More news, art and diaries to follow…..

Apologies to anyone trying to view this page recently, the web team made a slight booboo on the support site for Purgatory, this page will be updated as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience.

About Postal Panic

Postal Panic is the fun postcode delivery game. Your job is simple; deliver the parcels to the postcodes as quickly as you can. As the Parcels come down the conveyor belt, you need to deliver them to the postcode displayed before they hit the bottom, starting in London and then going national. Postal Panic is all about fast-fingers and good memories!

FEATURING
• Accurate map of the UK postal code system
• Simple, intuitive touch game controls
• Single or Multi-player with up to 4 players
• Addictively fun puzzle game play and scoring
• Learn the Post Code areas of the UK and impress your friends & family

Watch the trailer or click on the App Store logo on the right to visit the iTunes Store.

The Background

In December 2010 Train2Game posted a competition on their forums to take a supplied background graphic and create a game for it. Unlike many of their 48 hour game jams they gave prospective teams 11 days to come up with a game idea and proof of concept, so despite being already under a lot of pressure with our own projects and of course the run up for Christmas, Horizon Studios decided to jump in and give it a shot.

The competition stipulated that the game engine of choice was to be Yoyo’s Game Maker, in order to give as many students as possible the opportunity to submit something and although the initial idea was pretty much sorted within the first hour, the limitations of Game Maker compared to the versatility of the iPad’s multi-touch screen made for a few challenging decisions but ultimately we had something to work on and whilst juggling work, families, Christmas shopping and all the other little things life throws at you around that time of year, we pressed on creating art and code assets for our project.

Placeholder graphics were created so that Mike could implement them into the code and start to work on getting the general feel for the game and as always it didn’t matter what ideas Kevin threw at him, he always rose to the occasion and exceeded expectations wherever he could, adding his own unique ideas to the table as he progressed.

Martin designed the main character for the game along with a number of placeholder screens and titles then started to work on a rough animation to give our character Paul some life while Justin enlisted the help of one of his friends to add a voice to the character, while Kevin begun writing lists of requirements for the audio, the music, effects and speech to include in the game and worked with Justin to get them sounding as he wanted.

As time started to run out, ideas that we had discussed and considered adding into the game began to be put on the back burner so that we could focus on getting a playable game that could be expanded on in the future through updates, then after we’d given the project as extensive a test as we could given the constraints, we packaged it up and submitted it for entry.

Tangential Learning

As reported by the guys at Extra Credits earlier in the year, “games have more potential as teaching tools than most people realise, without being boring” and while there is still a lot of scope for edutainment games, games where you learn without realising can drive home the point a lot more and we’re proud that our game has the potential for both entertainment and education.

For those who don’t know local geography, once you’ve mastered this game you’ll have a clear idea of where anywhere is in the country, not just by name, but you’ll also have an idea of what postcodes are associated with those locations. I for one know that since we started developing this game that I now have a better grasp of where various locations are in relation to me within the UK and as a result I have a better understanding of what direction I would need to be heading in order to get from A to B.

Click the image above to see what the guys at Extra Credits have to say about Tangential Learning.

The initial concept behind the game was based on a bedtime story designer Kevin Tapping came up with for his children which saw our little Galep happily popping together to form fizzy drinks and inspired one version of a game. However as the team was forming, as both a challenge to our new developer Mike Connell and also to give the Galep an origin, Kevin came up with the idea for a prequel, based on a variation of the old “match three” genre but as the game developed and the team grew in confidence, we started to see numerous twists to the original genre appear to give it an identity of its own.

Over time we have released a playable version of the original proof of concept on the PC built with Game Maker which was an instant success and the feedback we received from almost everyone was…”This would make an awesome game on the iPhone”, and so we decided to do exactly that.

We started to change the graphics and layout to suit the resolution of the iPhone and had to make numerous changes to the overall layout of the screen based on the physical size of the iPhone but after looking at a few engines with which we could deploy from we finally settled on Unity as a means to converting our proof of concept from PC to iOS.

In making this transition we’ve also started to look at the story in order to make a full featured commercial product people would feel glad they had purchased. The design has been ramped up and what we can say is the game will now tell the whole story in one package, which we hope will be a charming story and an adventure where you love the little Galeps as much as we do.

In the meantime while you wait, you can help us to spread the word and help our little galep friends to get around by visiting www.galoop.co.uk and adopting one of the lovable little creatures for yourselves.

I have been playing video games from the days of the spectrum through to the xbox 360 now. I’ve always been interested in ‘how they work’ and for the past few years have been looking to do a distance learning course to try and open up my career possibilities. In a hope that I could find a job doing something that was interesting and challenging.

At the beginning or 2010 I found out about Train2Game and, although I was a bit unsure to start with, signed up for the developer course. I’m very pleased to say i have never looked back. I am thoroughly enjoying the course and have learnt so much in the past 5 months it frightens me.

I can now see that with a lot of hard work and a lot more learning that I can change my career into something much more inspiring and with Martin and Kevin asking me to join Horizon Games I am even more optimistic that it will be in the making of games.

After our last post on our two new developers (of which one is still to supply us with some words of wisdom and a photo) we were please to read the following…..

http://thoughtsoft2g.blogspot.com/2010/06/horizon-studios-recruits-two-train2game.html

Fresh from his recent Tigjam UK3 experience Zac Brady has agreed to jump on board along with Mike Connell otherwise known on the Train2Game forums as SmoothandShiny, to add some much needed fresh development talent to the team.

The original aim of Horizon Studios was to bring together the collective skills of a select group of Train2Game students to work and progress together in order to build up both our own personal portfolios and to also collaboratively build up a company structure that we could then use to publish and promote our collective skills.

As founders, both Kevin and myself believe that the new additions to our team will give us the chance to expand our horizons and start to push forward the ideas that we have been working on for some time now.

From the age of 8 I was fascinated with computers and more importantly video games, working out the coding required to make different things do what they were supposed to. I used to spend hours with sheets of graph paper drawing out little grids of 24×21 pixels, colouring in the squares and working out the hex values to make various animations in order to recreate my own versions of games I saw in magazines like Zzap64. In my mid to late teens I remember walking past a nearby office block, with one office in particular that stood out, thinking “I would love to have a games studio in there”. At the time I was working in the business applications software industry and although computers were in their infancy, exciting things were happening and the games industry was really starting to take off.

Sadly it wasn’t something I could get into at the time as revenue and suppliers weren’t that easy to source, but over time I moved on from number crunching and business software development to graphic design when it came to producing manuals for the software I’d worked on. Working in design gave me the opportunity to express my creativity, using new and exciting tools in text and photo manipulation, expanding to 3D graphics and page layout.

In 2009 I was approached by Train2Game, initially signing up to the Developer course before switched to the Arts course when it came about, and although I didn’t specifically learn what I needed for where I am now, I was fortunate to meet a great bunch of guys with whom I’ve teamed up with in order to create this company.

Back to the team

I’m very creative with my story telling something I have always done but since joining Train2Game and studying for the TIGA Diploma in video games design, this has allowed me to bring some of my stories to life through games.

Some of my big achievements since joining the course are being lead designer for Soul Wars a MMORPG, which was a fantastic challenge on my story writing, team management but more importantly my game design skills. I was also student of the month in September 2009!

I have a theory on design and that is “Keep it simple!” some of the greatest games ever made are of the simplest design, and the way forwards with games is by looking back on what has been and what made it good and how it can be recreated with today’s technology.

Back to the team

At first working with bands and solo artists and in the last two years moving onto working on several short films, both as a composer and sound designer. Over the last year and a half I managed to grab a freelance position at one of the UK’s biggest Dialog Recording Facilities, SideUk; where, still working out of my studio, I have had the pleasure of working on several high profile games, as well as some less known ones such as:

• Lucas Arts – Star Wars: The Old Republic
• Lionhead Studios – Fable 3
• Disney – Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned
• Realtime Worlds – All Points Bulletin
• Piranha Bites – Risen
• Rare – Natal Sports
• Barnstorm – Thomas and Friends: Hero of the Rails
• Sony – Buzz: Quiz World
• Animation Arts – Lost Horizon

I am pleased to now say that I have been working with Horizon Studios on a couple of upcoming games, Galoop, a fun and colourful puzzle Game for the PC platform, and most recently Light the Skies, a fast paced action shooter. I look forward to see what other great ideas Horizon Studios have up their sleeves, and I’m glad to be a part of it.

Back to the team

Right, so I don’t have any GML knowledge, so far I have been following and using The Game Maker’s Apprentice book, which is a very good book for anyone who is interested in learning Game Maker and I would highly recommend it.
So to learn GML I turned to google and YouTube, in fact there are some very good video tutorials on YouTube.
I had the idea of what sort of game I wanted to make ‘Platformer’ I had an idea for my games character ‘8bit‘ or originally he was called ‘Pixel’ and I knew the feel I wanted to go for ‘retro’ so I set out with Google and searched for the tutorials that taught me to do the bits I wanted to do.
Your be surprised that after a while of searching and coding in GML how quick you do start to pick it up, I mean I have never ever really ever touched any kind of coding although I have tried and failed many times before, even stuff I have learned in the past seams to be forgotten easy?
But I have stuck with it over the last week and a half tweaking what I have learned, been moaned at by Marty for the code being messy and gradually adding bits and pieces to the game as I envision them.
So I popped 8bit up on the YoYo’s website a couple of days ago and put a post in the Train2Game Forum.

After getting some really good feedback especially from Mr MattB me and Marty have decided to make more of this game, one problem because this was just an offshoot of ideas for myself to learn Game Maker, I have no documentation!

Its time to sit back and look at the game and document it, take a good look at what we have and where we want the game to go and find a nice balance to the level structure. (while I  let Marty tidy up the code and graphics)

But it just goes to show that from a very small idea and a little bit of hard work learning something new, anything is possible and you never know what can come from it, so as a designer on the design course maybe instead of putting up posts in the forum I have an idea, why not try and create that idea yourself it is possible just google tutorials for the things you want to do in your game, so your code might be messy and your graphics are very basic but you have the start of your game, which is something some of the developers in the forum might pick up on and help you bring your small idea in to something we can all play.