As you’ve no doubt heard in every other Steam Greenlight promotion post, the initial couple of days in a Greenlight campaign is where you get an influx of interested gamers funnelled to your Greenlight page from Steam. When your project inevitably falls off the front page and this traffic falls with it, where do you go from there?

(Click here for a bit about what Ga-Ma-Yo is)

Another excellent Ga-Ma-Yo came and went on Thursday 19th November. This time Castle Invasion: Throne out came along to be shown in all its glory on a demo TV at the event.

The games artist (Adam) and I had been slogging away for weeks to have a solid, beautiful, demo ready packed full of every feature we had the time to implement. A steady stream of players came over; some to play, some to chat and some for the free stickers(can’t blame them, they look pretty cool).

Game Makers Yorkshire(Ga-Ma-Yo) is a meet up in Leeds for game developers of all sizes every six months. I’ve been to the past four of these, propping up the bar but this time I bring a game with me.

Castle Invasion: Throne Out is a fun, frantic and comic 2D tower defence game. You control an archer defending his castle against the onslaught of the kings army. A whole array of misfit combatants march towards the wall and each must be dealt with in a different manner. Throw in a pinch of boss fights and out pops fun.

I’m on the home straight of developing an advanced 25 level demo to show off at Ga-Ma-Yo. Until then, here’s the latest screenshots.

Mouse Bounce has been developed by 2 people, myself (Dave) a programmer, and a friend (Adam) an artist. I’ve known Browny (Adam Brown) for far too long; he grew up in the village next to mine and we went to the same school together. Through a string of coincidences we ended up going to the same university and living next to each other in Nottingham for a while. Since then he trotted off to London for a bit and now he’s in Australia while I moved back to nice warm Yorkshire. After spending 15 months in full time work I fancied the excitement of making my own games. A few days before I was about to leave my safe, secure, paying job I dropped Browny a message, that was along the lines of:

“G’day mate! Hope I haven’t interrupted you drinking Fosters around the barbie. How do you feel about making a mobile game, ripper? You do the art, I code, we both design. As a pommie you’ll be wanting to explore Aus so you can just pitch in when you’re free”

Hey there!
I’m Dave Ward, a game developer from Yorkshire, U.K. As this is the first blog post I’m giving a bit of background to Cat Trap Studios talking about how it came to be.
My first taste of game development came in the form of Castle Invasion, a side project throughout the third year of University. At the time, PlayStation Mobile has just launched and not that long before it the PS Vita. I found it the coolest thing in the world (even cooler than those parrots that talk back to you) to be able to develop for a PlayStation device and dove straight in to make something of my own.