Swing Swing Submarine

Last words from Buster, now retired

Posted on July 4, 2012

Hi humans,

When you’ll read this message, I shall be far from the Submarine.

Few months ago, I decided to quit my job as Chief Marketing Cat of Swing Swing Submarine. You have to understand that I’m already 3 years old and I can’t spend my whole life working under the sea.

I need to retire, I need to breathe, I need to see the sky and catch some birds in a garden or in a large balcony. And that’s what I’m doing right now in my new home, in Italy.

I’m sure Guillaume and William will do their best to make great games even if I’m not working with them anymore. More than anything, I hope they will find a way to show you how smart this damn fox is, soon or later.

See you in another life, walking food dispensers.

Buster

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Playtests, pictures and price

Posted on April 11, 2011

Hi early adopters,

I’ve got a lot of work to do in order to tell people Blocks That Matter even exists. It’s quite hard but I’m a chief marketing cat and it is my duty to be optimistic and confident. So, here’s a new blogpost signed by Buster. A votre service.

Important stuff first: Blocks That Matter is now officially in its final phase of development. The large majority of levels has been created and we are making some playtests now. We already have selected a panel of playtesters (almost people we can see playing the game), but for those of you that really can’t wait to play Blocks That Matter, I took three screenshots secretely from William’s computer with game elements you’ve never seen before:

Now let’s talk about the game price.
As you may know, the only possible prices on Xbox Live Indie Games channel are 80, 240 and 400 MS points. I made a lot of complicated calculations during my last nap and finally decided to set the price of Blocks That Matter at 240 MS points. I know Guillaume and William think this is not high enough, cause they are decadent humans, but I’m the boss and I’m the one to decide. So, that’s it: 240 MS points!

Oh, I can hear some of you from my couch: when will Blocks That Matter be released on Xbox? And my answer will be very clear: when it’s done! It means in April. But we are already in April, you’ll said! Well, great, it means the game will be released real soon so… By the way, there’s plenty of other indie games you could play waiting for BTM, like Iconoclasts by Konjak, and great game music to listen like the soundtrack of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.

Ok, have a great week and see you next time, pals.

Buster

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Birthdays Corporate Gifts

Posted on April 8, 2011

William – March 31
got a TeaSub from Guillaume

– – – – – – –

Guillaume – April 09
got a Tetrobot proto figure from William

– – – – – – –

Buster – September 04
will meet its friend again. Maybe.

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Buster presents: BTM Gameplay Footage

Posted on March 14, 2011

Hi boyz and girlz !

Guillaume and William are bad people. They talk about Blocks That Matter since a month and they still haven’t post any gameplay footage to show you what the game is really about.

Frankly, I don’t know why I still work with those humans.

Is it the fridge that just opened ?
Ok see you then.

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Seasons demo dev diary : Week 5

Posted on September 2, 2010

Welcome in this new demo dev diary, human beings.

I’m Buster, the “product marketing manager” of Swing Swing Submarine.
You can call me “Boss”.

Don’t worry, Guillaume and William are not dead (yet) but they are really busy right now. So busy they didn’t took the time to write the weekly report about the development of the first playable demo of Seasons. Speaking of it : COME MEET THEM IN PARIS NEXT WEEK !!!

Well, I’m more professional than them so I’ll do the report. But let me warn you : there’s a lot of pictures and not a lot of texts. I don’t want to ruin my french manucure using this curious computer device you call “keyboard”.

So, first : Guillaume’s part.
PROGRAMMING

> Camera refactoring (behaviour + feature like projection/unprojection)

Guillaume played with the camera by putting some constraints on the camera targeting. You can see two green circles in the image. One circle is the constraint, and the other one is the current camera target. It seems like it’s a funny game put I prefer my toys.

Guillaume says it was a pain in the ass to get a decent camera behaviour

Especially when the orange thing falls, you have to be smooth and fast at the same time to let the human player see where it falls.

> Fade effect during transition between level

Now we can travel from the pink level to the orange level without experiencing a dirty cut. Guillaume is happy because he can do some stuff during the black screen. This is saving my super cat eyes because they were bleeding each time I was looking to their computer screens when changing level.

> Integration of Sony vectormathlibrary

Now Guillaume can write things like this thanks to Sony lib. Before that, he was making is own stuff. Since he’s a poor programmer, his math lib was so inefficient that he wasn’t able to use SSE. Now yes, he can.

> Gameplay
– generic hole
– generic script unlocker, to unlock various gameplay element
– some script modifications to be in the good state when changing a season from another level than their own level.

> Other stuff
– synchronization on levels + transfert asset from a level to another (during the black transition screen)
– scale different from 1/1 on indirectly spawned asset
– some memleak fix

And William’s part.
GD /LD / ART

Half the screens are gameplay and art complete ! Well, William still have a lot of work to do on the other ones, and he still have to finish the character(s) animations.