DougVFX: Blog

Thumb At Me Bro!
This is the title I'm going with for my thumb wrestling game. I have made a ton of progress and I've only really been working on it for two weeks but it feels really good to see it come together. Since the scope of this game is so small I'm free to play in between the lines. It's in that spirit that I've added 4 skins for the hands which are acting as characters. I'm really drawing inspiration from the feeling of pro wrestling entertainment I watched as a kid and the personalities each wrestler had. They always seemed to embody some kind of specific gimmick and go way over the top with it. The other fun thing is that since it's so easy to just make skins for the characters I can make a bunch if I want. So now I have a character Select screen that fades into the main event scene where the match happens.

 I also changed the way pinning works. Before I was checking for some ranges where the pin could be in a pinnable state and then you had to click the trigger to invoke a pin. this caused a lot of fatigue on the players hand so now you can use the trigger on your side of the controller. Additionally you can invoke a pin with this button even if you're not holding up. Each time you miss though there is a moment of vulnerability whch makes the game more exciting. I also added some effects when you miss a pin so you can read it very easily as a miss and it's way over the top. Obviously. 

If a player lands a pin each character has a unique effect that happens. Moscow Mule has something that looks like a hammer hitting hot steel. Grave Digger has one that looks like a lightning bolt strike.

I will be working on the character select screen this weekend some more on top of creating an intro screen, a start screen, a player lose screen where the winning player says a winning taunt and a continue screen with a countdown. If the losing player hits the trigger during the countdown it will start the character select screen. Currently I only have a simple rematch choice on a black screen for continuing. I am giving myself until Monday to have the game in an Alpha state. Playable from beginning to end and then I will have the game in Beta by next Sunday. I still have to work out music and sound effects which I really want to be awesome so we'll see how the heck I pull that off. 

What Am I Doing?

Making the game has been a lot of fun and I have had several people tell me to try and sell it for at least $0.99 or something. That sounds great. Problem is I don't know how the hell to sell a game. This is going to be my biggest hurdle. How do I copyright the game? What kind of thing will this do to my taxes? Do I have to register an LLC? It's a lot to think about. I've been very careful to make sure I'm not using any assets or resources that may be under a freeware license that denies commercial use. My only concern about an asset right now is the text font. I got it from 1001 free fonts and I read it up and down and it said it's available for commercial use. I even tried to look for the author to contact but could't track down a contact. Anyway we'll see. Changing fonts is the lest of my concerns.