Post-GDC Stretch
Hey all, long time no update… mostly I’ve just been banging away at my various grad school projects. I’m pretty excited about all of them and hope to have more to say about them soon, but here are some brief descriptions of my final projects…
Chomp: 2 players share a single controller, each manipulating one jaw of a fish as you swim through the ocean. When you see a good fish, try to chomp down on it by moving the jaws together at the same time. I’ve mostly worked on design, though I also wrote the main menu music. Zlata Barshteyn is the programmer and project lead, Trevin Hiebert is doing sound design, and Jenny Jiao Hsia is our artist. For Andy Nealen’s Minimalist Game Design class.
Bandit Kings (temporary name): A CCG ( collectible card game) where you swap cards permanently during play. Whatever cards you end the game with, you keep! When you create a deck, you customize your cards with names and pictures. You’ll use these bandits and treasures to battle opponents and snag their best cards. Each card has a “Glory” rating which is used to assess your deck’s prestige – the more Glory you have, the better you’re doing! Designed with Misha Favorov, Char George, Elyse Lemoine, and Maria Saint Martin for Eric Zimmerman’s Game Design 2.
Geneses: An abstract real-time strategy game where your only resource is time. As a fledgling god at the end of a cosmic cycle, you strike out across the world to discover the Altars of the old gods, which house their sacred power. You build holy Beacons to spread your influence across the land, and you win by connecting the Altars you find back to your home base or “Genesis”, slowly adding their power to yours.
In other news, I received proofs of the materials for Nika and finalized the dimensions of the pieces. Aside from one minor issue, everything looked great and appears to be on schedule to ship in July. I also submitted Nika (as a board game) to IndieCade this year, so, fingers crossed!
Finally, I hope to know soon what my summer plans are. I’ll let you know when I know!
Josh
Wind Catcher Games 