Bellbird Creative News & Blog

First video blog from the development of Team Friendship, the game I’m developing with UDK. I think I like this format better than written blogs!

Very much alive and kicking, but been so busy with work recently I haven’t had much of a chance to get into a bit of creativity and constructive work. C’est la vie; gotta pay the bills!

Recently I’ve been working alongside My Tours App to get all the tours from Audio Tours Australia up and running as an app and I’m really happy with how that’s turned out. Previously I’d thought about doing that but it required getting a graphic designer and programmer on board and that was out of my budget. So that’s up and running now at the iTunes App Store.

So with that done I designed some DL sized flyers and phoned a heap of hostels in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne asking if I could mail some to them to put on display for their guests. Most were great about it. Only one or two said no because all their flyers are partnership agreements with tour providers. I imagine there’s a commission/affiliate agreement in there, which is fair enough. So in the end I had 33 backpacker hostels say I could send them some flyers. I sent the design away to a printing house and got 5000 flyers delivered the next week! So just this morning I’ve finished bundling them up into envelopes to send off on Monday when the post office is open again. Exciting!

Team Friendship is also still alive, just a tad dormant at the moment. But I’m going to dedicate a few hours to it this week now that the tour flyers are out of my hair for a while. Bear with me!

Been busy working recently but I’ve had some time to get all 30 of the multiplayer puzzle rooms photoshopped so the level design is neat and tidy. I thought I’d posted a handful of them if you’re curious but I don’t expect them to make much sense without the walkthrough write-up to go with them (that later). This isn’t by any stretch a definitive guide to level design but it works for me. A bit laborious when it’s much more exciting to just jump into the editor and start smashing out levels, but the foresight, groundwork and planning always pays off, especially in regards to cohesion and consistency. Enjoy! ~

Just a quick update! So I’ve clicked together all 30 of the multiplayer rooms sequentially and also spatially and the flow looks pretty good to me. I’ll get that down pat and then wrap the intertwined single-player route around it later. I imagine a lot of the finer details won’t really come out until whiteboxing, but I know what multiplayer rooms need to intersect with the single-player rooms, and the rest will fall into place on its own. Read more…

Wow… Long time between drinks, so to speak. Been busy here working at work, working at home, working on Team Friendship, working on Audio Tours Australia, and working on not becoming a hermit becaue of too much working. Last I mentioned I’d finished the pen & paper level design for Team Friendship. Well that was partially true. You should know I’m absolutely opposed to “feature creep” where irresponsible management bloats a project with extras and new features during development which slowly but surely corrodes the integrity and overall vision of a project, often resulting in a mish-mash of features with no cohesion, no target audience (or rather too many target audiences), no definition, and often the complete collapse (or worse; development limbo) of a project. I’ve worked on projects like that before and, in a word, it’s bad. Really bad. So I was tentative about the big step I wanted to take with Team Friendship. Read more…

After a completely failed attempt at writing my own HTML code for a mobile version of Audio Tours Australia (well it worked, but just not on mobiles) I hacked and glued together a mobile version using an awesome template from iWebKit so now it looks like I actually know what I’m doing without the need to actually know what I’m doing!

You can check out the mobile version at mobile.audiotoursaustralia.com using any smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, even iPad). What I’ll actually be using it for mainly is when I start up a print campaign again, likely with TNT Magazine Australia which I’ve done before. I’ll just list both URL’s on the ad and probably also a scannable QR Code. Read more…

Woo hoo! The pen & paper level design phase of all 30 puzzle rooms for ‘Team Friendship‘ is done! Here’s a couple of pics I took of the latest and greatest (maybe just latest):

Yeah it looks like chicken scratch at this stage, but it’s meant to. If I started putting too much emphasis on aesthetics instead of core gameplay at this stage it’ll just end up fundamentally un-fun which will permiate through the rest of the project. Chances are it’ll look rubbish until the eleventh hour, but this is normal enough. Read more…

I just wanted to jump back in here for a moment to say I’m still alive and so is the project! It’s been a busy couple of weeks.

I spent a little time over in Perth for my nephew’s first birthday and to catch up with my sister and her husband again which was great. Overnight flights are a killer… While I was over there I got a call from the local liquor store saying I got a job there, so that’s neat. Obviously I’m currently not working in games because Australia’s industry is a bit dried up at the moment (perhaps due to the parity of our dollar with the USD stopping new licenses coming in). So yeah, a man’s gotta eat. So over the last two days I’ve been up at the Sunshine Coast doing training and induction stuff, which was a bit mind-numbing but necessary. We were on the balcony of the Buderim Tavern which had views out over the coastline to Moreton Island and it was easy to tune out watching the cargo ships sailing along the bay in the distance. But all good, I passed everything. Read more…

Just touching base here. Been fairly busy the last few days, and just this morning I laid mulch over a whole garden. As laborious and repetative as gardening is there’s a masochistic sense of satisfation about it… Same goes for game development I suppose and at least gardening gives you something tangible to show for it! Read more…