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[fucrate]

Haha, yeah.  The crushers don't kill you right now, they just push you through the floor.  I'm gonna have to get creative about handling crush situations, the physics system just kind of gets confused right now

Just backed you on Kickstarter.com.... really interested to hear if that works out for you.  it could be a great tool for other indies.

Thanks a lot! So far, it seems like kickstarter could be really awesome as just the place you handle pre-orders. Everyone who pre-orders can feel a lot more secure in that if the game doesn't get enough funding, they didn't spend money.

[Wander]

this game is pretty rad - nice job so far!  The world has a very cool creepy feel - nice color pics for that.  it's pretty original looking.

I died allot - so maybe you could make a button push skip the death cinematic what with the flies.  I spend most of my time watching the fireflies pick me up. (^__^)b

i'll have to keep watch for sure.

[aeiowu]

this game is pretty rad - nice job so far!  The world has a very cool creepy feel - nice color pics for that.  it's pretty original looking.

I died allot - so maybe you could make a button push skip the death cinematic what with the flies.  I spend most of my time watching the fireflies pick me up. (^__^)b

i'll have to keep watch for sure.

Thanks! =D That's a good idea to skip the cinematic. I always get annoyed with those too.

We've kind of had a bipolar week between liferaft and releasing Fig. 8, bug fixes and doing administrative crap (we're on the hunt for an intern!). Nonetheless a lot of the work we're doing is behind the scenes. Mike is taking the lead on making a bunch of levels which are shaping up really nicely. Our goal is to finish up the roughs (un-detailed without art) by the end of the month and then spend all of October on polish.

As far as updates to the demo version in this build we've got... new firefly particle effects, a new enemy kill explosion, fixed the elevator jerkiness, added a half-broke boss to the upstairs room.

http://www.intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft

BTW, thanks for all the support guys! Kickstarter has shown a lot of growth over the last week or so and we're really excited by that. If you're one of our pre-orderers (or even if your not) you especially kickass! 

ps. oh yea, also I posted a bit on our experiences with level design. We can't really show those off as we want that to be a complete package that's experienced on its own. The demo that we have up is more of a vertical slice without much of a narrative progression. anyway, here's that write up on my blog: http://mile222.com/2009/09/the-trouble-with-not-knowing-what-were-doing/

[aeiowu]

Work continues under the hood. We have the first 3 "levels" roughed in and I've been working on making the mechanical side of the spectrum more interesting. As it stands now, the game starts you off in a relatively stark part of the facility and compared to what you guys are playing it looks pretty boring. It's been a struggle but last night I had a bit of a breakthrough and got out of my funk.




As for what's playable, I added in three layers of parallax to give a better sense of depth, as well as some large struts/pipes to help make the interior feel like it was anchored. Originally the interior seemed pretty flat and floaty. I think this helps a lot. I'm not going to add it to the whole level as I need to keep working on the actual _game_ but this demo should give you a good idea as a type of sandbox.

Linky: http://intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft

Updates to the playable version will be less frequent (and have been lately if you haven't noticed) as we won't be making the actual game game publicly playable until release. If you're interested in testing privately and what-have-you, let us know though.

[Dom2D]

The paralax background works really well.
The shooting butterflies mechanic is great.
The grapple stuff works just fine.

Love the death animation.

Keep at it, I hope you get 100% on Kickstarter!

[ElijahKatz]

Work continues under the hood. We have the first 3 "levels" roughed in and I've been working on making the mechanical side of the spectrum more interesting. As it stands now, the game starts you off in a relatively stark part of the facility and compared to what you guys are playing it looks pretty boring. It's been a struggle but last night I had a bit of a breakthrough and got out of my funk.




As for what's playable, I added in three layers of parallax to give a better sense of depth, as well as some large struts/pipes to help make the interior feel like it was anchored. Originally the interior seemed pretty flat and floaty. I think this helps a lot. I'm not going to add it to the whole level as I need to keep working on the actual _game_ but this demo should give you a good idea as a type of sandbox.

Linky: http://intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft

Updates to the playable version will be less frequent (and have been lately if you haven't noticed) as we won't be making the actual game game publicly playable until release. If you're interested in testing privately and what-have-you, let us know though.

I'd love to beta test with the private version :D

[aeiowu]

Hey.

Welp, we decided to stop production on Liferaft. About a week or so ago we had a serious sit-down over some soup and decided that we were in a bad spot and needed a change. We're not really sure where we're going, but we do know we'll be starting development on a couple smaller games. It turned out that Liferaft was simply too big a project to take on, we grossly underestimated the amount of time it takes to make a good level, let alone tell a story through environment like we wanted. To do Liferaft justice we'd probably need a few years and we simply can't afford that right now.

We may pick it up down the road when we can, so if this thread ever gets dredged out of the mucky-muck lookout! Make sure to warn us and say "HEY! you can't do that, remember what happened last time!" so that we don't make the same mistake twice. 

Anyway, we appreciate all the feedback you guys have given, it's been crazy awesome and really helped the game out. We wouldn't have gotten as far without you.

 

We've learned a lot from this whole experience, just as we always do with every game we make, but it's always the failures that teach us the most. I'll be writing a bit more about it, in the weeks to come as we reflect more on why this all happened the way it did.

here's a bit of a post from our blog elaborating a bit more about the matter: http://www.intuitiongames.com/2009/10/is-hiatus-the-correct-word-here/

[Eric McQuiggan]

Oh, wow, that's too bad! I was excited.

[c-foo peng]

Really sad to see this one go...

Goo luck guys!

[Jason Bakker]

Dang, this was looking really cool I understand the refocus though... I've done so fourish times before the current project. Good luck on the smaller stuff!

[st33d]

Noooooo!

Just played this for the first time. I thought it was really promising.

Will be sad to see this go.

[Alex May]

Sorry to hear it. Good luck with whatever's next!

[HyperDuckChris]

Actually in shock, you guys will be great at whatever you come to, and keep this one in the vault, it's a great piece. Good luck!

[MalcolmLittle]

This project has been obviously taking a lot of your team's time so I can definitely understand the decision to postpone/cancel the game, especially if you guys would need a few years to complete it.

But what you managed to complete was really nice and appealing. If nothing else your next game will probably be even better! Practice makes perfect, and all that.

[fucrate]

Thanks for the support guys, it actually makes the decision that much harder to bear when I hear how many people actually were looking forward to Liferaft, but it's the right decision.

Maybe someday we'll go back to parts of it, but it's just become this crazy beast that we don't know how to feed anymore