Faerie Princess Alyshia update planned

This week, I'm going to start working on the update for Faerie Princess Alyshia.  I've gotten a lot of good feedback from the community, and plan to take those suggestions to heart in this first official update.  Some of the updates planned include:

• Making butterfly and flower styles purchasable with nectar.
• Allowing players to change the style of individual flowers and butterflies.
• Allowing players to move flowers around.
• Address the bug where butterflies sometimes spawn off the screen and take several minutes to join the family.
• Tweaking the flower blooming time so that more flowers are available for butterflies.

I think these updates are going to be the bulk of what I do in this next patch, but I'm interested in hearing from everyone what they would like to see in the future.  If anyone would like to make a comment on this post about what they would like to see in future updates, all ideas will be considered.

In other news, we have broken 1,000 plays for Faerie Princess Alyshia.  To be honest, I was expecting to see about that much for the life of the game.  I never really thought we would be there in just over one week!  Thanks to everyone who has enjoyed the game, and I'm going to do my best to make the game even more enjoyable.

Where the magic happens

Faerie Princesses and candy making Gnomes don't grow on trees...Well...Maybe they do, but we make them to star in our video games.  On this end, we kind of thought (and I'm not using the royal We this time) that all of you might like a little look behind the scenes of Megan Morgan Games.  

So.  Without further adieu.  The office:

Magical Shelf of Inspirations

When we dream, we dream of electric sheep.  Or maybe we dream about Homer Simpson and the Scooby Gang.  Any way it goes, this shelf embodies the little things that bring us here at Megan Morgan Games little moments of joy and happiness.  

Spooky's Desk

This is where Spooky lives.  Well, she lives in the whole house, but this is where she works.  If I can draw your attention to the right, you will notice a couple of really, really, really, really (1,2,3,4) really, creepy books.  And yes, that is a weird book about mushrooms next to the ventriloquism book.

Darkness' Current Game Board

We like marker boards.  There are several of them around the office.  This one is where Darkness keeps track of what needs to be done in his current project.  The notes in this picture reference the work he is doing on Oswald's Chocolate Factory.  You may notice the coffee stain on his flow chart.  At any given time, Darkness drinks enough coffee to personally finance the country of Columbia.

Modular Dungeon Pieces

Everyone needs a hobby.  We at Megan Morgan Games say "Why have just one?"  Darkness likes to make fantasy architectural models.  This picture shows a few pieces that he made for a simplified version of D&D that he plays with the kids.  The two minis were hand painted by Darkness and are the characters that are played in the game (The kids picked them out themselves).

The Stargate

Both Spooky and Darkness enjoy various forms of needlework.  The Stargate is a piece that Spooky made for Darkness for his birthday.  There really is no place like home.  As a side note, she also made an awesome Salad Fingers doll [Pictured on Darkness' Current Game Board].

The Geek Shelf

If your geeky and you know it clap your Bigby's Floating Hands.  Darkness plays D&D, he loves Star Wars, and reads Dean Koontz and Brian Lumley.  There are two more shelves above these that contain our Stephen King books, our minis shelf, and (for some strange reason) a cactus shot glass.

Oswald's Chocolate Factory

I've begun work on my next title, Oswald's Chocolate Factory.  It is already proving to be a fun and challenging project.  I've spent the better part of the day working out the movement mechanics for the game.  A great deal more trial and error than it should be, but the final result is extremely promising:

Still needs a little bit of tweaking when the chocolate falls off the ends of the belt, but it is coming along quite nicely.

In other news, I am blown away by how much action Faerie Princess Alyshia has gotten since it's launch.  As of the time that I am typing this, I have gotten 248 plays on Kongregate, with one player already holding a score of over 33,000!  Once I get to a good stable point with Oswald, I'm going to revisit Alyshia and see what I can't do about making the game even better.

If you haven't checked out Faerie Princess Alyshia, be sure to head over to Kongregate and play.  While you are there, be certain to rate the game, and feel free to post any comments/questions/criticisms/love notes you might want to leave for me. You are all awesome.  I just can't say that enough.

First game, Faerie Princess Alyshia is live!

Faerie Princess Alyshia is live!  It's nothing spectacular to be sure, but I am really proud of it.  It has been a nearly two months of work, most of that being the hand drawn graphics.  I've also learned a great deal that I will be using to make future titles even better!

Almost there

I'm working on some final bug fixes, and then I'm going to pass Faerie Princess Alyshia (new name for Faerie Princess Idler) on to my testers.  I figure a week should be adequate to test the game, and will give me time to plug the appropriate APIs in.

The open story sequence has been fun to work on.  I finally decided to go with my parchment background and use some edge faded images to accentuate the text.  The images aren't extremely impressive, but I think they get the idea across.

You may notice that there is a huge transparent border around the image.  It was the only way I could insure a clean fade into the parchment background.  If the border was smaller it seemed to leave a flash-line that was very unattractive...

The current bug is driving me nuts, but I think I'll have it fixed before I go to bed tonight.  It seems that when I tell the program to splice the array, it is leaving a null value in the spot that is being spliced.  It only seems to do this with my clouds, and not with my bubbles (Both use the same routine).  Anyway.  I'm sure I'll get it figured out.

With any luck.  You should be able to look forward to seeing Faerie Princess Alyshia next weekend!

Happy early 4th of July

I'll be working tomorrow (my corporate job), so I won't have time to post.  I didn't want to miss the opportunity to wish you all a very happy and safe 4th of July (for those of you that celebrate).
Games are coming along slowly, but surely.  I'm on schedule to release the Faerie Princess Idler by the end of this month.  It means learning how to incorporate gaming site API into my programs, but it shouldn't be that hard (knock on wood).
For those of you who didn't know, Megan Morgan Games is named after the two most important women in my life, my daughters.  The youngest of my daughters lives close by, however my oldest daughter lives clear across the country, so we stay in touch primarily through text messaging.  She gave me a bit of an accidental shocker yesterday when we were texting back and forth. "Mind if we come over for a bit?" Needless to say I wasn't expecting my daughter from across the country to show up at my doorstep in the middle of the day. I might have had a minor heart attack.   But,  I guess her fiance saw "Dad" on the cell phone and thought he was texting his father, and got me instead.   My family is full of practical jokers, myself included, but I really have to give props to my kid's fiance for getting one over on me without even trying...lol
Anyway.  Enough of my [sadly sober] rantings for one evening.  This weekend I hope to have some more screen shots of the Faerie Princess Idler for you :)