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[Pemanent]

Game is out! Go play it fools.
First few levels are free.

Miniverse is a fast-paced puzzle game for the iPad in which you move helpless people around a universe.

My name is Ryan and Ryt is my pseudonym. Contrary to what it says below. Things change, ya know. Anyways so right now it's just me working on the game and it's going to be released only for the iPad. Oh and it'll be available June 30th in the app store.

Miniverse is an action puzzle game. The main skill of the game is learning how to briskly gather information and make informed decisions based on limited knowledge.

I'm Ryan and I'll be doing most of the art while Devon does the programming. We collectively call ourselves Coding Cat Studios.

We will be using Unity for this and will release on iPad, Mac, Linux and Windows. Unity is awesome. We are literally just starting work on this but plan to finish within a year, (psh, yeah, right, but that is the goal and we have milestones set up to keep us on track.)

Game Website here

Beta!

Hey you! I need beta testers! If you have an ipad then post your email address (or tweet me or pm or whatever) and I'll email you an invite.

music music music music music music music music!!
We need somebody to work with us in producing music / sound effects for this! Let me know if you're interested and I can give you more information.

Development Timelapse 1 - First Human Planet

Development Video 1

Miniverse Timelapse 2 - Key Puzzle!

Development Video 2

Gameplay Audio

[Windybeard]

Cool game, i got to like level 6, it was good fun, i like the idea! i can see some crazy madness coming our way with this one!

[Pemanent]

Thanks! Glad you liked it. Oh we have a lot in mind for this! Crazy madness indeed.

[DustyDrake]

I can't play the proof of concept for some reason.
The instant I press one of the WASD keys in either IE or Chrome, I just go shooting off in that direction and can't stop.

[nuchon]

Nice concept! and I love the name and logo :D

[kamac]

Played a bit (was fun) and then the game froze.  

The logo is indeed beauty.

[Pemanent]

@DustyDrake
hrm :/ You're the first we have ever heard of that. I'll check it out and see if I find anything though.

@nuchon
Thank you! You can thank me for the logo and Devon for the name.

@kamac
Oh sorry! The demo is indeed rough around the edges. Glad the bit you played was fun though. Thanks about the logo! I doesn't really feel done to me yet so I'm sure it will change a bit before the final release.


Did some work last night. Made a quick timelapse of my planet work. Probably gonna go with the textureless, shaded, heavy ambient occlusion look for this. Much like tf2.

Development Timelapse 1 - First Human Planet

Devon also got zooming in and out done and worked on the 'click to move people' control.

[Pemanent]

This is the first real official update for Miniverse.

This is the current state of the game.

- New sun radii effect.
- New human world model.
- New world proximity effect. The little green arrow lets you know that you can move humans between planets.
- New human spaceship model. I would like to put some more work into this at some point.
- New sun material.
- Some VERY preliminary work on the asteroids.
- Some VERY preliminary work on the space backgrounds.

We also made the decision to tap a planet to move the people. For example, the player moves a planet close to another planet, the small green arrow points to the planet that the people will be moved to, the player will tap the planet with the people and the people will move to the nearest planet within range. This will make moving people very simple, which was a big issue in the demo.

I also did a bunch of research on shaders and lighting models in TF2 and SWOTOR as they are the look we are trying to emulate.

If you can guess the inspiration you get a 60 internet points.

[zede05]

That looks like a cross between the Spaceballs ship and The Magic School Bus...

[Pemanent]

haha yeah pretty much We plan to have lots of subtle references to Spaceballs and Something Something Something Dark Side in this.

[Pemanent]

Some shader work. Most of the banding is gif compression.

[Majestic]

Pretty good game. I like the creative and innovative concept. The gameplay and animation as very smoothe and fluid also

It's good work. Keep it up

[Pemanent]

Thanks! The real game should be significantly better than the one made in 48 hours


The humans will be roped to giant propane tanks as jetpacks for which to fly around space with.

[Pemanent]

Things were feeling a bit off. The humans didn’t seem to fit with their space ship and the ship itself just seemed out of place. So I threw together a quick color palette and retextured the ship. I didn’t put much thought into the color palette but it just felt right. Though I do wonder how I’m going to feel in the morning. I’m going to retexture the human and the planet with this palette tomorrow and see how things turn out. Oh I also took the thruster (propane tank) from the human jet pack and used it on the human space ship.

[Pemanent]

Here you see the new fancy level transition I implemented tonight. Also the first two levels can be observed.

[Pemanent]

Planet explosion effect. Looks pretty shitty imo. I haven’t worked with Shuriken (Unities particle effect system) until today so it is not a bad start. If you have any critiques I would love to hear.

[Pemanent]

sun radii shrinking

[DustyDrake]

heh, every 3 or so explosion on the sun radii picture the second planet's explosion links up with the top gif

[Pemanent]

heh LOL

[Pemanent]

Spend most of the day working on asteroid functionality. Ran into a lot of problems but sorted them all out in the end. The asteroids move by themselves and are uncontrollable by the player but can still hold people. Should be an interesting way to create some windows of opportunity in the levels.