WonderFridge

Authors notes:

I wrote this game for several reasons.
   Mainly I wanted test the little fully managed XNA engine that I developed over the past months. It should facilitate flexible Windows / XBox360 games development. Of course I could have taken TorqueX 2D
but I wanted to get to know C# and XNA more indepth - so writing a small engine bottom up seemed reasonably.

   Furthermore I wanted to implement a game design that I think can be considered "addictive". The monthly contest of the website "experimental
gameplay project" for June/July 2010 inspired me to do that. You find
it here: http://experimentalgameplay.com/blog/2010/06/two-months-of-casual-addiction/
Great site! (If anyone of experimental gameplay reads this: Big props to you guys! And sorry, that I could not / did not want to finish this prog in one week. In my eyes the polishing is quite important to make a game 'addictive'. Of course this game is far from being shiny. But on the other hand it´s not a *completely rough*
prototype either, which I think would not be addictive at all. :-) Building upon a fairly working version of my engine, the development took 2 weeks. But only 1 week was actually spend on gameplay related content and mechanics. The other week was spend on
extending the engine (mainly by fully managed XNA-native GUI elements),
and on polishing this small game a little bit. I am looking forward to future challenges!) But what (if so) makes this game addictive? Mainly I think it is the
same effect, that keeps player´s searching for better equipment in games
like WoW, Diablo, Torchlight and similar. Everytime you beat a baddie
in these games you find yourself curious what items it might drop.
Most of the time the items are worthless junk. But sometimes and more
important *randomly* you find items that are of high value inside of the game. It is also this 'random effect' which keeps people playing one-armed bandits and similar machines with real money. They ignore
the fact that they creepingly lose money. Simply because if you win randomly, you always have the small hope that the next try will be *the* big win. Possibly this will make you play "WonderFridge" for
hours. You always hope to get another "NEW ITEM!!!" and play
for another "just a few seconds", that sum up to minutes, which sum
up to ... hmmm ... let´s see, if the concept really works out. :-)

   And last, since codemachinery targets being a professional independent games developing firm, this small project serves as kind of a "Hello World!" for the company itself. This very first project should provide me a grip of all the implied steps to produce a positive
and fun gaming experience. In the main menu of this game you find 2 options that are hopefully helpful in getting the brand of "codemachinery" more known. The first option works like a hardcoded link to our website. The other one prepares an e-mail ready to be send to friends to spread the word about this free fun game. These
kind of menu options are commonly found in "XBox LIVE Indie Games",
so I thought it would be a good idea to include it here in order to
make us more known.

   It is left to say that especially I want to thank the artists whose music titles and sound samples I was allowed to use under diverse Creative Commons licenses. You guys facilitate work of indies
like codemachinery in a significant way! Thank you very much!
Please find the detailed list of all contributors, their contacts
and the licenses and conditions under which their work was used in the
attached file License.txt. Below you find just a short listing:

Music Tracks:
"Maybe Someday Blues (instrumental)" by oldDog
"Paloseco Brazz Samples 2" by The Paloseco Brazz Orchestra / Waldhorn33

Sound Samples:
"17638_fonogeno_refrigerator01.wav" by Fonogeno
"15393_dobroide_fridge.door.wav" by dobroide
"16443_kkz_Raga_Loop.wav" by kkz
"94792_jbates18_utensil_clink.mp3" by jbates18
"5648_pushtobreak_valihaloop1_8.aif" by pushtobreak
"22952_acclivity_Cheer.wav" by acclivity
"60026_qubodup_swosh_39.flac" by qubodup

   You are welcome to drop us some lines. Any feedback is highly appreciated: anyway if you deem this program as a complete waste of time or you cannot stop playing it out of sheer pleasure.
Please write to: feedback(at)codemachinery.net

Please visit us at http://codemachinery.net to find more info on
codemachinery and get news on upcoming games.

Harry Trautmann
on Friday 2010-07-30