Puddygum

We're excited to announce that we are currently in production on our next project—a 3D platformer game where you play as a chicken in a library! Yep, that's right—chicken in a library. This is a project that we are pretty passionate about because we all enjoy the 3D platformer genre and have wanted to make a 3D platformer for a while. And who doesn't love chickens? They're just so goofy. The inner workings of a chicken This is a project that we're planning on taking 3 months to complete, a little longer than our previous projects. We're currently in week 5 of the development. The first 3 weeks were spent getting an MVP (or skateboard—see this link ) to see if the concept we were going for was any good. At the end of week 6 we plan to have the first finished version of our game, with some time after that to really improve it and polish it. This game is going to be very  small and very  simple: just one level with some collectibles, focusing mostly on

The other day Joe asked me to write up something about my daily process, what I do to be effective with my time, to see if there’s anything that could be of benefit for the rest of our team. I’ll tell you what, I’ve really had to learn to have a good daily process since starting to make games full time because there’s no one making me go to work. In fact, sometimes there are myriad forces trying to keep me from going to work. I wanted to share what I wrote with our fans. Maybe you’ll find something here that you can use to help you be more effective at whatever you’re working on. Start with a routine I got this one from Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit . Starting your creative work with a certain routine or ritual helps you get in the zone. The ritual doesn’t even have to be that elaborate. It could simply be sitting down at the same place with a bowl of cereal and turning on your music. Whatever cues you to get in the creative zone. My routine is watching an Extra Cr

After finally making those last few tweaks to get them ready, we've now uploaded a couple of games that Joe Burgan and I each made independently before we founded Puddygum. These were both made as practice projects to start building our game dev skills. Disco Duckies was made by Joe and is a variation on the space shooter tutorial by Unity. In this version you are a frying pan flinging household objects at rubber ducks as you listen to peppy disco music. Yep, that's Joe. I made Space Whale Attack with a lot of help from the Unity asset store (you can see whose work is featured in the credits.) This is a game in which you are a spaceship trying to avoid the space whale as you both move faster and faster. And yes, it's a space whale because those are the assets I got for free. We figured we'd put the finishing touches on these games and put them out there for people to enjoy. Have fun checking them out on our Itch page , and feel free to give us any feedback o

Hey everyone! Things have been pretty quiet on our blog for the last couple months, but don't worry, Puddygum is still alive and kicking. We’ve gone into monk mode and taken a vow of silence to find ourselves and chart a new course. Well, not exactly, but after PLAY NOW! Joe and I really just felt like we needed to rediscover the core of Puddygum and figure out where to go next. So, over the last couple months (almost three now) we’ve worked on a couple of projects. Here's a little info about those and what's coming next. Michael's Labyrinth We made the first iteration of Michael’s Labyrinth , a game about a man named Michael who’s traveling through a labyrinth, believe it or not. The twist is that you play as the labyrinth, not as Michael. You move pieces of the labyrinth around to help Michael, controlled by AI, to reach the exit on the other side of the chamber. It was a good idea on paper, but turned out to be rather difficult to implement in a game,

The Creative Process of PLAY NOW! (The button logo totally works!) One day, a user on the Unity Slackers Slack group shared a video of a brief after-work project he'd done before bed that day. It was a Virtual Reality game in which he had put himself on a platform with the control of two virtual hands, and in the distance, you could see pictures appearing and coming towards him. They were pictures of pop-up advertisements-- the kind you see and know they're fake in an instant-- and as they came up close to him he was swatting them away with his virtual hands. Over time, more and more appeared, starting to fill the screen. They smacked him in the face, he pushed them away; another got in his face, he grabbed it and used it to whack other ads away; then tossed it aside when he was done, ready for more. It was chaos-- and hilarious! If I could find the video I would just paste it here, but it's been at least a year since then and it's lost in the ava

Hello everyone! We here at Puddygum are pleased to announce the completion and release of our second month-long project— PLAY NOW!  Yes, that was both the title and a command, the kind you see in those annoying banner ads. That's because this game is all about spam! Hooray! PLAY NOW!  is set in the not-too-distant future, when advertisements have taken over the world! Fend off swarms of sentient ads vying for your attention and your money as you try to find all the buttons to power up the ad blocker! It's a little bit spooky and a little bit comical and a lot of fun—the perfect Halloween treat! Check it out over on our Itch page and share it with your friends! https://puddygum.itch.io/play-now So what are you waiting for?—PLAY NOW!