Fresh Meat

Hey, this is ella fae, the “new face” mentioned previously, and I just wanted to drop by and give you a quick introduction.

I’m just your average girl with a B.A. in English, a dream of becoming a professional author, and a passion for all things nerdy. And in case you’re wondering the validity of that last statement, I was the president of my university’s anime club and am still the only girl to ever win a tournament at the gamer’s club bi-annual LAN party. I am also very proud of my book, manga, and comic book collection, which exceeds 3,000 (though I ran out of room for them all a long time ago). Of course this all pales in comparison to my almost complete collection of Mystery Science Theater 3000, my absolute favorite TV show.

I am currently working on a couple of novel ideas to publish, on top of writing in fandom for my own amusement.  

As for my roles in hiive, I’ll mostly be the behind-the-scene girl doing the administrative work; however, I’m also going to help out with the research and story development for various games. I’m really excited to be part of the team, and I look forward to all the fun to come. 

Ja ne!

Time. The lack thereof.

Time is in short supply here at hiive HQ.

Although I'd love to be devoting my time to prototyping our new game the real world - unfortunately - has a habit of getting in the way.

The platform game prototype is working pretty well, but it's lacking a certain... something that makes me think it would be a great game. I have some ideas to develop it further, but until I've fleshed them out a little bit more, it's going on the back-burner.

So for the meantime, we're going to focus on prototyping another couple of ideas.
The first is the brain-child of my artist, Ian. He's been pestering me for a while to do a take on a Rogue-like. However, I wasn't keen unless we could think of something worthwhile to differentiate it from all of the other Rogue-likes out there.

Well, it turns out that an idea I had for another game allowed us to circle back round and take another look at the Rogue-like idea. The other game (which I'm not ready to mention yet) is nice and unique, and may well be a great deal of fun if I can pull it off, but will require a significant investment of time and money to do justice, whereas a Rogue-like... Well it's a Rogue-like. And by definition it will be easier and cheaper to produce.

I've been working on some Dungeon generation and path-finding code this weekend and hopefully will be able to get something up and running pretty quickly to test gameplay ideas. I'd like it to be recognizable as a member of its genre, but still be able to add something unique to the mix. We shall see how it transpires.

In the meantime, here are a couple of mockup screenshots using the graphics that Ian has thrown together thus far. (He seems to be under the impression that if he throws enough graphics at me I'll feel guilty about the effort he's been putting in, and consequently break down and start working on it. He's right.)

Mock-up 1

Mock-up 2

Bear in mind that these graphics are not indicative of the final game. This is purely a prototype. It may not pan out. We shall see.

In other news, there will be a new face on this blog soon. Hiive has enlisted the services of a talented young lady who will be responsible for a lot of the administrative work involved in running Hiive. I've been doing it myself for the past seven years and it's becoming a total pain in the posterior. I've been thinking about hiring an assistant for some time, but I finally pulled the trigger this weekend. So Yay! That means more time for me to work on games and less on boring paperwork!