Welcome to Wrestling Gamers United Newsletter #403
1) Ooooh Pretty! 2) Old Dogs 3) Indie Wrestling Games
1) Ooooh Pretty! ****************** A guy can only be tempted for so long before he gives in. I said we wouldn't waste any time changing PWX Uprising graphics when we had more important gameplay improvements to make. Someone please tell me I made a bad decision here? So far I simply cannot see the negatives to this situation. Here's the deal. A University here in Alberta is graduating game design students who are required to have work experience in order to graduate. I told them we weren't hiring and that any work we're doing on Uprising is only the critical stuff left to do before we release. Stuff that was best left to the crew already experience with it. We don't have any work for interns. But then they say they will offer interns, free of charge, to do any work that we don't deem necessary but that would help polish up the game anyway. So I did it. I caved. And this week we have an art intern started who's going to be redoing some textures, adding some detail, and essentially any work that we thought would be nice but didn't deem important enough to spend our precious little resources on. So look for some graphics tweaks showing up in screenshots in the next few weeks and thank the post-secondary education system in Alberta.
2) Old Dogs ******************** Any of you old timers remember Mel and/or Pickles? Through the modern miracle of social networking and free long distance after 6pm I've been back in touch with these two crusty original PWX crew members. I'm happy to report that they are both doing extremely well and neither blame the PWX adventure for destroying their faith in humanity. In fact, they're both kind of...happy. So maybe it did break them after all!
3) Indie Wrestling Games
********************* Someone recently asked me about why there aren't more indie wrestling games out now that there are all these free game engines and game design schools popping up all over the place. Well think of it this way; why isn't the radio full of more awesome music now that digital recording software is readily available and music schools are everywhere? Great tools don't automatically give you the ability and knowledge to produce good results.
Even so, the original sentiment isn't entirely true. There are a fair amount of indie wrestling games out there and new ones in development. Off the top of my head we've got Mat Dickie going back to the 2D drawing board and making new games in Flash, the Homebrew Wrestling creator has been incredibly smart about the way he has approached game development and we should be seeing a new title on XBLA from him in the near future, and Adam Ryland is still producing some of the tightest wrestling simulators out there.
On top of all that you've got some really smart and well intentioned guys starting other projects that you can easily find online. Most of them talk a pretty big game and have so far only produced menu screens and pre rendered 3D scenes but that kinda sounds familiar, doesn't it? Nothing wrong with visualizing and dreaming big. Big fan. Whether or not they all continue is anyone's guess. I'm hoping we eventually see the release of a new indie wrestling game every few months. Lord knows there's a large enough market to support it and with all of these indie developers looking to do something different from one another it would be fantastic for everyone involved if they all succeeded. I'd very much like to be one of them.
In the meantime and in between time, that's it, another edition of Wrestling Gamers United.
Thank you for your support, Dave Wishnowski
PWX on Facebook! [url]http://www.facebook.com/ProWrestlingX[/url]
Follow PWX drama on Twitter! [url]http://twitter.com/prowrestlingx[/url]
PWX on YouTube! [url]http://www.youtube.com/user/PWXDave[/url]
PWX Official site! [url]http://www.prowrestlingx.com/[/url]