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richardeflanagan
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« on: January 18, 2013, 07:25:04 AM » |
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AHOY!  Kind of late to start one of these maybe, but could be fun if I keep it snappy and informal (there's lots of game making left to be done). Let me know! THE SPIEL:
Experience the world of FRACT, a first-person puzzle adventure game inspired by electronic music, specifically synthesizers. Explore an abstract, broken-down world built on sound, rebuild its forgotten machinery, and create your own sounds and music within the world. Features an expansive and open world to explore and discover, stylized visuals and sounds that combine to deliver a unique and synaesthetic experience. MEDIA:
A dev diary we did for FRACT OSC a little over a year ago: The Teaser Trailer for FRACT OSC: A timelapse of me making stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttnc10vaFhMThe old prototype trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3k6n5_KYDoOur youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PhosfiendSystemsOur Flickr Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fractgame/WHAT'S THE DEAL
After snagging the best student game award at the 2011 IGF, my wife and I decided to take this thing full time and build the FRACT I originally envisioned. Needless to say, we didn't really have any idea WTF we were doing, but have gotten lots of help and advice along the way. We hired Henk Boom (Waiting for Horus, Pax Pritanica, and much more good stuff) to join as our techlord, and have had help from Paul Forey on some early sound prototyping and Aliceffekt on some environment art a bit later. Now we're back to the three of us (plus my wife's and my new daughter Zoe) and are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The game has gone through a lot of iteration, we've even changed direction a *little* bit since the dev diary last year (no major changes, promise). At this point we're in the 'just finish it already' stage. With no major design questions still remaining (plenty of tweaks I'm SURE) it's just a matter of wrapping this monster up. Anyway I'll try to update this devlog regularly, if not not in super deep detail. If you have any questions, please let me know! And if you dig it, please give us some love on Greenlight! SOME MORE PRETTY STUFF
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« Last Edit: January 18, 2013, 02:09:38 PM by richardeflanagan »
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Malky
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« Reply #1 on: January 18, 2013, 07:32:46 AM » |
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You released your student build from the IGF, right? I'm pretty sure I played that, it was great.
I really, really can't wait to get my hands on the new Fract. It sounds... I mean, it's freaking amazing. I'm so impressed.
Keep it up.
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Ant
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« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2013, 07:37:50 AM » |
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Oh gawd I remember being impressed with the beta of this a while back, looks like you've been beavering away it looks even more super delicious. Best of luck with it.  |
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PeteDevlin
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« Reply #4 on: January 18, 2013, 12:04:00 PM » |
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It's terrific, so striking and memorable, good luck with it
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richardeflanagan
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« Reply #5 on: January 18, 2013, 12:41:49 PM » |
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Thanks for the kind words and encouragement everyone! BIG MACHINES
So, to get this started, today I'm working on some late game stuff. The world of FRACT OSC is divided into 3 primary areas. The end of each culminates at an XXXXXXXXXX. Not only am I working on the architecture for that space today, but finalizing its transition (supposed to be dramatic, so far so good). Also, Henk whipped up some new tech that swaps simple static meshes for the complicated ones during animation. These machines have A LOT of moving parts, so this should help optimize them when they're not XXXXXXXing. Also, I'll be UVing this monster today too, and tidying up the animation and the asset in general. SNEAK PEEK (don't worry these colours are temporary to help me organize the UVing)
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Christoffer
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« Reply #7 on: January 18, 2013, 01:23:51 PM » |
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I love FRACT so so much. If you're not excited you should be.
(Posted to follow)
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richardeflanagan
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« Reply #8 on: January 21, 2013, 11:46:05 AM » |
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OPTIMIZATION, DRAWCALLS BEGONE!
So, with the Tech that Henk whipped up last week, and a script that he's fixing right now to determine which assets are the worst offenders, I'm trying to optimize some assets that are eating drawcalls BADLY. Those big machines I mentioned before, well there are a few in the world already and THEY ARE HUNGRY. So first up is optimizing them. ASSET SERVER, WE HATE YOU
Also, the unity asset server is misbehaving again; this thing has wasted so much of our time. Next project we'll start fresh with some other SVN ( any recommendations for big projects?). But for now we're stuck with something that works barely enough - shame it cost us so much money!
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« Last Edit: January 21, 2013, 11:56:08 AM by richardeflanagan »
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melos
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« Reply #9 on: January 21, 2013, 11:52:48 AM » |
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composing in a game!
sweet!
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play hydlide 2
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Christoffer
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« Reply #10 on: January 21, 2013, 03:38:27 PM » |
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(any recommendations for big projects?).
We use Tortoise SVN at Might and Delight. It works alright (pretty certain it works better than the Unity Asset Server). It helps that one of the programmers wrote a script to make sure assets couldn't be added without their meta file. |
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eigenbom
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« Reply #11 on: January 21, 2013, 03:44:22 PM » |
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Played a demo of this a while back, it's looking great. Look forward to the day when it's released.  |
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SolarLune
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« Reply #12 on: January 21, 2013, 09:30:00 PM » |
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The game looks astounding. Great tech-y electronic graphics!
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GrinningPickle
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« Reply #13 on: January 21, 2013, 09:35:50 PM » |
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This looks glorious  BTW we also use tortoise but we haven't put it under a lot of stress yet so I can't outright recommend it. |
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richardeflanagan
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« Reply #14 on: January 22, 2013, 08:37:24 AM » |
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Thanks for the recommendations everyone - even with hiccups Tortoise has to be better than the Asset Server. Anyone using it remotely, or are you guys all using it on a LAN. Even on a gigabit LAN the Unity Asset Server still chokes a lot.
*EDIT* We do remote on occasion - we'd do more, but it's a pain in the ass. Would love to have something I don't have to babysit when Henk wants to make a commit from outside the office.
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richardeflanagan
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« Reply #15 on: January 22, 2013, 09:05:11 AM » |
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BACK IN THE STUDIO
The Studio in the world of FRACT OSC plays a number of roles, and has been evolving progressively over the course of development. And since all of that development has been highly iterative (based on tech, design, and time) it hasn't evolved in an entirely cohesive way. That said, it's incredibly fun. Every time I work in the studio I lose a lot of time just playing around, the tools are IMHO pretty dope. But they need work, they need to be friendlier, more intuitive and maybe we need less of them. Today I'm looking at the kitchen sink that is the studio to see what we can wrangle into a more cohesive experience, what features are missing and what we can potentially cut (for the better, promise).
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richardeflanagan
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« Reply #16 on: January 23, 2013, 09:27:53 AM » |
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UI Tweaks
Yesterday's look into the studio revealed a few missing UI elements (I know right?). Anyway, I got an initial version working. Later today I'll head back to the studio for some layout and hooking these things into our last synth (the polyphonic pad, oh ya!). Again, sorry for the bad colours, it's a test scene  .
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richardeflanagan
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« Reply #17 on: January 24, 2013, 09:50:01 AM » |
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REACTIVE SYSTEMS AND MINI PUZZLES
Won't go into too much detail today, but working on some reactive systems that bring life to the world and some of the mini-puzzles that break up the flow of the core puzzles in the game.
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ithamore
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« Reply #18 on: January 25, 2013, 08:58:37 AM » |
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I like the progress reports here and on your blog and glad to see you are continuing working so hard on the new FRACT.  |
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Please help TimW, a longtime promoter of indie gaming everywhere and an old friend of TIGSource, to write about indie games full-time.
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richardeflanagan
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« Reply #19 on: January 25, 2013, 12:04:18 PM » |
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Thank you! We're certainly trucking away over here, eager to get it done. SOUND DESIGN-CEPTION
Today I took stock of where we are in terms of sound design in the current state of the game. I definitely rushed a few things leading up the IGF submission this year, and some stuff is a bit rough around the edges (and then some). But it's also better than I remember it being, so that's good. There are a few truly egregious sounds in here (mostly old stuff) that really don't jive with some areas, and generally I have to write maybe 4X the ambient tracks to avoid that "haven't I heard this already?" feeling. But that's OK, because there are parts of the game that have written their own ambient tracks based on the interactive systems in place. That's right, the game is making sounds for itself, and I find myself using the engine to create more and more dynamic sounds for the game from inside the game - I love it. If your curious to hear some of these realtime synth experiments check out our SoundCloud Stream And to keep my post pretty, here's a photo of a CRT degaussing sample: |
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