daughter turned 18. A huge deal where I come from in the UK. Over here in SoCal USA it is not such a big deal. In fact I had such a hard time finding a card with 18 on it, that I never actually did.

Now being 18 means she is now officially an adult. Yes, an adult. She has already started her college career at a local community college this summer, meanwhile she is also of course working with her Dad (me) on our first game development together.

Leilani has been working on Very Bunny Haha now for over a year and are still going strong. We really have been connecting well on the game and as the game has developed we have added, changed and improved so much along the way. In fact in the last year the game has developed from our first ideas to the way it is going now. It has added many, many months to the development cycle, but we are really enjoying the ride. In fact adding in Leilani's graphics are a real pleasure, along with working with her on scripts and other aspects of design.

Leilani is a wonderful daughter that has her own ideas, and works really well with me. Something we will always have, and hopefully when it is completed many other people will also get to enjoy our game.

Leilani has now been in the Industry making this game for over a year. Do you think she will get an E3 badge next year? I don't know, but I will certainly try hard to make it happen. She works every day on this game... she deserves it.

Congrats my sweet Leilani. Follow those dreams and work hard like you always do. I believe in you.

Dad,
DaVoodoochief

VBHh ongoing Development

Been a while since I last wrote up a Blog post. We HAVE been busy however.

First off I want to mention something I only got set up a couple of days ago, but I am really chuffed about it to say the least. That is MantisBT.

MantisBT is Mantis Bug Tracker software. This will allow us to track not only bugs, but also features we are working on or desire in the future. We can Rate, Group, Sort  and Assign these bugs between me and Leilani. Later when we get real testers on the game we will be able to give them accounts as well. Brilliant and awesome for the future of the game. I will mention my mate Colby who helped me set it all up in no time at all. COOL!

We have also been busy developing the game..

We have been creating characters, characters that feel more real. Easier to connect with, along with story arcs for a number of them. Motivations, desires and goals. This all came about several weeks ago when I read this AWESOME article on Gamasutra.
Lively Game Characters
This was such a good read for both me and Leilani, we decided to give it a test run over lunch. We picked fairly randomly 3 of the NPCs we have in the game and followed the main bullet points. What we did was create something we didn't have, something more than wonderful. Real feeling, rounded characters, but along with that we got a hefty bonus. More story for these NPCs meant we also had more areas to create quests for the game. FANTASTIC!

There has also been some new graphics created, though not yet in the game. Along with some programming to fix bugs and add more features.

Finally one of the big things we have done is to do a 10 minute walk through. Ok, so we did not make ten minutes before I called it as we had three pages of notes half way through. Now I am very busy trying hard to get all those notes done and soon I expect we will do another game play through and try hard to make it to the 10 minute mark.

So the game is coming along. Never as fast as we want it to, but we want quality more than we need it finished. Along with that Leilani has college to deal with and me the usual day time job.

There will be more coming and I intend to start work on the Press Pack once more as now I have gotten over the fact that screen shots will not be final. Heck, who cares at this point... the game still looks original and AMAZING!

g'night
DaVoodoochief