FancyBox Dev

We're still here – if anyone was wondering. Fancy Box Studios was started with the intention of it being a side thing for all of us, and if we had some luck maybe then it could be the full-time thing we all did. So, alas, life got in the way of all of us recently; school, work, family – so that's why we haven't been keeping things up to date.

So, what is new with us? Well, for those of you who've paid any attention might have noticed our Kickstarter failed...hard. But that's okay – we stuck in there and it really only prolonged development a little bit.

As for Pothole City, well, it's “finished.” Or extremely close to it – we have a few things to do then we'll submit it to Apple and once it's on iOS we'll push it onto the Google Play Store and most likely Amazon App Store for Android users. So, “soon” is as specific as I can honestly be. But we're all pretty happy about how the game turned out and we hope it frustrates everyone while bringing loads of joy to your hearts! Or something...

What's next for Fancy Box Studios? As for now, we're not really sure what we're going to make next, but I'm personally hoping we make our next game in Unity. Programming the game in an unfamiliar scripting language with an unfamiliar SDK was probably not the best course of action for Pothole City, but we got it done, and I did learn quite a lot from the overall experience. But considering a good chunk of our team is familiar with Unity, I really hope our next game is created in that wonderful engine!

And the last thing I want to touch on is “What's In The Box?”, our Twitch.tv weekly show. We haven't done it in a long time, and there's not really a specific reason for this, but I do hope we do it again so we can talk to other Indie devs and learn from them aswell as help promote their awesome games. We'll see, hope we start it up again.

EDIT: Oops! In my excitement I left out the link! CLICK IT!!

Hey everyone, check out our kickstarter page! Spread this around or fund it if you can! Thanks everyone!

Also, I'll be posting another update soon.. have been doing a lot of the work on little things in the code preparing to finish this thing up! Very excited.

I'm trying to update more regularly, and I wanted to show the hint screen I recently finished. A lot of people who test our game seem to be pretty confused, so hopefully this clears some stuff up. :)

Just dropping by to add some more-recent screenshots of Pothole City!

We're working on it all the time, fixing bugs, making everything better and fancier (as much as we can).

Massive Potholes!

Pretty snow!

Flaming Coffee Meter(for road rage)!

Tyler here. just finished up all the artwork for Pothole City meaning we are so very close to finishing the game! It's been a wild ride. Maybe once the game is officially out I can finally beat Kenny's high score.

We skipped our weekly "What's In The Box?" twitch.tv show this week because of some other things that we needed to take care of. "Pothole City" is still making regular progress, we have all new sounds and songs, new art, and many of the mechanics are working (but need tweaking!).

We were interested in using image/sprite sheets to manage our art assets, and this is something I've never done, but understood the concept. Basically, I thought I was gonna smoosh all the images together in a single file, and then tediously figure out the x, y location of each image in the file so I could use it.

That doesn't exactly sound hard, but time consuming and boring.

So, I did a quick search and found Texture Packer (http://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker). It's actually extremely easy to use, just drag and drop files and select which engine you want to export for. It'll provide not only the image sheet, but also a file defining each image in the sheet! Awesome!

We don't have all of the final art assets yet, so we're not quite done pushing them all to image sheets but with what we've done there's been a noticeable size decrease and also performance boost so that's awesome, too!

I'll post another progress update in a couple of days.

We've made a ton of progress once again, and currently have a fully working, playable build that we all passed around trying to beat each others scores! Of course, there are still some bugs to be squashed, but here are some new, pretty screenshots!

the HUD looks pretty epic, thanks Tyler!

Ooooh other cars trying to get in your way!

Another car and powerup woohoo!

There's also sounds and music!

We've made a lot of progress on our first game over the past few days. Kenny and I are finally figuring out Lua and Corona SDK enough to be making a significant amount of positive progress. 

Also, we've been getting a lot of the art from Tyler and gradually been swapping it in as we touch up mechanics.

Here's a just-finished screen on the main menu with fresh Tyler art! It's almost a completely functional menu too! Oh yeah, we're calling it Pothole City now!

Slowly, but surely, our first little app is coming together. Kenny and I have been coding mechanics, then tearing them apart and recoding them to hopefully make them better. The truth is, we don't know what we're doing 100%, and jumping in Lua might have been a rash decision considering neither of us messed with it before. We now have spawning "potholes" but we're working on making a better collision detection system. The distance was going up, but we took it out also and will re-implement it. It's still not pretty, but one day...

I'll be updating more often soon.

We've been hard at work with our first game, which we have been calling POTHOLE SEASON!!! We're programming some of the logic, and we even stuffed in some filler art (that took far too long to make, I might add).

There's honestly not a whole lot going on here, but it's progress and things will start to come along a lot faster. Now, pretty much all that goes down is that the car can change between lanes when you swipe left or right. It's pretty fancy, I'm just saying.

As things progress and real art is swapped in, we'll post more updates!

Hello little fancy boxes! 

   Today we get to talk about the ever so popular game, "Elder Scrolls Online".  Now, I know I said I would post my findings the very next night....Well....I kind of fudged up my key and couldn't start until yesterday morning.  BUT THAT'S BESIDES THE POINT.  Moving on...the game..yeah it was fun.  

   Okay, i'll be serious now.  Let's talk about the game, lets knock out the review before we dive deep into the mechanics.  What did I think of it?  Extremely addicting and completely captures that "Noob" feeling you get when you play a game for the first time.  Now despite being offered numerous BETA keys, I never played the BETA except for once.  I love becoming immersed in the game and by entering the world with absolutely no knowledge of what to do creates the most immerse experience I could imagine.  The questing system creates a sense of realism because not only do the players actually TALK TO YOU (WITH AUDIO), but they show emotion as well.  I enjoyed that, along with the combat system.  The combat system is an "action oriented progression mechanic", which pretty much evolves as you play the game.

Combat- (action oriented progression mechanic)-When the player first starts he or she is given a weapon with a single attack by clicking the left mouse button.  It's a progression mechanic because the player gains new spells and abilities with their weapon and spell as they progress through the game.  This shows progression through the combat system that is unique for each player (depending on the weapon and class they choose).

Movement- (action-oriented mechanic)-This one is simple, but i'm listing all the mechanics I see as I play so bare with me.  This one is a simple action-oriented mechanic because the movement in the game is all through player physical actions and decisions.  If the player decides to jump then the player with jump if the correct key sequence is initiated.

Open Doors- (action oriented mechanic)- This one is simple again because it's just opening doors, however it is actually a mechanic.  Player initiates button sequence when prompted at a door for the door to open and the player then initiates the "Movement" mechanic by deciding whether or not he or she want's to pass through it.

Made some pixel art in my spare time. I was just messing around with the different types of colors and shading them. This was all practice for me, since i'm not the artist or anything like that. I really hope that i can work on a pixel game in the future and make some amazing stuff! Hope you guys like it, ill be putting up some more when i get the chance.

-Kevin Watts (DER3Z)

Hello fanboys and fangirls!

   As you can tell, this post is going to be filled with information on the new released title "Elder Scrolls Online".  Obviously tonight the game is not available (I fricken bought the 3 day early access, not the 5 day uuuggghhh).  HOWEVER!, we will be starting to break the game down followed by screenshots and interesting ideas regarding the mechanics:D  Yes...I'm going to be THAT guy and tear apart the mechanics like the evil designer that I am.  Hey...you would too if you spent as much time as I do figuring out which rules are fun and which are not.  

   So please Fancybox Fans, stay posted because each night there will a new post up involving the game and it's flaws...*cough* *hngh* *cough* I mean exciting features:D

Well, as you guys know we are working on our first app game for the iOS and Android market. I don't want to talk to much about the app, but I will give you a little teaser from a personal experience that relates to our game.

It was a beautiful morning; birds chirping, sunshine coming through the trees, everything that you would picture in the summer time. You see, the winter here in Cleveland, Ohio was a harsh one to say the least. We had about 8 snow days called for the local schools, a 30-car pile-up on the highway, and white out conditions almost every week. It was bad. So to have this beautiful weather was a blessing to say the least....or so I thought.

Remember, when I said that we had a harsh winter? Well, apparently the roads took a beating from the salt, turning it into a scene from Saving Private Ryan. The kind of scene where the the mortar shell creates a crater in the street.

Now, lets get back to where the fun starts. I was going down with my girlfriend to an authentic Mexican restaurant to get some tacos al pastor. Now, these aren’t your average American tacos, they contain Mexican-season spiced meat with cilantro and onion and a side of homemade sauce, so we had to go out and get them. While driving down Fulton Rd with no problem, we got to the restaurant, ate our delicious tacos, and went on our way home back up Fulton Rd.

Well, I guess going down the other side of Fulton, I wasn't so fortunate. Going the speed of 35mph, I hit a small pothole. No big deal, I say to myself, I dodge the second one and continue down the road. Now to save myself in this post it was night time, so i kind of didn't miss every pothole. BOOM! WTF WAS THAT!!?!? BOOM!?!?! ARE YOU SERIOUS!?!? Pissed as if someone just wrecked my car with a sledgehammer, I continued home. To my surprise, when I got out of my car, my passanger wheel was blown.  I had to call in a tow truck and take it to my mechanic.

All in all, becareful on the road and don't trust the streets of Cleveland. Man, I wish I had some magical monster truck wheels about now. Maybe soon, there will be an app for that…?

-Kevin Watts

Working on portraits for the fancy members of Fancy Box Studios (excluding myself)

Clockwise from the top left it's Aaron, Kevin, Jake, Paul, Andy and Kenny. Keep in mind I've only met 2/3 of them in person and very briefly. So I had to take some artistic liberty. Hope you enjoy them as much as they do.