“What Makes You Tick: A Stitch in Time” Demo Released

March 17th, 2010 by greg  |  comment

It’s live! The game demo is playable online, or available for free download as an Adobe AIR application. All demo material is available from the demo’s website at:

http://www.lassiegames.com/games/stitch_demo

So, this is big news! Not only is this a major release for the “Stitch” project, but this also for Lassie Shepherd. This Stitch demo now assumes the role of the official Shepherd demo game, and it does a fine job showcasing the engine’s capabilities. Within this demo you’ll see in-game cutscene programming, custom UI elements, dynamic game logic, Flash media includes, and much more. Overall, Matt and I very happy with the way this game has turned out, and we hope our friends and fans enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed building it.

Happy Adventuring!

Matt Kempke Interview

March 1st, 2010 by greg  |  comment

An interview with Matt Kempke by David Steffen of Diabolical Plots appeared on the zine’s blog today. In the interview, Matt discusses the process of developing “What Makes You Tick: A Stitch in Time”, and well as some future plans and other passions. Read the full interview at: http://www.diabolicalplots.com/?p=1179

“WMYT: A Stitch in Time” Demo Announced

February 28th, 2010 by greg  |  comment

March 18th has been officially announced as the release date of the “What Makes You Tick: A Stitch in Time” demo game. The demo will be available for free download, and will include the complete first act of the full game. The demo delivers four playable rooms, 15 character appearances, lots of great artwork and music, and perhaps a few surprises! The game experience is the combined effort of many talented people working together for over a year now, and Matt (co-author) and I are very pleased with the result. That said, we’re excited to share the game with our friends and fans! For more information and all the latest news on “A Stitch in Time”, visit the game’s official website at http://www.lassiegames.com/stitch.

This release is also big news for Lassie Shepherd. The Stitch demo will assume the role of the official Lassie Shepherd demo game for showcasing the engine’s core features. Lassie enthusiasts who are curious about what’s possible with Shepherd may be interested to see the demo in action… the game makes use of everything from basic room transitions to heavy cache tracking and dynamic logic features.

Whether you’re a designer, a developer, or just a general game enthusiast, we hope you’ll stop in on Match 18th to celebrate this release with us!

Lassie Shepherd v1.1 released

February 13th, 2010 by greg  |  comment

The latest build of Lassie Shepherd is now available from the Shepherd download page.

This release cleans up several rough edges and missing functionality from Shepherd v1.0. The former “media” panel has been replaced by an engine settings panel for configuring the engine’s file management and visual properties. In addition, the game menu has been isolated from the user interface to become a modular engine component.

There are new room editor controls as well! Unfortunately, I don’t remember what they all are anymore because I’ve been using many of the “new” features for months. However, I think developers coming from 1.0 will notice these:

• Grid trapping. Rather than relying strictly on walkable boxes to define the region of movement used while trapping background mouse clicks, you may now also use points as trapping geometry.
• Node bindings for puppet layers. Rather than setting a puppet’s walk-to target near a grid node, you may now bind a grid node directly to a puppet as the puppet’s walk-to point.
• Cross-state dialogue references. Rather than placing the same dialogue over and over again on multiple layer states, now you may just write the dialogue once on the first state, then use a compiler directive (”@state:stateID”) to duplicate that dialogue across other states.

However, the largest new realm of functionality added into Lassie Shepherd v1.1 is in the scripting APIs. There are lots of new little helper methods added to both the XML and Logic APIs that I’ve included to facilitate game situations in Stitch. While reviewing XML documentation, search for “1.1″ to locate new articles about the added features. Within the Logic API, just look over the method definitions section… the API has more than doubled in size.

And finally, what would a release be without… MORE DEMO GAME. So, check it out: the demo has been expanded with an extra room an some addition scripting that demonstrates basic practical game scenarios at work. While the new demo isn’t much bigger, it should be more helpful as a development reference.

Happy New Year!

January 14th, 2010 by greg  |  comment

Happy new year to all, and greetings from La Paz, Bolivia! I´ve been traveling around South America for the past month, so nothing has been happening on the Lassie website or Shepherd developments. However, I´m coming to the end of my trip and will be back to work soon. In the next month I hope to have some new website content put together, and Shepherd 1.1 should be on the way.

Happy 2010!

Demo games!

December 20th, 2009 by greg  |  comment

I’ve restored the online-playable Lassie demo games. These include the original Lassie Director and LassieAS demos, as well as one new demo for Lassie Shepherd. All games can be accessed from their new overview page within the Games section.

Lassie Director Available

December 8th, 2009 by greg  |  comment

Old school is back: I’ve restored Lassie Director downloads this evening. Hurray for Macromedia Director! (…the classic never dies, right?). Enjoy.

Ongoing Site Development

December 7th, 2009 by Greg  |  comment

Just an update on this website: the site is undergoing development, and will continue to be for the coming months. Progress is slow around other projects, but I am making a point to keep chipping away at setting up this new content architecture.

Also, I should note that this site become my playground for figuring out WordPress integration. That said, don’t be alarmed if the site shows up broken for brief periods. I’m actively working on the live site, so things may look jumbled as I make updates. Should I set up a testing environment to work in? Absolutely… However, the reason that the site looks like this in the first place is because of lack of time. Any links I can remove from the development chain just increase chances of making forward progress on the site.

As always, thanks for bearing with me during this transition!

We’re back… partially.

November 22nd, 2009 by Greg  |  comment

First and foremost – my apologies for the website hiatus. I’ve been planning on migrating web hosting for months now, and I was planning on doing it before my old hosting contract expired. However, way led to way and I missed the deadline. So, sorry for the confusion, and I hope the Lassie community finds their way to this new location.

Looking around, you may notice that the site looks a little bare… “bare” here meaning that there is probably nothing on the site but this news post. That’s because I’m finally hooking this website into a light content management system (thanks, WordPress), so I’ll be integrating the system and migrating content over the coming weeks.

For the time being, just know that this is the Lassie project’s new home. Please update your bookmarks and spread the word!