First Game

First day of classes today.

We had a guest visit from the Beehive Cheese Company with a request to make a casual iPhone game that would appeal to their core demographic: 24-45 year old fancy-cheese buying women. Games for this demographic can't really be overly strategy based or excessively complicated, and have to be fun enough for people to want to keep playing while simultaneously branding different products from BCC.

We discussed extremely different styles of game mechanics, settling finally on a launch-style game, similar to Angry Birds but with more flight control and a longer path. A bee would be launched out of a beehive with a huge wheel of cheese and the player would attempt to intersect floating BCC ingredients in the air. Tapping the screen would deplete the on-screen "boost" power to make the bee fly higher. The level would start with a specific cheese requirement (eg: you're making Barely Buzzed cheese, collect 10 coffee and 5 lavender) and the player would progress to the next level if he had "collected" the minimum threshold of the specific items he was looking for. Unrelated items would count towards points for boost powers, and landing on the ground would end the level. Initially, landing on a cow instead of the ground would launch you back into the air instead of ending the level, and the frequency of cows would diminish as the level progressed.

Apparently we're also required to use the MOAI SDK, which is not inherently intuitive and has a lot of the other engineers up in arms about how to use it. It seems initially that you have to deploy every program you create to the cloud, which implies that any graphics would have to be loaded there as well. Disk space would disappear rapidly if this was actually the case, and it would become a freemium model really quickly as only 50 MB are allotted to free-level programmers.