Ludoko Studios Blog

Wow, it’s been quite a crazy first few months here at Ludoko Studios. Thanks to everyone whose supported us throughout the beginnings of this crazy endeavor. You’re kind words and helpful thoughts and comments have really helped drive us to where we are today.

It’s weird to think that not too long ago Ludoko Studios was still just an abstract concept, an idea dreamed up by a few crazy kids in various stages of college during a few late night conversations. Some then a lot of things have changed, some small and some huge. The one constant I’ve learned though is that even the best-laid plans can quickly change and let’s just say that Ludoko has sometimes been operating less on an actual plan and more on a loose set of guidelines and ideas.

That being said I’m pleased to announce that our first game, Simple Picross is about ready for prime time. This little game has actually been close to ready for over a month now, but due to the crunch associated with getting our other game Point of Sale ready for the IGF we put off finalizing the release until now. And with that task now complete I’ve gone back and have finished up all the little details necessary for an actual release. Things like getting the DRM in and compiling an installer.

Simple Picross actually first began life as a much more character-driven casual title. Back then it was called Picross Adventures and followed the adventures of two archaeologists/explorers Dan and Maria as they went around the world find artifacts through solving tile puzzles (i.e. picross puzzles). Since then we dropped the entire pretenses of a narrative and instead went with the more direct approach. We added features that were never originally planned (the random picross puzzle generator) and filled out others (including a lot more designed puzzles).

Overall though, Simple Picross isn’t just important as a game that we can sell, but also as a learning experience. It was a great choice for our very first “professional” game as a studio. We never had to worry about the finer details of creating our own game, but instead could spend time dealing with the other issues of development like how to structure our work flow or how to properly deal with assets or even just how to properly store our users’ data in the proper Application Data folders (and Torque’s inept file IO didn’t help us out on this one). Every single thing we had to do on this project was something Chris and I were doing for the first time and with some frustration we managed to effectively wrangle all those little problems.

So here we are. Chris noted that Simple Picross in the end turned out to be a nice little game. It’s certainly one of the more casual-friendly implementations of picross out there and I’d like to think one of the better picross games in general. It’s certainly not a world-beater, but I like to think of it as something like Zen of Sudoko was to Sudoko, a cute polished implementation of a casual game.

As for us, Ludoko is always on the move. Point of Sale is in the midst of some rather not insignificant overhauls to its core system and while the changes will be worth it in the end, we’re looking at pushing the release back for that to the end of this year or early next year. And we’ve just started working with two very talented artists on the next project after that. Always stuff to do, games to design, etc., etc.