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[sagzorz]

I personally am VERY impressed!

Thanks! I'm hoping to release it soon!

[sagzorz]

I haven't updated this in awhile, nothing massively new on the tech side.
The past two weeks have been mostly facing design challenges and starting to contact and work with indie music/sound people to get (or make) tracks for the game.

[sagzorz]

Lost 2-3 full days this week being sick/recovering.
There's no way I'll be able to get everything I wanted in the GDC build for at this point.

On the bright side, I manged to fix (I think?) a rather annoying visual bug. Hey, I might even be able to sneak in a barrel roll!

Super exciting times ahead: going to GDC (flying out tomorrow) and working with several (so far 3) awesome musician/audio guys for tracks for the game. The level of collaboration ranges from tweaking existing and existing track to writing something completely from scratch in a highly joint manner.

[airman4]

The problem that I see with this game is that not a lot of songs offer a good area to drive through or explore.
Like for example you've usually got this large mountainous area to the left, and then seemingly chaotic bumps in the middle, and then barely anything interesting to the right.

Personally, I think the platformer sounds like a cooler idea.

Yeah, the frequency spread was an issue as you pointed out (too much on left, not enough on right). This was mainly due to the fact that I was using the FFT data as Unity gave it to me, i.e. on linear scale. Music doesn't really work that way, it's easier to see on a logarithmic scale.

I recently got around to implementing a pseudo-log scale for the data that's flexible, allowing my to tweak the data on the fly (blog post about it here --> http://sagzorz.com/2013/02/28/a-technical-breakdown-of-frequency-domain/

This results in a far more balanced spread in the terrain.

Here's a gif of the current build (give it a moment, it's rather large).



I'll have a video up asap, it'll make things much more clear 

As for the original platformer idea, it's something I'd like to go back to someday. There are really good reasons why I put the project on hold and started Frequency Domain, I'm going to have to write that post-mortem on of these days >___<

reminds me 2001 space odyssey xd

[sagzorz]

The problem that I see with this game is that not a lot of songs offer a good area to drive through or explore.
Like for example you've usually got this large mountainous area to the left, and then seemingly chaotic bumps in the middle, and then barely anything interesting to the right.

Personally, I think the platformer sounds like a cooler idea.

Yeah, the frequency spread was an issue as you pointed out (too much on left, not enough on right). This was mainly due to the fact that I was using the FFT data as Unity gave it to me, i.e. on linear scale. Music doesn't really work that way, it's easier to see on a logarithmic scale.

I recently got around to implementing a pseudo-log scale for the data that's flexible, allowing my to tweak the data on the fly (blog post about it here --> http://sagzorz.com/2013/02/28/a-technical-breakdown-of-frequency-domain/

This results in a far more balanced spread in the terrain.

Here's a gif of the current build (give it a moment, it's rather large).



I'll have a video up asap, it'll make things much more clear 

As for the original platformer idea, it's something I'd like to go back to someday. There are really good reasons why I put the project on hold and started Frequency Domain, I'm going to have to write that post-mortem on of these days >___<

reminds me 2001 space odyssey xd

That's high praise, thank you!
Just wait till you see the barrel roll 

[sagzorz]

Heading for the airport soon, hoping to get barrel roll and level/track switching by the time I get to SF.

Also, if any of you are staying at the "Indie Hostel" for GDC these next few days let me know! I'd love to have some playtesters 

[PythonBlue]

Looks very nice so far! I like the color choice especially: so vivid!

[alts]

I love the idea of trying to find games within mathematical concepts, like this case with Fourier transforms. Has much thought been given to the interactions of the player? From the first post, you mentioned some exploration, but I'm not sure that a Fourier transform provides much in the way of variety to keep exploration interesting. That said, it looks beautiful, and I'm sure there is something that'll fall out of these prototypes.

[sagzorz]

Got back from GDC a few days ago: it was amazing and I got tons of feedback from all kinds of game devs. The "indie hostel" was particularly mind blowing in terms of the concentration of great indie devs.

So, the plan was to work on some key , non-backend features when I got back from GDC,but when I came home to find out that my Unity Pro trial ran out >__<.
I can keep working to some degree and implement features, but I won't be able to produce an updated build with the original visual style.

If anyone knows how I can get my hands on a "long term" Unity Pro trial, let me know! 

[sagzorz]

Saw/heard the KORG volca video yesterday, I just had too see what it looked like in game :D.
So here it is -->



(Apologies for the occasional audio/video distortions, the recording process had some hiccups)

Music from the KORG volca series trailer video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gau7UIzYY0&feature=youtu.be

As for the game itself:
Minor camera tweaks, mostly fixing core back end stuff, wanted to get that out of the way before I start working on the new features.

Oh, forgot to mention: this gameplay video shows off the "warp" feature for the first time. It's definitely not final yet, but that's what it looks/sounds like for now.

[sagzorz]

Spent the last few days trying to get an particle based environment that reacts to the player. At of this time went into trying to use the Unity Particle System via code, but I realized yesterday that the current apis are simply too restrictive to do what I wanted.

So I'm now resorting to using plain old mass prefab instantiation, with the main issue now being the ridiculous number of draw calls and its resulting hit on the performance (runs almost 2x slower, an extra 7ms).
All of these gameobjects are identical (just a cube prefab), but the dynamic batching just doesn't seem to want to kick in (it does partially sometimes for short amounts of time, not sure how/why).

If anyone has some pro tips about how to handle a few hundred identical GameObjects in Unity, let me know!

[sagzorz]

At last:
Frequency Domain Playable Prototype 4 (ft. Daft Punk - Get Lucky [Radio Edit])  -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0vPjbvI7E&feature=youtu.be

Looks like YouTube might be blocking it in some countries, I'll have a Vimeo version up later Sunday.

I was originally going to use the 1 min teaser they had up, but then the 4 min Radio Edit got out!
On the game side, I'm working on a big new feature, but it wasn't ready to show yet, so I'm sticking to a slightly older feature set build for this video.
Main things gameplay things here are the barrel roll and "warping", plus some minor camera tweaks.

Sorry for the slowdown at the beginning, it stable for the rest of the video though.

[sagzorz]

Alright, got the gif!
It's a pretty good one, you get to see the barrel roll + warping.

The only problem is that it's over 12MB (sorry!), give it a minute to load  



And I've also got a 75% smaller version of the gif (below):

[sagzorz]

Aaand here's the Vimeo version of the Frequency Domain Daft Punk - Get Lucky track video.

.
Just in case YouTube blocks it (looks like it's the case for Germany right now).

[sagzorz]

The usual Frequency Domain not trippy enough for your taste? Sustained barrel roll + warp  = THIS -->

#SeizureWarning

[sagzorz]

Introducing the new feature I’ve been working on since last week: flying creatures! (I don’t know what to call them yet -__-)
If you observe carefully, you’ll see that these creatures after a player performs a significant jump. They’re movements reflect what the player did during the hangtime of the jump and the colors correspond to the colors of the music that were playing during that jump.
You could say it’s a time travelling tool that shows you what you did and in what musical context.

Frequency Domain v0.1 (ft.Daft Punk - Around The World / Harder Better Faster Stronger - Alive 2007)  -->


SEIZURE WARNING (near the end of the video)

Music: Daft Punk – Around The World / Harder Better Faster Stronger – Alive 2007 (I edited the beginning of the song a little to get to the interesting part faster)

[sagzorz]

Frequency Domain v0.1
Introducing a new player feedback mechanism: the flying creatures



the gif gives a better idea, but...


the video is far better! (seizure warning at the the end, it gets pretty crazy! ) -->  



I'm really excited/happy by how this new feature ties in the last few (barrel roll, warping). It's hard to tell from the gif, but I show off the "barrel roll + warp = awesome creature" combo several times in the video.

[sagzorz]

Created a Greenlight Concepts page for Frequency Domain.
Props to Steam for making such a sleek layout --> http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=142393387

[Gremlin]

the video is far better! (seizure warning at the the end, it gets pretty crazy! ) --> 

Really looking good. I like what you've done with it since GDC.

[sagzorz]

the video is far better! (seizure warning at the the end, it gets pretty crazy! ) --> 

Really looking good. I like what you've done with it since GDC.

Thanks! I'm working on the next feature right now, it's been going slower than I thought though, hopefully I'll have something to show this weekend.