Brothers Flint

For those curious, we thought it would be interesting to share with you a little of our process for creating a level in Coffee Pot Terrarium. It typically starts with an inspiration of basic shapes, for example, a sequence of squares increasing in size, long rows of tiles in parallel, or a map in the shape of a spiral. A simple pencil sketch records these ideas. From dozens of iterated layouts, we pick our favorites that we think are eye-catching and would provide a good core for creating a level.

The next step involves fleshing out the design on graph paper by adding intricacies to the tile layout. Sometimes this involves adding in mini-situations that connect in a series of increasing challenge, at other times it's an organic process of trial and error to create an engaging scenario.

Once the tiles are in place, we record the enemies' starting positions and include any directional notation for patrollers, such as turn-bias and starting direction. The last step is placing trees and raising tiles to give extra personality and challenge to the maps.

We're then ready to implement this information into a playable level with our map editor, created in Unity. It's a streamlined editor that's easy to use. After playtesting and a few balance refinements, we're ready to add it to the queue of levels ready to ship! We've considered including the map editor in the actual game as an update down the road. It would be a lot of fun to play your levels and share with the community. :)

We're about halfway through designing all of the game's levels, and have received a lot of great feedback from folks at gaming conventions in Eugene, OR and San Francisco, CA. We look forward to sharing the Coffee Pot Terrarium experience with you when the game is ready to launch, sometime this summer.

A collection of levels ready to be crafted in the Coffee Pot Terrarium map editor

A tutorial level designed to introduce the Raise Path skill

The idea for this level started as three parallel lines with our hero Orion standing in the center

We prepared a 10 minute playable demo of CPT, featuring 3 levels introducing a player to the game. We ran the demo on our laptops accompanied by headphones and controllers, displaying the visuals on larger monitors for a more dynamic presentation. We had a banner display to help mark our game’s turf, and free flyers to hand out as a way of saying “thanks!” to all who checked out our booth.

It was thrilling to watch people play through the demo, observing real-time reactions to what they liked and what could use improvement. We enjoyed hearing player’s feedback and will definitely be including many of their ideas to further polish the CPT experience.

We also had a great time meeting fellow devs, enthusiasts, and members of the press. It was a very well run event making for a great experience. Looking forward to sharing CPT at more events in the near future. Stay tuned and best of luck to all the devs we met!

Coffee Pot Terrarium booth – before

Coffee Pot Terrarium booth – after

Siliconera

http://www.siliconera.com/2015/11/21/coffee-pot-terrarium-is-a-pretty-upcoming-tactical-rpg-made-by-two-brothers/

The Awesomer

http://theawesomer.com/coffee-pot-terrarium/345738/

Games Village ITA

http://www.gamesvillage.it/videogiochi/news/105087/coffee-pot-terrarium-approda-su-steam-greenlight/

Langweile Dich

http://www.langweiledich.net/taktik-puzzler-coffee-pot-terrarium/

The Robot’s Voice

http://www.therobotsvoice.com/2015/12/robotic-gaming-monthly-idea-factory-hopefully.php/3

Lost Video Games

Taking what we learned from making animations for our previous game Up & Away as a starting point (primarily background animations including the flag, bird, trees, and shining glints on windows), we applied these steps to creating the animations for our characters in Coffee Pot Terrarium. This process involves making a reel of 2D sprites, packaging them in TexturePacker, and giving them a frames per second count in Unity.

For Coffee Pot Terrarium specifically, we have an idle, movement, and attack animation for every enemy character. Each animation is composed of around 4 to 12 frames running at 10 frames per second. For the idle and walk animation, we run it as a loop with a brief pause between run-throughs.

Right now we’re playing around with the properties of a sprite to create our animations, including rotation, stretch, squash, and translation. Using these properties we can quickly craft some unique personalities for each enemy. We’ll go back and refine these placeholder animations down the road, but in the meantime, we’re pretty darn excited with how the placeholders are turning out. It’s amazing how just a little bit of dynamic action can turn an otherwise static image into a lifelike character.

We hit the highway a couple days early to drop off 5 original digital art prints for the art show. The artwork is all recent from this year, mostly including fantasy characters wielding big swords. We took the rest of the day to explore the city of Eugene, walking around the downtown area, touring the University of Oregon campus, and exploring surrounding parks. We tried a couple flights of beer at Ninkasi Brewing, and highly recommend checking them out if you’re ever in the area. It’s a pretty cool city and we definitely look forward to visiting again.

On Thursday, we enjoyed our day off by driving out to Florence, a small city near the Oregon coast. We hiked the Oregon Dunes, toured the Sea Lion Caves, and dined downtown before driving back to our hotel. The fall leaves were just starting to turn, so even the drive was a memorable experience in itself.

Things really kicked off Friday with the Business Summit. The event focused on preparing and equipping game developers with the knowledge and tools of business to help find financial success. Topics included monetization strategies, business structuring, marketing, legal, and how to pitch to investors for funding. The entertaining Twitch streamer Indie was in attendance and provided insight into leveraging the Twitch platform (something we’re starting to look into). Each presentation was enlightening and we’re glad we made the spontaneous decision to pick up tickets for the summit the night before.

Between getting hands-on play with games at the expo and listening to pro talks, Saturday was a busy day. Anytime we got a chance to listen to devs talk about their real life stories in the industry, we took it. Marketing director for Jumpdrive, Corey Warning, presented on grassroots marketing for their upcoming game XO, and Jon Dodson and Wick shared lessons learned on taking Starship Rubicon from weekend project to Steam. Of all the awesome games in the expo, our favorite would have to be Starr Mazer. We remember when it was going through its Kickstarter days, so it was fun to see a real project like that in person.

All in all, Indie Game Con was a great experience that surpassed our expectations. We’re looking forward to attending more cons in the future and feel prepared to join in and show what we’ve been working on.

Best of luck to all the devs we met!

Game Expo

Pro Talk

Since we already had a pixel art style worked out, a development platform under our belt, and the waters of the App Store and Play Store successfully navigated, why not develop a spiritual successor to Up & Away with slightly different gameplay mechanics? A few weeks into developing DON, however, we decided to pause and consider other ideas. Maybe developing another mobile game so similar to our previous release wasn’t the best option; maybe it was time to push new boundaries. With each project there’s a fine line between getting in over our heads and staying too close to a comfort zone, and we decided it was time to discuss new game concepts that would continue pushing our abilities.

We’ve always aspired to develop a game for PC and consoles, but we wanted that game to do those systems justice. A game with more complex mechanics, high-caliber graphics, level progression, and narrative. We continually talked about making a game like this one day, and we decided now is the time. Might as well give it a shot.

For this new game, we harkened back to childhood memories for inspiration. We had always dreamed of developing a turn-based tactics game, similar to Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, or Tactics Ogre. These were some of our favorite games growing up with numerous hours invested on the long drives out to the grandparents for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We decided to put DON on the back burner and see what we could come up with. We wanted a turn-based tactics game, but we wanted to give it a twist. We tried a number of ideas – most of which were either challenging but not fun, or fun but not challenging. Then we had a creative breakthrough. What if you could directly move the tiles and what if they supported each other, so when you drop one, the rest of the tiles in its row fall as well? We took a few weeks to prototype something up, and found the early demo to be fun, challenging, and novel.

So that’s what we’re working on now full-time – a turn-based tactics game called Coffee Pot Terrarium, to be released winter 2015 on Steam and mobile, and as many consoles as we can in the following months. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates on its development.

From the review, Super Game Droid describes the gameplay as both “intuitive and challenging with tons of extra stuff to unlock which should give you plenty of reason to float up, Up & Away with this great new arcade physics game”. We enjoyed that they mentioned the word ‘physics’ when describing the game, something we worked hard to develop. The balloons react independently to the wind gusts and player’s movements, giving each balloon its own velocity and force pulling on the character. The physics work in tandem with the gameplay as you collect more balloons, giving you increased control, in addition to creating a unique and natural swinging feel.

SGD imagined if there were “floating buzzsaws flying around in the movie Up like there are in indie studio Brothers Flint’s addicting new arcade game Up & Away it might have had a slightly different ending”.

He finds Up & Away to be very rage quit worthy and his difficult game of choice so that “boredom can be diverted in an instant.” It made our day to find this article and we’re glad people around the world are enjoying the game’s challenge.

Check it out for yourself on the Games In Asia – Indonesia (now Tech In Asia – Games) website:

Reviewed by one of our players as “asinine and completely pointless yet charming and stupidly addicting! I love it!”, Up & Away is our second game for iOS and our first for Android. Developed over the summer, our goal was to put a unique twist on the endless runner, incorporating a physics-based bunch of pixel balloons that must be guided through countless swinging wheels of death that upon contact, burst into colorful pixel explosions.

Building on what we learned from our first game, Satellite Defense (a tower defense game set in space) for iOS, we pushed ourselves to include more features in Up & Away. Two such additions include achievements and leaderboards – and it’s incredible to watch some of the heights people are recording as they push the game further than we expected. The Android leaderboard is very active, though its iOS counterpart has yet to come online – one of Apple’s internal teams is looking into it and we’re hoping to have this fixed in the coming week.

It’s free to download and play, utilizing banner ads placed discretely in only the game’s Shop and Game Over screens, with none to interfere gameplay. We’ve received over 1,000 downloads in the first week, and are looking to increase this number through exposureandgetting the word out. Some of the enthusiastic 5-star reviews we’ve received from players on the App Store include:

“This game is insanely fun and addictive. The retro graphics and huge number of characters you can achieve are all great. Definitely recommend this game, especially as one that’s fun to play every day.” – AndyFrench

“Asinine and completely pointless yet charming and stupidly addicting! I love it!” – Shannsnaoajsiaiaia

“This game is simply addicting! Play at your own peril.” – Bigmac 69 game lover

“Loving all the characters and pixel art!” – Sunnycrest52

Get it here for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/up–away/id909800185?mt=8