So This is another Dev Notes.

In case you lost your memo Https://www.ArgusComputerEntertianment.Com is our new website and we are doing our best to make this the new home for our news, blogs, and dev notes as well as our home for all our games and game content.
We want all you to visit and continue to do so as we bring you the latest content here first.

In other news we are working hard to create a video and we are putting together our campaign for Kickstarter which we hope to have very soon.

Puffer the Pufferfish is our first video game as Argus Computer Entertainment and so we want to encourage all of you to spread the word, like and share with all others. As this game is still underdevelopment we are listening to everyone’s feedback and taking all the suggestions to better improve all our games and products. We would like to be involved with the community just as much as have them involved with us.

This is why our demo is free to play right off our own website to encourage all your feedback. We will hope to set up many more channels to make it easier for your suggestions and feedback in the future and we are moving to be more engaged quite soon.

Our next big phase is our kickstarter so it is still a matter of getting all our ducks in a row and we are doing the best we can since our lead artist had become quite ill. We hope for her speedy recovery.

This Friday we have been working more on our video trailer and piecing that together. As with last week we shared a glimpse of what we are working on, we are continuing to work on and touch up before releasing in officially.

There are still a few other things we are looking back on as well with other aspects we can improve. Along with the release of our trailer video we also plan for a new release of our game Puffer the Pufferfish which will include many new features, as we are steadily shaping our demo to reflect our vision.

An official announcement will go out soon after the video release which we will announce when we will be launching our kickstarter for Puffer. We are steadily making progress towards this goal as we need you and everyone who has been following us to give us your support so we can continue this wonderful project of ours.

We thank you all so much for liking us and following us and hope to continue to do what we love and what you all love too. Making fantastic games and content!

Puffer the Pufferfish

Another Friday and another Dev Note.

We have been working in all areas and all fields preparing for the next milestones in the development of puffer. There is a long road ahead of us, so at this point, it is just getting all our ducks in a row.

The demo has a few tweaks that we feel would finalize the demo for now as we then move to complete the full game. Though this in itself has been a hindrance as we look to invest in new tools to take us here. Key in our next milestone.

The current agenda still stands, Demo -> Website-> Video-> Kickstarter. We are dedicated as ever to pushing forward and innovating new ways of getting our content to you. As we been very much quiet at this point, momentum must be built before you expect anything to budge.

We have a huge potential energy built up right now, in our artists, our programmers, our musicians, and designers. This energy is just waiting to be released but timing is everything. This is why we are working as hard as we can to cross as many milestones as we can and checkpoints in between those milestones.

Currently the demo as it sits is looking quite good. We have most translations in for the other two languages we are working on and already have full translations for Spanish. We hit a mild roadblock when trying to figure, should we create different versions for different regions or should we have all the language packs in one game with a switch to choose between? It would be easier for us in one sense to have all the languages in one but at the same time can bloat the size of the game, luckily the bloat really isn’t that much, especially compared to everything else we are working on.

Art is fun, who doesn’t like art? The feel of the game is one that almost reminds me of a painting, but one you can explore. With so much more work ahead of us, who can wait to see what wonders lie ahead?

Our current lead musician is on hiatus due to other pressing matters. But he isn’t the only musician we have. Each level in the game is to be unique in its own way and that being said, each level will have a theme. We are constantly working on “fine tuning” our music in the game to fit the theme and feel overall.

ArgusComputerEntertainment.com

The website is the next largest milestone in under our belt and in essence is like creating a whole new game. It takes a good designer and programmer to work together to build, test and maintain.

Our website will be in two flavors, mobile for all your phone savvy enthusiasts, and desktop, for all you dedicated types who like things big.

Working with websites isn’t new to us, we might be a video game company first, entertainment second, but irony has it that our knowledge on how to make a game for HTML5 and JS and building a working website is quite not the same.

It really is a new field for us but luckily not very hard, the most we have is time consumption which is always a factor when you are looking at a company which only has a handful of people at any time. This is why the milestones we are taking are drawn out so we are focused on a single task instead of divided amongst the team.

Even though we have our milestones and it might seem liner in fact they all depend on each other to build and support another. For example our website will directly support our game, will support the video which will state our cause and show off better what we been working on, and support our kickstarter. Again time is of the essence.

Kickstarter and Video

People want to see things, especially before they make a decision. In this case it will be your support. Why do we need your support?

We are a company with a handful of dedicated people all with the same goals and dreams. Start a company and create a game. But why do we wish to just stop there? In order to even start a company it will take a huge amounts of resources to start. Resources in time, dedication, but one key that is more hindrance than non is the proper tools.

In a technology company this is ever so true, technology changes and so to keep up with the changes you have to adapt and adapt quickly. This is no different for us when our current market is for PC and Mobile. Getting the proper tools means the difference between keeping up with technology or not.

The average depreciation of computers is that that they would already of served their purpose in 3 years. ( Palffy, Georgina. How Business Works: A Graphic Guide to Business Success. Print. ) Our game has been in development for 1.5 years already, that is half the over all lifetime. Some of our devices are much older than when we begun.

Example is this, our goals are to hit all the mobile devices. Windows, Apple, Android. Windows have stopped all support for windows 7 phones. Now they are windows 8 and we fear that they will stop supporting 8 in favor of windows 10 and it hasn’t even been that long for us as we don’t time ourselves to their development cycle. So if we are going into a project as they are going out of theirs, we have to then re-invest in the newest tools.

Apple and android isn’t much different. Another key factor is that in order for us to port into said mobile device we have to have the same OS across the board. Windows 8 to Windows 8 Phone.

This is where you come in. We paid for the start up, the location, and everything else on our own nickles and dimes. Now we need your support to push us through. 

There will be more talk and discussion as we prepare ourselves to cross these milestones.

Thank you for your support.
Argus Dev Team

Argus Computer Entertainment.

This Friday has been long hours and hard work rendering minutes upon minutes of video and we still aren’t finished. One of our renders took hours to complete just due to the detail in animation we been doing.

Upon all the footage we been also taking various shots of game play footage and been preparing the footage by editing, splicing and stitching together the footage to create new scenes. There are a total of seven scenes not counting the opening and outro to our short trailer video and we have currently two and a half scenes completed. We hope to get anywhere from one to two more scenes finished by tonight. We are strongly pushing to get the video wrapped up by this weekend and we know that is quite a stretch.

Our focus is mainly on this video and consolidating all our plans for our kickstarter as there is allot that goes into building a strong campaign. We have over come two major milestones, that is putting together our demo, putting together our website and now we are in the mist of creating our video and then running our kickstarter.

We have come a long way from the beginning and from our project start have had allot of bumps along the way, as we could expect in any start up. It has been officially two years since the start of our project. Our company was founded a year after. We have had many join us and many leave as well, but we have stayed the course and are stronger than ever, even if we are small.

Puffer the Pufferfish will get an update sometime after we finish the video as we are trying to keep focused. We will get out the demo version which will have the option to change the language of the text in game, will have full animations on puffer himself as well as the angler fish and we will have a few other things in store as well.

There have also been a few people who commented about sea life and not enough in our demo, we understand that. Our game starts off in the abyss and our first boss encounter is an anglerfish and she is quite hungry. The abyss is a scarce place mostly devoid of much food and even oxygen. As Puffer explores more areas of the ocean there will be a change is sealife and it is all dependent on the area.

Don’t you just hate it when your internet is slow? We do too. Very hard to get work done when your entire infrastructure is based around the internet.

This week we have been working hard to get our trailer put together and putting together all the scenes that we need. There is still allot of work to be done and allot of animation that is going into this trailer. This is only one of several planned videos as we are in planing for our kickstarter as well.

The Downloads for Puffer has sort of plateaued which is expected but never the less we will have a new build soon with our launch of our kickstarter and our videos to go along with it.

It is another Friday and that means another day to tell all of you what we been up to this last week,

Storyboarding, Writing, and Editing. The little things that go into making a great video for our game. As we shared many of our milestones with the general public, we do so not only to tell you what we are up too but be encouraging to others to be creative in everything they do.

There is still allot of work to be had as nothing has been finalized just yet but we will hopefully be sharing a ton of new content quite soon. Puffer the Pufferfish, we have allot of plans for and as it is our first game, we want to make sure we put in a good effort.

This is another Dev Note Fridays.

Due to recent world events this blog post had been delayed out of due respect to the incident which occurred over night in Munich. It is always tragic when ever we hear news like this, so we only wish to give our respects to those affected by this.

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This week we have been working hard in touching up our videos which we plan to release upon its completion. From our promotional videos to our campaign videos, both need to be well crafted, edited and finalized. Currently we are in the process of crafting the videos now.

After our videos are finalized we will then move to our final milestone, having our game Kickstarted.

Videos and the Learning Curve

Videos are fun, and they are even fun to create. This week we have all been working around the clock working on our own video, or may I add videos, for our game trailer. It is always exciting when you work scene by scene and start piecing it all together.  Unfortunately, as with anything, there is very much a learning curve to be overcome when it comes down to anything outside our major field of expertise. As we mentioned before, we all have back grounds in the industry as we have come from working with many others in our time, mostly other indie companies.

When we decided to move away from the droning selective work of working under others, it not only has allowed us to pursue our own interests but allowed us to also explore and expand on our own skill sets as well.  We all went from game developers to video editors, artists, musicians, business managers and leaders and in a short amount of time. It has been really interesting to see how far we actually came since the beginning of our project and really interesting to see where we are heading.

Having the freedom to learn and create has always been the greatest highlight in our company and learning new things has really benefited us as a team here at Argus Computer Entertainment. But learning and training always comes at a price. That is the price in time. The more you spending on teaching yourself and others the more time you take away from other projects that can be done. But training isn’t a bad thing. In fact when you can work with others and teach them you build greater bonds with your teammates as they are also eager to learn as well. And there is no greater reward than the satisfaction of achievement. You learn something, you do something and you look back at the result and every time; it is like landing a rover on mars for us.

We are a small company and as such it allows us to work closer together as a team, but the drawback is not everyone is an expert in everything. So we work hard and work together every day of the week to learn and expand our knowledge and skills and ever so more whenever someone might be out of the office, especially when they may fall ill.

Our Kickstarter Campaign

When our videos are finalized we will share them on all our social media channels and then we will fall back to our first milestone (our game itself) just to give it a glance over because our last milestone is kickstarting our game itself. As this will take in the most time and the most pull, and for obvious reasons, we are doing everything we can do to prepare us for the long journey ahead.

With Kickstarter campaigns, there is always a risk and as such we are planning everything as a contingency in case our Kickstarter fails. And of course we are also planning out everything if we are successful as well. Our primary goal is to get our game onto every mobile platform there is. This is Windows, Android and iOS. That being said, we don’t want to leave anyone out nor behind. Our secondary goals are to also hit the PC markets, Windows and Mac. To achieve these goals it will be ever so important that we run a successful Kickstarter campaign. As we near this next milestone we will be sharing more and more with everyone through all of our channels to keep you all up to date on all our progress.

Hello again everyone.

This week has been much a slow week as we all been planing out the many steps that lie ahead. From our game to our website and even our kickstarter campaign, great thought has to be made before we can move forward.

We have also been continuing our QA tests for everything, rigorously going back on everything to give us a stepping stone to move from instead of hinder us. When ever one thing gets fixed, two more things always seems to break. This is why we are trying our best to get to a stable area for our game as well as everything else. Believe it or not, even websites uses code and scripts and this too needs just as much attention as the rest.

Along with QA and planing, we also been looking into new strategies for when the time comes that we will be seeking greater and greater outreach. We of course are a smaller company and hence why currently we are operating under the radar. As we continue to get all our ducks in a row, we plan to be even more active and even more vocal in all communities as our main goal is to share what we been up to. When all this will unfold is relatively soon, of course we can not make any acknowledgements when exactly as we tend to work at our own pace. Rest assured, we will continually inform the community of our progress and update you on everything as we make headway in all our goals.

So what can we talk about?

When it comes to our website it is very exciting as there is very little more we can do currently before the site goes live. Most pages are finalized and just waiting for the rest to be finished. As far as creating a website, there is allot more to creating a site other than a 1 pager website as we want to create a reason for visiting, to create a community around our products.

Our desktop version will be the first version to come out followed by mobile.

As Far as our game goes.

The demo in the current state is stable but we feel there are quite a bit of gems left in there that could be brought out and polished. From multi language support to new animations. We still have some great plans to really make this game stand out.

We been listening and this is what we have come up with.

*New Music (Unique music per stage)

*New Animations

*Cutscenes

Of course this is all still planed (on the to do list) Bouncing between website and development has been rough and is why the main focuse for the time being is actually the website. As we near completing the site we will shift back to the game and finalize that before launching a huge campaign to finish our game.

As you all may of read in last weeks Dev Note Fridays, Puffer the Pufferfish has been suspended.

In the mean time we are continuing to evaluate a course of action to continue this project, being understaffed and not able to meet deadlines is a main focus of discussion as how we plan to compensate for this.

We are looking over all our options and taking aggressive measures to see these things through. Our company itself is well, but our project is in danger as the scope was meant for a small to mid size team.

One of our options is to work on a new project, an app of sorts to provide others with solutions to their needs. We are taking a focus to this area currently.

As we are software developers, web designers, musicians and artist we also can provide any number of these services to others. So we are currently looking into private clients to work with.

News and information is constantly coming in as we are being careful to delegate all our options.