Blogs - Purrpulsion

Hi everyone it’s Brendan and this is the first dev blog for the game Purrpulsion! I’m going to talk a little about the game, why I started it, and what I want to accomplish by developing it. I’ll also be talking about why we’ve made this blog and what you can expect to see here in the future!

Last year at the Ohio Game Developers Expo I presented a game called Wumpus World 3D, it was my first time going to a gaming convention and it was a blast. At the expo I played a game called Astronaut Kitty Boom Boom by Super Soul/Run Jump Dev and I absolutely loved it. It was simple and fun, just what I’d expect from an indie title. The premise of the game was that you and a friend were cats and you competed against each other to achieve the highest score by pressing button combinations that came on screen. This was awesome because the mechanics were simple and easy to learn, plus there was a competitive nature in the game that made it intense and fun. I decided at the time that it was brilliant and I wanted to do something similar in the future.

Almost a year later I decided to start work on another game. I wanted this to be the biggest game I had worked on up to this point and it would be my crowning achievement to show game companies that I wanted to work for. You could compare it to a senior project. I found myself a team of dedicated passionate people and Purrpulsion was born. We’ve flushed out a lot of the design but are still making changes to it today (for better or for worse). We decided to make a competitive, 3D, 4-player, cats on rockets game. It will consist of 2 parts: a reflex based button pressing part, similar to Astronaut Kitty, where you would reinforce your rocket, and the actual flying portion that would be dodging obstacles, as well as ramming your opponents into them. We’ve been tinkering with adding a story of Dog Pirates stealing your catnip and that’s why you’re flying and trying to beat out the other cats, in order to retrieve the catnip (treasure) for yourself.

Right now we’re planning on presenting our playable alpha at 2 different events towards the end of October this year. First is the Ohio Game Developers Expo at COSI in Columbus, Ohio. We are also planning to present at the Minjas Charity event on Halloween night, at Northern Kentucky University. We’re looking forward to showing off Purrpulsion at these public conventions and getting some feedback from our audience. If you’re interested, look for the links on our other social media, check it out, and come support us! We will have T-Shirts, business cards, and other cool promotional stuff that you can get by coming by our station!

I think that each person on my team has a different reason for working on the game, and I know that the reason I started working on it has changed dramatically since I started. Initially I wanted this to be a sort of portfolio piece, but now I’m realizing that there are so many more oppurtunities that Purrpulsion can give us. We’re currently looking into Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight as possibilities for the game, and if either of these go through and gets enough attention we may even be able to create a company out of it. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, but that’s all it was, a dream. I don’t think I ever imagined it was a real possibility until this past summer. So everything that I do from now till I graduate, and probably further, will be to make Purrpulsion a success.

Lastly I want to say thank you to everyone on my team that has made this project possible. All of the people on the development team have not only put in hours upon hours of work into this game, but have done it for nothing. They aren’t getting paid, and are even dishing out money for promotional stuff and to show the game at the expo. You guys are all awesome and I hope that in the end all of our hard work will pay off!

Hi everyone it’s Brendan and this is the first dev blog for the game Purrpulsion! I’m going to talk a little about the game, why I started it, and what I want to accomplish by developing it. I’ll also be talking about why we’ve made this blog and what you can expect to see here in the future!

Last year at the Ohio Game Developers Expo I presented a game called Wumpus World 3D, it was my first time going to a gaming convention and it was a blast. At the expo I played a game called Astronaut Kitty Boom Boom by Super Soul/Run Jump Dev and I absolutely loved it. It was simple and fun, just what I’d expect from an indie title. The premise of the game was that you and a friend were cats and you competed against each other to achieve the highest score by pressing button combinations that came on screen. This was awesome because the mechanics were simple and easy to learn, plus there was a competitive nature in the game that made it intense and fun. I decided at the time that it was brilliant and I wanted to do something similar in the future.

Almost a year later I decided to start work on another game. I wanted this to be the biggest game I had worked on up to this point and it would be my crowning achievement to show game companies that I wanted to work for. You could compare it to a senior project. I found myself a team of dedicated passionate people and Purrpulsion was born. We’ve flushed out a lot of the design but are still making changes to it today (for better or for worse). We decided to make a competitive, 3D, 4-player, cats on rockets game. It will consist of 2 parts: a reflex based button pressing part, similar to Astronaut Kitty, where you would reinforce your rocket, and the actual flying portion that would be dodging obstacles, as well as ramming your opponents into them. We’ve been tinkering with adding a story of Dog Pirates stealing your catnip and that’s why you’re flying and trying to beat out the other cats, in order to retrieve the catnip (treasure) for yourself.

Right now we’re planning on presenting our playable alpha at 2 different events towards the end of October this year. First is the Ohio Game Developers Expo at COSI in Columbus, Ohio. We are also planning to present at the Minjas Charity event on Halloween night, at Northern Kentucky University. We’re looking forward to showing off Purrpulsion at these public conventions and getting some feedback from our audience. If you’re interested, look for the links on our other social media, check it out, and come support us! We will have T-Shirts, business cards, and other cool promotional stuff that you can get by coming by our station!

I think that each person on my team has a different reason for working on the game, and I know that the reason I started working on it has changed dramatically since I started. Initially I wanted this to be a sort of portfolio piece, but now I’m realizing that there are so many more oppurtunities that Purrpulsion can give us. We’re currently looking into Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight as possibilities for the game, and if either of these go through and gets enough attention we may even be able to create a company out of it. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, but that’s all it was, a dream. I don’t think I ever imagined it was a real possibility until this past summer. So everything that I do from now till I graduate, and probably further, will be to make Purrpulsion a success.

Lastly I want to say thank you to everyone on my team that has made this project possible. All of the people on the development team have not only put in hours upon hours of work into this game, but have done it for nothing. They aren’t getting paid, and are even dishing out money for promotional stuff and to show the game at the expo. You guys are all awesome and I hope that in the end all of our hard work will pay off!