developed in macromedia flash 8.
art created in photoshop and 3d studio max 8.0
deployed with MDM ZINC

Overview

Luck Charm Deluxe was a long time coming. Back when I first started making Mr. Figgles I was already thinking about how I could make this game. In fact, in Area51 (Trick) you can play the EARLY demo of my technical thoughts on the project. All in all Luck Charm Deluxe was the match to my game making fuse. It really propelled my design skills to the next level and pushed what I thought was possible in flash to a new level. Discovery is a great thing. A two month development timeline isn't too shabby either.

Luck Charm Deluxe

So many things went right with Luck Charm Deluxe it's really rather hard to find a place to start. The biggest thing that swung in my favor was Macromedia Flash 8. This allowed for a bit more animation than the previous versions of flash. So my technology was capable, which is always a good thing.

The amount of development time was also great. I crammed the entire process into 2 months calendar time. It was a truck load of work, however, I had a pretty clear concept of how it was going to look as well as play. I saw Luck Charm Deluxe as a challenge of sorts. I knew I could make flash games because I had already done Mr. Figgles and Runed (with some help from Bazi Games). The challenge was to create one quickly, cleanly and efficiently. I would have to say it worked out pretty well. Just when I was totally sick of it, I was done!

My programming skills still are horrendous. Even to this day if any real programmer looked at my code, they would probably shake their head in disbelief. However, though a couple of right turns, I found myself able to actually code up the game mechanic virtually piecing together the tid bits of Actionscript I had learned over the previous months. The game was up and running in no time, and I spent a majority of the development time fine tuning things. I wasn't 100% happy with it when it shipped, but I will get to that part in the bad...

Everyone wanted it! That's the biggest good thing. All portals were interested in Luck Charm Deluxe. For me that was huge because it gave me a bit of confidence in what I was doing. I was flattered and then swamped in contracts, faxes as well as phone conversations. I have a new found respect for the bushiness people in any company. It's not my strength, however, I wouldn't have done it any other way.

It sold! HAHAHHA This was the first game that made any amount of money for me and that is a great thing. It was validating, surprising and felt long overdue. Just proved that if you beat your head against a wall long enough, eventually you will break though. That's just what I did.

Luck Charm Deluxe was the first game I created that got translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. What an amazingly painful experience, that happens to be so cool there really aren't words for it. After hours of figuring out how to read in localized files, replacing all the text in the game with text that can be replaced dynamically and sorting through the 100's of bugs I can honestly say, it was just barely worth it! ;)

Bad

Well there wasn't much bad about the Luck Charm Deluxe process. I suppose the biggest was the lack of time. I prematurely submitted the game to some of the portals and they wanted it ASAP. However ASAP turned into several weeks because of a tricky bug with the wrapper I was using. My hands were tied and unfortunately I didn't take advantage of this. I was busy setting up press materials when I should have been fine tuning the game mechanic and getting more testing done on it.

In the months following the release, I had a ton of people with great ideas crawl out of the wood work... I love input and I love brainstorming, however, I didn't really feel like I did a good job of that on Luck Charm Deluxe.

I moved! Actually to put a point on it, I bought my first house right in the middle of signing contracts, and submitting builds to portals. Talk about a stressful situation. That was as close to "snapping" as I have ever been. I feel great now a few months later, but at the time I was about ready to burn anything that plugged into the wall. I learned a valuable lesson, I have as much time as I need. I should have postponed the game in favor of moving instead of multitasking it. I probably took 4 years off of my life in stress right there.

Conclusion

What can I say? Luck Charm Deluxe was a success in virtually every category I know of. To this day I am super proud that I was able to create something that was bouncing around in my head. It is one of the only games I have ever created that I could honestly see another developer making and I would be impressed. That is a great feeling...