We have moved to pre-planning of our kickstarter campaign for Puffer the Pufferfish and preparation of it. As we continue to work on our visual materials, videos and other art assets, getting everything in order is our main goal.

There is still quite allot of work to be done before we reach our final milestone, after which our next major milestones will be set. There are many stops along out journey and many miles to go. We are almost at our first stop which our really journey will begin.

In other news Argus Computer Entertainment will be looking into the possibility of starting a Summer Internship program and will be looking working with colleges and schools with programs in Video Game Development. This will be in efforts to reach out and try to encourage the next generation of game developers. The details of this is still being worked out as it is still something we are looking into. Selection will be limited to only a few new members at this time through the colleges and schools we are trying to work with.

The interns that we do hire will gain a great experience and will get full credit for all their hard work and contributions.

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 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.

4 out of 7 Scenes in our Trailer video is finished. We have 3 more to go and there a bit longer and complex than the others.

This trailer is for Puffer the Pufferfish, our game as we understand videos are everything. In fact, videos account for 80% of your pull. Even Kickstarter themselves recommend a video for this very reason, so you can see why we too are creating one. This video will be re-purposed and retooled to how we feel fit, so we are really taking care to make our messages heard and understood.

It has been one crazy week too, we all been working hard at creating new assets not only for this video but for our game as well and rest assured we are making some great progress.

When we reach the end of this milestone in creating our video we will breifly refocus on our game, see what there is that we can do that we can squeese in, then we will focus on preparation and launch of our kickstarter. We have a bit of a ways to go before we get there, but we are ever so much closer to this next goal than what we were.

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.

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.

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.

Hello everyone, it that time again for another Dev Note Fridays.

For the most part, Puffer the Pufferfish has been a slowing project as we have hit several snags that as evidently caused some major set backs. Because of these setbacks, our original plans and set deadlines to reach certain goals are no longer valid.

This is quite unfortunate as it will take a great momentum to get rolling again. It is almost like Murphy’s Law, what ever can happen will happen. In our case it has been a series of events that has set us back. Our artist have left due to medical reasons, one of our main computers failed due to a power supply, and it is for these reasons and more that the project have taken quite a hit.

We are still very much a company and still very much adamant about our Project but things will be quite slow if not stagnant till we can re-evaluate the situation and put a new plan into action to finish this project.

The key to any good start up is that you do no incur any debt, our debts have been quite minimal, which is a good thing. As the saying goes, don’t quit your day job. Argus Computer Entertainment and Puffer the Pufferfish has been very much a project of itself and a huge undertaking. We are a quite small company, 5 at the most, which is nice as we normally can work together and quite quickly. But small teams have its disadvantages as well. Many of these disadvantages are when things go wrong.

An employee becomes ill, it becomes harder to replace them; a computer breaks down; now you are spending the funds to repair it; there are allot of things which makes small teams a really big chore and undertaking for anyone managing it or on it. Of course, many of the reasons for this to be such a large undertaking is due to how young our company is.

Argus Computer Entertainment is very much in the Seed phase where most seeding is coming from the three F’s, Family, Founders, and Friends. Again, why you don’t quit the day job. Our efforts have been to move from this stage and into the stage which will be to crowd fund our project. Though as we have hit a few snags this, at this time, isn’t viable, which is why we are looking at the alternatives.

We will, as always, keep you all posted on any changes and any updates to our project. We might have to suspend activities for a while till we can build our momentum again, at least with Puffer the Pufferfish.

Here we are another Friday and we have been working on finishing the last scenes of the trailer video. We have about two and a half scenes to go just about and we are making progress even if it is a bit slow. Our lead artist is still out on medical leave so we each been working with all the skills we have to do what we can in the mean time.

We come to realize as well that we are killing two birds with one stone, figuratively speaking, no actual peacocks were harmed in the making of this video. In the sense,the story we are telling in our trailer will be told in our game. In other words we are recycling the footage for our cutscenes in the game. This gives us allot of flexibility but also adds in the benefit to tell our story in an inviting way.

After our video portion is finalized then our trailer will go off to audio which we will then add in the music, sound effects and any voice over work we might add, though this part will move along faster than the video part for sure.