Development Diary: Rat Race Entrepreneur.

Not sure which of these I like most. Been staring at them for hours. I can talk about the different energy they represent, the balance and all the tech design stuff. A logo says a lot about a game, and Rat Racer needs to broadcast from the get go. Something Indie, but polished, i.e. not crappy. Something fresh, stylised, fun, fast and sleek, with a bit of edge. Something inspiring, with a break -the-rules and do it your own way personality. Something that will get it attention.

Welcome to the development diary of Rate Race Entrepreneur ( or RRE, working title), a fast paced life simulator game for mobile about making it in the big city, and what that "success" entails (nice little topic for a future entry...) . Jones in the Fast Lane meets Sim City meets Hungry Hippos. Working on my elevator pitch... After 18 months of development, of working around the clock and after "work" work, RRE is almost at it's one player alpha stage and is actually starting to feel like a game (trailer coming soon). I've got me my dude-like character with his swanky animations, he's got things in the world that he can do stuff with, shops, items, NPCs, stats pages, UI, nice colourful world… So it’s about high time I get the blog started.

As I go I’ll be documenting the entire process. I’ll be doing this in the true "wing it, figure this out as we go" spirit of everything else that has been the journey of RRE so far. There'll be stuff about character designs, 3D stuff, why I made certain design choices and which features got dropped, why I chose font X, how I got my kinect working and why I had to redo those bloody fbx anims. Hopefully this will in the very least provide an interesting read for you guys interested in game dev.

A bit about me. I'm from -no wait, first thing you need to know about me is that I despise computers and technology with a passion. Don't get me wrong, I love what we can do with them (believe me it's bloody hard to get magic midgets moving coloured hand painted pictures around - especially for games mind you...), but I’m not a techie person and I can’t stand working with tech. Every time – every single time – something can go wrong, it will. We’ve overcomplicated everything and in order to produce anything you have to be a tech slave, hunched over and scouring the web for solutions to whatever problem arises, having to remember your login just to read a forum thread-

Getting carried away here, I’ll do this in another entry sometime. It’ll be the ‘I hate tech’ entry, which will precede the ‘I just killed 4 people with a can opener’ entry that won’t make too much sense… Anyway I’ve been designing games since I was a kid. My school books were always filled with characters and moves and weapons and stuff. Freakin’ guys climbing around paragraphs, shooting at each other, flip book animations… now residing in Sydney Australia, I’ve lived in 3 other countries (South Africa, Israel, Japan), am by now an established film maker, 3D artist and musician. And I can do some basic code, although as you’ve guessed I take to it like a steak knife to the right eyeball.

Anyway, think that’s enough for day 1. We’ve got the website going, got the blog up once I finish this and click submit, got a game alpha, I think off to an ok start. This blog, which I’m going to call “The Ignorant Entrepreneur Game Developer (needs a proper title)” will be updated quite regularly – promise – in fact next post I’ll see if I can explain this blog title. So with that I'm going to crack open a beer, as I do every time I get something done (today it's none other than a Trappistes Rochefort 10). The development diary is finally up!

PS liking this as a good starting point for the logo. Got some ideas/comments/feedback? Would love to hear it, so go to the Forum and Contact page and place it on the forum or fill out the contact form. Also if you feel like it, go to the forums and tell us about a fun dull, mundane weekend story you have. Might get featured in the game…

Cheers,

Daniel

Chief Rat Racer