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[Xainkrif]

Dev Log entry 1: An Intro to INT

Allow me to introduce myself. MY name is Jonathan but I go by the handle Xainkrif. I am currently part of a development team that is currently working on a game called INT. I will be posting here frequently to keep you updated on the progress of our game! IF you would like to see updates faster, follow us on our social feeds. We post daily!


What is INT?

INT is a Sci-Fi, RPG, built from scratch and set in the years 2248-49.  The premise for our RPG is that a catastrophic World War erupts in our current century, leading to the dramatic altering of humanity’s fate during the last decades of the 21st century and early years of the 22nd century. This paradigm-shifting altercation leads to the rise of the Sol Colonization Authority (SCA), a sub-committee of the United Nations. After years of research at the turn of the 22nd century, the SCA successfully designs a faster-than-light drive system. However, the system requires immense gravity wells to construct. Initially coming to the aid of the SCA’s budgetary constraints, Earth-based corporations decide to pool their resources and establish an operation at the planet Jupiter to begin construction of the I.D.S. (Interstellar Drive System). Over time, these entities begin to see the futility of the SCA and decide to fund their own colonization projects. This new corporate political reality leads to the decline of Earth’s governments, ultimately causing the collapse of the post-war global order and the subsequent rise of regional, nationalistic states, with only the mega-cities of New York, Brussels, and Beijing remaining as hub-cities for the United Nations and Sol Colonization Authority.

A hundred years later, the Jupiter Ten (Ten former Earth-based corporations) colonize the Orion sector of the Milky Way Galaxy. Much of the sector is controlled tightly by the United Colonies of Earth (UCE), which is the military arm of the Jupiter Ten.  Gradually, insurrections begin in the colonies against UCE control, which leads to widespread war. A leader rises from the colonies named N.D., who pulls the insurrection together and launches the First Interstellar Civil War.

By 2248, Bastion, a core colony, is under siege by the Atlas Confederacy of Planets (ACP), and the UCE is locked in a bitter and desperate struggle to hold the planet.  You, the player, live on Bastion. When the war arrives, you must escape or risk becoming a causality of the conflict.  As the player you will fight to escape your apartment building and make haste to Dawnsport, the star-port, in the Capital City of Bastion named Aurora. Getting out of your apartment will be easy; the hard part will be to escape the planet in one piece!  You will need to assemble a team of followers. Some will be your neighbors.  Others will be jaded outlaws and veterans of the conflict. But all hold secrets. They will help you acquire your first starship, courtesy of either the ACP or UCE (the two combatants in the war). Of course, you could always steal a ship that belongs to one of the black-market, gun-running, drug-smuggling cartels named after the Payne and Ortega families.

The journey from your fiery apartment building to Dawnsport won’t be easy. The streets will be running red with the blood of battle. It will take everything you have to make it to the hangar in one piece. This is the story for our free, public demo, which will be given to you at no cost.

Public Demo

In the next few months, I will be outlining our plans to release a public demo to you for free.  This demo will let you experience the world, game, and universe we are creating for you at no cost. The demo is intended to be the prologue and set-up to the main game and will introduce you to your first crew members, their stories, and reasons for joining you.  Anyone who is interested in joining our community and wants to be part of the game we are building is welcome to join up and begin discussing story, design, art, and sound topics on our forums.  These members will be the first people we invite to join our alpha testing of the demo before it is released to everyone for free. Community meet and greets will be planned accordingly based on turnouts. Proposed ideas include the following:

• Community meet and greets
• DEV entries
• Gameplay trailers
• Story trailers
• Introductory trailers
• Live chats
• Q&As

Of course, our community building plans are contingent on people signing up and joining us in the universe we are creating for you, the gamer, the player, and our fans.

Demo Features

• Fully 3D Modeled City
• Interactive story where choices matter
• Companions
• Custom Soundtrack
• Rogue-like Randomization
• Boss Battles
• Character Customization
• And More!

After Demo Plans and Outline

After the public demo is released we fully intend on building a fully featured, main game that will be distributed on a major distribution site such as Steam.  Raising the money for this game won’t be easy, but we hope that after playing the demo and seeing our hard work you will be interested enough to follow our efforts on Greenlight and Kickstarter.  Shortly after the demo release we will be moving into a detailed Kickstarter Campaign plan, which will be realized in the not-so-distant future (late Summer and early Fall 2014). It is important that you are aware that we are not just building a free demo, but a full game experience set in an exciting Sci-Fi universe with RPG, Roguelike, and Space Western elements.

For now, sign up to be part of the INT community. Become a founding member, a major contributor, poster, and interact with us. Like us on Facebook, Twitter, and check out YouTube for our trailers. We have exciting material to share with you and plan to fully incorporate our community into our demo release. I hope you will join us to discuss the game, demo, and our future. Stay tuned for future updates from department team leads detailing completed and ongoing work.

Social Media and other ways to contact us:

Website: http://www.int-game.net

Indiedb: http://www.indiedb.com/games/int

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/INTgame

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/INTvideogame

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/INTvideogame

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/starboard


Now that the introduction is over, allow me to show you a teaser trailer!





Thanks ~Xainkrif

[Xainkrif]

To see the pictures in better quality, please right click and open in new tab!!


Greetings,

I would like to share our progress with you, our loyal fans, the wider community, and fellow travelers of this marvelous creation we call the internet our progress over the past month.

June has seen a flurry of activity of growth and progress at Starboard Games LLC. We’ve continued to fine-tune the first level, and we are nearing the finish line on Level 1. Our concept artists are starting on the second level, and the coding department is hard at work building the crucial systems that will make the game functional.

In the June 2nd update, I discussed how our current monthly objective was to finish polishing the original apartment level models (which will be seen throughout the game), as they are mostly furnishings. This task is complete. The apartment level models are polished, and we’ve begun implementing small items such as posters, movies, and the in-game particle system, which will showcase the destruction that’s taken place at this small apartment building.



In the first screenshot, you see the player apartment before the cutscene. This is where you’ll stake out your identity, gain introductory skills, and become aware of the universe at large. Once the introduction is complete, a cutscene is triggered; it shows a wave of hell being unleashed upon your home.



In the second screenshot, you see the player apartment after the cutscene. The change you see is a reflection of the Interstellar Civil War, which has arrived on your doorstep. Your building is now on fire, crumbling, and in ruins. Your only recourse is to escape the building and more importantly, the planet before society completely collapses.

I’d also like to take a moment to compare a June 2nd Screenshot of the player apartment to a July 2nd Screenshot of the same room.



As you can see, we’ve filled in these rooms with superior models that better reflect the quality of modeling that I discussed on June 2nd. I am confident now am happy to report that our mission has been a success. Our energetic team has powered away at the models needed for Level One, and I’m happy to report that we have achieved success. Check out the sampling below.







These are just a few of the models we’ve implemented in our alpha build, but you can clearly see a marked improvement on these models over the work we were putting out in the spring. We continue to improve models as we see fit, and work as hard as humanly possible to bring our fans, the best game possible. The Art team led by Monte and his staff: Matt, Kevin, Lachlan, Victor, Nathan, Adam, and Kong continues to work on new material which I will share with you next month.

As I discussed in the introduction, we have also been hard at work in building the necessary features to the game that will make it functional. Since June 2nd we have rapidly expanded our coding and developer teams and we are making substantial progress. Below are some of their accomplishments from the month of June.



The Inventory structure, which has been under development for months by our coding lead, Mark Pollard, is now nearly finished. Mark and Nathan have worked on the GUI for the inventory. The system will allow for stacking, equipping items, moving items, and destroying them.



Our dialogue system will allow you to interact with NPC’s, Companions, and other entities of the INT universe. Our system allows you to pull from several pre-written prompts provided by our writing team and implemented by our coding team. These prompts will sometimes give you law and order points or rogue points, but they could also give you factional points from the two major combatants of the Interstellar Civil War: ACP and UCE points. These points will work in tangent with our factional-moral-alignment system.INT features a sandbox leveling system. Our intention is to allow you to customize your player as you see fit. You can become anything in INT: a space pirate, humble medic, or anything in between. We have dozens upon dozens of skills that will allow you to build your character. Some skills are combat oriented, others give you increased charisma or intimidation, and many are necessary for healing and passive regeneration.



The Quest journal is where you will find current main quests and secondary quests. The journal will be accessible by a button on the main HUD.



The Health and Battery System has been in active development for weeks and is in a working state. This system will allow you to take damage and use energy in combat. This is a first step towards our combat system, which we’ll showcase later this fall.

For the past month, our coding team: Mark, Marius, Rock, Patrik, and Jeremy have been working on developing the necessary features and GUI artwork in tangent with one of our concept artists: Nathan. Above you can see some of the progress made up to this point on the following systems: Inventory, Dialogue, Skills, and the Quest Journal. These systems make up a hefty portion of the necessary systems for INT. In the coming months, we will talk more about other in-game systems: most notably, combat.

In addition to coding, our writing team has been hard at work providing dialogue, flavor text, and companion lore to the game. BC, our writing lead, has been pushing his team hard, and I’m happy to report major progress with flavor text, dialogue, and companion lore.

Stephen, a writer on the writing team, wrote the following flavor text for movie posters.

1. Cruel Cupcake Killers

a. B-list horror movie

b. “These cupcakes…eat YOU!”

c. Poster: 3 sentient pink-frosted cupcakes, still in yellow wrappers, with faces in the frosting jump

toward the camera, mouths open ready to bite, against an urban background.

This text was taken by an artist on our team named Jason who has developed it into a B-List horror movie poster which will be featured in the game. Check out the poster.



Let’s look at a piece of companion lore for Wes, who was features in the June 2nd Update as an untextured model. Below you will see a sampling of text about Wes. Following the excerpt, you will see a textured version of Wes: now ready to be implemented into the alpha build.

“Born to a low class family on the slums of Earth, Wes was adopted into a life of crime. Working for the largest crime family on Earth, the Barbarosas, Wes earned a reputation as a grade A enforcer and conman. By the age of 18, Wes was a major player in the Barbarosa cartel and privy to all of their operations. After a major crackdown on the cartel, Wes was forced off Earth, and left to wander UCE territory on his own. His journeys took him to a large pirate operation, where he began to truly hone his skills. However, once again, fate struck yet again, as Wes’ ship was destroyed by a UCE cruiser. Taken prisoner by a UCE recover team, Wes was sentenced to ten years in a medium security prison on the planet Taros.” –BC



Our writing department has been hard at work over the past month building characters, dialogue, and flavor text. These written descriptions are then passed to other portions of the team for implementation. We also held a lore panel in June. Check out this lore panel so you can gain insight into our universe.

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Our Sound Department has been learning unity implementation for sounds, and while we’ve had some minor turn overs in staff, our new Sound Lead Matthew Calvert has provided a demo track for INT. Check it out below.

https://soundcloud.com/starboard-games-llc/int-musictest01-matthew-c

In addition to these achievements we have also established a side team to work on comics, graphic novels and additional material for the INT universe. This team, led by Brian, has been working vigilantly on new material which we will announce soon.

The core sections of the team have been hard at work building INT, our flagship game and the centerpiece of Starboard Games LLC’s game development studio. However, we have been focusing in other areas over the last month as well and launched several crucial campaigns.

At the beginning of June we launched a Patreon page, where you can fund the development of INT and other unannounced titles within the INT universe and beyond. On this page,you’ll see our exclusive backer rewards and information. Please check it out and let us know what you think! Give a shout out to our PR representative Xain for his excellent re-design of the Patreon page as well.

http://www.patreon.com/Starboard

Just a week ago we launched a Steam concept page. This page is our first step towards launching INT on Greenlight. We fully plan on having INT as a game on the Steam distribution platform. As we get closer to our demo launch we will move to transition our steam concept over to Greenlight. Check out the page below.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=276249287

If you like the work we are doing and are as excited about INT as we are then please come over to our community board, register, and sound off about what you want in the game. Check our website out below.

http://www.int-game.net

On behalf of the INT team, I want to thank all of you for taking the time to read this. We are hard at work to bring you an excellent Sci-fi RPG in a universe created from scratch. We want your input and feedback as we make this game. So please check us out and let us know what you think.

Thanks again,

Justin

-INT Project Lead

http://www.facebook.com/INTgame

http://www.twitter.com/INTvideogame

http://www.indiedb.com/games/int
http://www.youtube.com/INTvideogame

[Xainkrif]

Hello! Here is the first of many weekly updates that we will be doing. They are small and only outline one or two things.

This week, the art department finished modeling, texturing and placing almost 20 models into the game. Here is a couch that Matt modeled. Kong did the concept for it and Monte did the texturing.



Also here is a bit of the flavor of the game in a take off from farmville for the future. This was done by Ross!



Moving on to writing, here is a quote from the first dialogue in the game. This is derived from the dialogue between the Player and his scoundrel neighbor Wes.

"I'm scared, you're scared, we're all scared! The damned city is on fire. If we don't get to that starport right now, mark my words-- we're dead." Wes

[Xainkrif]

Development Blog #4: Logo Design

Hi. My name is Nathan Hawthorne, and I’m one of the 2D artists working on INT. You may have noticed that in the last few weeks that on our website and all our social media outlets, the INT logo has changed. In this blog I’m going to talk about the journey the INT logo has had from the start of the project to now, and why and how we ended up with a new one.When INT started, the temporary logo we used was simplistic capital letters, colored white on black – INT.



But the entire team agreed that we needed more than this. So we had a meeting where we sat down and discussed at length what we thought the logo should look like. We needed something that shouted three things core to the game: that it is set in space, that you’ll explore space throughout the story, and that there are two interstellar factions in conflict. We decided to go with a future space explorer’s helmet with the letters INT embedded in the visor. Behind this space explorer are two planets, each the colour of a faction (red and blue), on opposing sides of the explorer. This painterly logo lasted around half a year and became familiar to many of the early supporters of INT.



We soon decided that this logo was not fully representative of what the game entails – although it involves exploration, the game does not center on individual outer space travel or spacewalking, as could be inferred by the logo. So we set about redesigning it. The new logo design was once again a team effort, with many of the 2D artists on the team contributing designs. One of our main aims for this logo was to keep it much simpler than the last and to lose the painterly feel in favour of something more graphical.



We ended up creating over a hundred proposed logos, but with each set we narrowed down the design more and more. When I created the final set, I was aiming for something that shouted that this game was about space, and thus included a star-filled image of space. I also wanted the letters to be shaped in a way that reflects danger and adventure, so I chose Calibri for its sharp, knife- like appearance. The light that stretches across the gap near the top of the letters represents the excitement ahead – an adventure spans across galaxies, which you can join.



From the mind of Nathan Hawthorne

A Concept Artist working on INT

[Quarry]

Please format your images like this;

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[Xainkrif]

I didn't use the URL tags, but I did reformat the width for the images to make it readable. I apologize for that. Thanks for the tip!