Bayou Island Part 2 and Introducing El Matador Misterioso

With the huge success that Bayou Island Part 1 brought http://bit.ly/2dBAXQZ, I've decided to do a Part 2 - I just wish I had started this blog then but little did I know that so many people were going to enjoy Bayou Island. So to start off this new blog I have two new pieces of news! Info on Bayou Island Part 2 and this little guy who is a new addition to Part 2.

Many people in the app store's were concerned about how short Part 1 was. To be honest I was a little annoyed with myself too. The reality of it is that Point and Click Adventure games are expensive to make. Using the various freelancers I use from around the world, it rounds up to about £1000 ($1243 USD) per every 20 minutes of gameplay. Of course this is a bit of a variable because it depends on so many factors. Animation and backgrounds in particular cost a lot of money. Part 1 really just started as more of a tech demo to see if a Point and Click Adventure game was really possible in HTML5 canvas (yes that's right - no Progressive C or Java here). It took just over a year (off and on) to build the engine which is built on top of Phaser.js. So all I was really focused on was being able to make the game. Now that I can see that it is all possible I can dedicate some time to writing this blog.

Bayou Island properly launched on 12th September and it's had over 2000 installs so far. I had no idea that I would get that many. Even just to get 100 installs would have been a great achievement for me :) 2000 installs is still a long way off from the likes of Pokemon Go, but hey we all have to start somewhere.

I've been busy working away at creating Part 2 recently. I have written the story (and yes it ties up all the loose ends from Part 1) and all the puzzles. In Part 1 I wanted to go easy on the game user by making the first room puzzles very obvious just so that the player can get used to the controls more than anything.
Part 2 I think will provide about 30 minutes of gameplay so for a very small game the total amount of gameplay the game has is 45 minutes which isn't bad for an HTML5 canvas game. Before working on Part 2 I've been fixing up some things in the game's engine which I always wanted to solve first. This was mainly down to caching which was always an issue for me. Previously Part 1 would just remember everything you had done previously but would never remove the assets from cache. Whilst this was fine for a small game such as Part 1 realistically having a game which is over say 20 rooms, would completely crash the device. In fact 4 rooms which Part 1 was, was a stretch.

Part 2 also introduces a new character to the mix called El Matador Misterioso you can see his design above. I will leave the mystery as to what his part plays in the game muhahaha :) But one thing I will tell you which you've probably guessed is that he's a ghost.

In other news I have just briefed my musician who is creating 2 new tracks for the game and I am waiting for the new Part 2 title card from my artist.

But what everyone wants to know is... what happened to George?!

For now that's all, stay tuned for further developments.

- Andy