Oh man, where to begin? I'll start with everyone's replies...
@JobLeonard - Thanks for the links! I do like the idea of pre-calculating the the paths with and without the furniture. Yes... something I'll have to consider putting in.
@Impmaster - Thanks! I can only hope this game will look and sound half (maybe 3/4?) as good as Transistor. I want to keep the combat strictly real-time though.
@EddCoast - Starling is a great little framework! I do feel it is very limiting at times, but it forces me to find creative solutions to it's limitations.
@eigenbom, @gunswordfist, @Ashedragon, @FreakOrama - Thanks so much for the kind words! Your encouragement means a lot to me
@Ege - For me it is essential that a feature be almost fully polished as it goes into the game. I need to know if it adds or detracts from the experience of the game, which I can only tell if it is close to final form.
@Moloch - Sorry for the long silence. Hopefully this post will explain it...
So what happened in the 4 months I haven't posted here?
The short answer is, I've been doing the
hard.
The long story:
Near the end of June I had to make a really hard decision... I had to replace James as the composer.
I feel like it was my fault... I'm not very good at communication and I was making slow progress on the game (you can see how much stuff I threw out from my previous posts). As a result, James had a hard time finding the right sound for the game.
Meanwhile, my little brother, Juan, came out of nowhere and surprised me with some tracks he had already completed for the game. I had no idea he was working on the tracks, but they sounded really good. I couldn't ignore them... plus he's my brother.
It took me a few days to work up the courage to tell James that I was replacing him with Juan. I dreaded sending the email... I felt really bad about it. James was not only working on the music but was doing a lot of promotion for the game on reddit, twitter, and facebook. He was genuinely excited for the game...
It turns out I needn't have worried. James took the news really well and was super cool about it. If you guys need a skilled and passionate composer, I couldn't recommend him more. Check out his
Soundcloud for samples of his work!
For the next 3 months after that I didn't get a lot of work done, but Juan has been working at a breakneck pace on the music. As of this writing, he has completed 21 tracks for the game. I don't know how he does it... he seems to have formed his own story about the game in his head and is conveying it through music. It also helps that we have this weird non-verbal form of communication between the two of us.
Juan's work paid off in a huge way last week:
In the first place, I couldn't even believe we got in as finalists. I had submitted a buggy 5 min demo of the game to the IGF China competition, because "hey you never know". The demo only contained 3 music tracks, so even Juan felt that we didn't do enough to get any award. The whole time we were showcasing the game in GDC China (in Shanghai), Juan kept telling me that Thumper or The Time Project or The Swords would win best audio, because their games had considerably more content.
Man I hope the IGF uploads the video of the awards ceremony. Juan will kill me for this, but when we won Best Audio, he kinda lost his composure and broke down in tears while accepting the award. I gave him a big hug afterwards. Good memories
Here's some more pictures from the event:
Also, this happened:
That's Rami Ismail of Vlambeer... playing Lithium City! I'm still not over it. He gave me some of the best feedback on how to make the game better. I don't know how often this has been said, but he is really an awesome guy. And super tall.
Afterwards, he tweeted two vines of the game:
https://vine.co/v/eV0Y6jwn0vdhttps://vine.co/v/eV0QVjhgzvjI'm just super happy about the whole thing. I feel like we're in a really good place right now and I'm looking forward to making a whole ton of progress on the game.
Big thank you to all the organizers of the IGF and GDC China! And to all the players who dropped by!