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[RandyOrenstein]

Well, first up this isn’t the first dev log for this game, but it’s the first on TIG, so yay!
 

My name is Randy, and my team and I are in Toronto, Canada, and have been working on this game for over a year now. It is our first game, and started as a student project. Its going well, but I would love to get feedback from anyone who wants to give it!



Archive is an arcadey top down dual-stick shooter, into which we have tried to build some tower-defense elements. We are building it in Unity, which is a bucket of magic wrapped in sparkles and chocolate, and using a 3DS Max, Photoshop, and Maya for the assets.

The story is based loosely on the Baghavad Gita, a Hindu text that is about 2k years old, and deals with the nature of self, death, and the ethics of both. How does that work with robots blowing each other up? Hopefully when the game is done that question will seem so obvious you will slap people who ask it. Or not. . .

Right now we are pushing to get a build ready to submit to the IGF, so wish us luck! Main goal is to complete and polish the shit out of our tutorial level, which is currently in pieces but almost ready to be lego’d together. Main holdup is our desire to use as little text as possible, but the complexity of how a couple of the systems work is making that really tricky.

We are building two main gameplay modes, a narratively driven campaign of 9 levels, and an infinite wave gauntlet linked to competitive high score tables and the like.


You can play a demo build of the game here (apparently PC only, even though it’s an online build, so sorry macs!): http://hypermetricstudios.com/blog/?page_id=21


If you want to know a bit more about our development to date you can also check out our previous dev blog here: http://randyorenstein.wordpress.com/

Also, if you are really masochistic you can follow me on twitter for more updates: @randyorenstein

[gears]

The idea of the 'towers' moving with the ship and being part of its directional arsenal was new to me. Unique premise as well. Lots of vibrant color!

I was initially a bit overwhelmed by what was on screen during the planning phase, possibly because the strong colors were too vibrant and nothing stood out strongly enough.

The radial menu was pretty slick, but it may be daunting for a beginner to see all those options appearing upon placement of a turret. The immediately-opening menu felt somewhat nonstandard (maybe I'm used to right-click context menus?), but I can't think of any better option off the top of my head. Also, the disabled button appearance wasn't immediately obvious to me, which goes back to the vibrant colors.

I didn't play long enough to get into the upgrades/AI/etc, but my feeling is that it might be worth introducing those individual options one at a time. That way, you can reward the player with new choices and also avoid overwhelming the player at the beginning by providing too many choices. Maybe initially you would do the very simplest thing -- place a single kind of turret.

You might consider putting this in the feedback forum, since you've completed something substantial that folks can comment on. Make sure it's obvious that it's a playable Unity web demo.

[RandyOrenstein]

Thanks for the feedback! We are currently working out our tutorial, which is going to introduce things a bit more sedately. Right now I don't know if we are going to gate the upgrades in the narrative, but I agree it would make for a good feeling of reward.

[RandyOrenstein]

Today I have been working on background assets for our various levels. I am super pleased with this most recent one. . . it is just so damn pretty. And the animation is neat too.

[Danmark]

Today I have been working on background assets for our various levels. I am super pleased with this most recent one. . . it is just so damn pretty. And the animation is neat too.

Let us see it then!

Tried the demo. Real slick. However, visibility of the crosshair is abysmal when things get busy. Seconding all gears' criticisms.

[RandyOrenstein]

I hope to be able to, some time this month. We are working away on the tutorial level which will be intro-ing the various mechanics slowly, and come hell or high water we will be posting up a new build by the end of October, complete with tutorial and the first boss of the game

On an *ahem* possibly related note, any suggestions for how to prep up a submission for the IGF student category?

[RandyOrenstein]

Hey All!
Sorry to have been a bit scant on posts lately, we are mainly pushing along with the tutorial, so its all slow and incremental. However, we have designed the first boss and its looking pretty neat, so here is a sneak peek, before we get the thing animated and shooting at you:

[Paul Jeffries]

Played the demo - didn't have much idea what I was meant to be doing at first, but it's real purty and I like the way you can position and build your own weaponry.

[Pixelmixer]

Fantastic looking game guys! I am curious, I'm working on a space game with a top-down sort of perspective like yours and I'm wondering how you guys were able to solve the issue of not being able to see outside of the camera's area of view? In a true 3D game there would be a perspective that would let you see far in the distance, but for 2D space games this isn't possible. I'm just curious if you guys ran into that problem and if so, how were you able to fix it?

[RandyOrenstein]

Because our camera is locked to a target (normally the player) and all of the action in the game is on a fixed plane, perspective has not been an issue for us at all, except factoring in the design of the backgrounds for the levels.

I would suggest using backgrounds and liberal fog to reduce the spoiler factor if your enemies are coming in out of the background, but besides that I cant offer too much

Hope that is at least vaguely helpful!

Randy

[RandyOrenstein]

Hey folks!

It has been an eternity since I last updated this dev blog, but here I am, back from PAX and GDC, and filled with ideas and feedback.



First up, the latest build of the game is having issues exporting to a web player build, so hopefully we will have the latest demo up and running on our site asap, but it isn’t there yet.
 
The game has taken a few stylistic turns since the last iteration, and is looking really pretty, and also much more readable for the player. We have gone through yet another round of UI redesigning and simplification, and it seems we have hit a really good balance between functionality and readability. Moving some functions to hover over mouse-overed turrets is making a big difference, and adding some more mouse cursor icons will make a further difference I think.



Overall progress on the game is at a bit of a stop in terms of level building, as we await a couple major physics tweaks that will make terrain possible in the game. Having strategic map construction in addition to some newly tweaked enemy ai’s and some brand new enemies is going to bring a whole new level of play to the game, one that many other designers said was lacking during testing.



We are getting ever closer to actually capping the game off, however, which feels great. Just need some more dedicated time from the programmers and animator, and then its all down to building the levels.



I will post as soon as the new build is online,
thanks for reading!

[RandyOrenstein]

Small update, but big news! Our new demo is live on our site!

Please check it out, and if you have feedback please share it!

http://hypermetricstudios.com/blog/?page_id=21