Game Dev Story: Work on Side Walk Empire

I recently attended the +Udacity HTML5 Game Development study group hosted by +Colt McAnlis , +Sean Bennett and +Peter Lubbers  in San Francisco.

It was an awesome experience as there was a lot to learn not only about HTML5 but also about game development in general. Colts rants were very very instructional.

I met +Derek Duarte there and two of us immediately hit off. We started building a game for the HTML5 competition, but unfortunately due to work and personal reasons were unable to finish in time for the contest.

But all was not lost. We have decided to continue on with the game and eventually launch it on the web and Android.

The game is a coffee shop management game where you try to manage your inventory based on customer preferences. The goal is to make the most amount of money you can and build a coffee empire all over the city. (incidentally most of the dev work for this game happened in a coffee shop... how... quaint)

It is based on the popular Side Walk Empire comic strip made by +Eddie Ahn. You can follow his work here: http://www.ehacomics.com/

Here is a brief video of what the prototype currently looks like:

I am running this on the desktop with the help of the wonderful Libgdx by +Mario Zechner and his team of snazzy code monkeys.

A lot of work still needs to be done on this some of which is:

• New Levels / Shops
• Improved Animation
• Optimization 
• ....

...and the list goes on.

Dev work on this will continue and we will hope to see a finished product by the end of the year.

Props to Udacity and Libgdx that made this possible.


Note: I am aware of the resolution issues of the video on this page. They will be fixed as soon as possible.