#ouya create

Not gonna lie, I'm feeling really weird right now; one part of me feels confident in the work I put in, but another is super nervous for tomorrow. Regardless of the outcome, I'm so happy that so many people connected with and supported the game :)

If you want to help out, here's the link to show your support:

Television is part WarioWare, part Myst.  Games take the form of shows on channels, which the players can switch between freely. Discover underlying systems, learn the rules, play Television.

Learn more at:

http://laboratory.vg/

http://youtube.com/laboratorygames/

Dev Log 2 - Get Setup For Your Attack Run:

Getting to know the OUYA has been a tumultuous ride. Receiving the dev unit package, exploring it's primordial menu, and launching the first test application were all very exciting. The day after the CREATE contest announcement, we started working on concept development, and on my end I started working on tooling and infrastructure.

I'm an ActionScript developer. That's how I identify myself as a coder. It's neat being able to move between platforms and retain my experience. But it also introduces it's own challenges. One of those is that AIR has great solutions for games with only a few assets in very high quality, but things get more complicated when you need to deal with a lot of large assets. That problem is compounded on a mobile platforms. The OUYA is a hearty little beast, but it is still a mobile-like platform, and so you're still dealing with mobile constraints.

I got my feet wet with OUYA contributing a test application with visual feedback  and some patches for work with Gas Light Game's OUYA Controller ANE. Getting a solid connection to the controller was obviously priority #1. Once we had a reliable solution we did some initial perfomance testing and generally going about determining how and what we can accomplish at a technical level.

We decided to go with Starling as a framework, because it's robust and easy to work with. I've used it for multiple games professionally, and it has continued to mature and impress. But the sacrifice is that you lose a lot of the power of Flash Professional for animation. It does have the new Sprite Sheet Exporter, introduced in CS6, but Television needs a bunch of large assets to move and rotate and generally do things that are not sprite-sheet-friendly. A 2D solution was having a number of performance issues and as soon as things started really moving about, pushing 1920x1080 was not going to happen without leveraging the GPU.

In order to solve our animation problems, I spent a few double-shift days working out a rough workflow to allow us to export animation data from Flash Professional using a customized version of grapefrukt-export and then writing a tool to utilize that animation data within Starling.

Dev Log 1 - Show and Tell 1:

There's one week (ish) left, and we're wrapping up our first three shows.  The majority of our time so far has been spent programming tools for the infrastructure of the game - and we at laboratory are excited to put that crap behind us; we all know that making games is the best part of making games.