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[Stache Studios]

Overview
Teknedia is a First-Person, 3D, platformer for PC (Linux & Mac are possible, but no promises). If you imagine Super Meat Boy in First-Person, you've got a rough approximation of what we're going for. It's all about fast-paced platforming with simple controls and copious amounts of wall jumping. You have no offensive capabilities. You have no power ups. All you can do is run and jump and try your best not to die... And then try again when you do.

The game is built from an engine we made from scratch in C++ using open source libraries such as Boost, Bullet, Lua, and OpenGL. We also took Radiant (the old Quake 3 map editor) and modified to work with the engine we have made.

Check out our trailer here!





A Brief History
Teknedia started as student project at the University of Texas at Austin during the Spring semester of 2011. We set out to make our first 3D game with the lofty goal of building our an engine. After month of toil, we created a working prototype of a game, and packed it up for the summer. Before the start of the Fall semester, we had a crazy idea of taking the prototype and making it a full fledged indie game. So, we got serious, expanded the team, and have been hard at work ever since.

Current Progress
At this point, the engine work is almost complete. We're wrapping up some optimization and some small tweaks, but it will be done in the near future. Most of the work left is content work including but not limited to making/polishing levels, making some more music, adding some sound FX, and having a nice intro sequence. We realize that packing everything into a sentence does not make it any less of a colossal amount of work, but I didn't really feel like listing out everything we had left  

We want to hold a closed beta in the not so distant future so keep your eyes peeled for a post about that!

Thanks for taking a look! Cheers!

[Stache Studios]

Hey, there! It's been a bit since a status report, so here's a good look at some of what we've been doing!

Gameplay Elements

Firstly, we have been putting some love into the finer mechanics of the game, such as the mine’s functionality. That may seem trivial since all they should do is explode, but we played with the idea of having mines gravitate toward the player when they got close enough. This concept proved to be more troublesome for the player than we anticipated.

Additionally, the mines and the crumble platforms needed more player feedback when they had activated. Players were often confused when they encountered them, and rightfully so! They didn’t really have much of a feedback till it was too late! So we added a sound cue that occurs when they are activated, and we made them start to rumble around to give the impression that bad things are about to happen. After a small amount of time rumbling around, the crumble platform will then disappear and the mine will explode. Here is what the mine looks like.



Web and UI Elements

We have begun to build our UI! Up until recently, we had enough buttons placed around to be functional, but now we have obtained splendid things like functional leaderboards that are viewable at the end of every level. In addition, we started adding flair to the UI by making the button mouse over actually happen, and even made the buttons beep when the mouse goes over them! Fun/Excitement +15%!!!!

Graphics Optimizations

We've also gone through and reworked a lot of our rendering code. We programmed it all from scratch with OpenGL, and there were a couple of oversights we had when we originally programmed it. So the past month we have rewritten how the renderer works making it run better on lower end machines and also fixed a memory leak in the particle system that caused crashes. The tests we’ve done so far have shown an 25% increase in framerate. So that’s dandy! Here’s a picture of the weird things our graphics programmer does.



Level Creation and Beatification

Last but not least, we have been cracking away at many new devilishly difficult levels. Levels that make all the other levels we’ve made seem childish. There’s definitely some mean stuff in there. Additionally, we have been going through getting rid of the disco tile and making things look pretty. Check it out!





Thanks for taking a look! 

[impulse9]

Definitely caught my attention. Looks like a lot of fun! Good luck with this project.

[rivon]

It looks quite good but there seems to be too much air control if you know what I mean. The movement is too much forgiving and it's also a bit slow.
If you want your game to succeed and be popular, then you should make it more appealing to hardcore players.
If you don't already know Warsow (and it's Race mode) and Quake Defrag, then you should definitely take a look at them and also try them cause they're the kings of FPS racing.
And the best thing you could do would be if you were able to load their maps into your engine even though you use different physics cause it would definitely get a lot of attention from the Quake crowd. And it shouldn't even be so hard seeing that you use Radiant for mapmaking.

Here's some great movies to get the point across:
Sorbimovi - one of the best Warsow race movies ever


- another good Warsow movie


- Warsow cooperative trickjumping movie, really great stuff
Heartbreak - finally one Defrag movie


Otherwise good job

Edit: oh, I just remembered. You definitely need some weapons or "tools" in the game cause walljumping is just one simple mechanic which might get boring quickly.

[Stache Studios]

Thanks for the comment, rivon!

Good eye noticing the air control. Our game is focusing a little bit less on making movement like Warsow or Quake Defrag and more on movement like Super Meat Boy. The mechanic of wall jumping are definitely the core of the game, and we wanted to focus trying to make that as fun as possible. Both Warsow and Defrag have a heavy emphasis on the conservation of momentum which makes level design focus on movement along the same plane. Yes, there are definitely parts of levels that force you to move up, but that's mainly just a way to get to the next plane of movement. We wanted to exploit the use of the third dimension in our levels more while also creating a unique feel for our movement.

In addition, we wanted to make the movement physics pretty accessible, but make the levels you have to traverse more difficult. To be complete levels for Warsow/Defrag maps, you need to intimately acquainted with how the physics work in order to exploit them. For Teknedia, we wanted to shift the focus toward a fairly transparent control system while increasing the insanity of the obstacles.

We'll definitely be doing a beta in the not so distant future, so if you want to give the game a go, stay tuned! Cheers! 

[rivon]

Yeah, I definitely want to try it

[Stache Studios]

We recently wrote a blog post about the tech we use in the game. It doesn't go super in-depth about the algorithms we use or anything, but it will give you a good idea of what we us in the game.

Teknedia Tech Talk

Also, I promise not to make it a habit to just link to our blog for every post. This one just seemed like something that would be of interest to the community. Cheers!

[Paul Jeffries]

Playing Turok gave me a prejudice against pixel-perfect jumping in first-person games but this looks pretty cool.  Is there anything in particular you're doing to address the old lack-of-sensory-information-about-where-exactly-your-feet-are problem?

[Stache Studios]

Ultimately, that is a problem that comes with the perspective we're using and the game type that we're trying to make. There will be a time where you clip on something, and you didn't think you did. We mitigate this by designing levels that don't make this a huge issue and by giving extra cushion time for when a player can press jump (i.e. you can still jump even though you ran slightly off the platform). In the worst case, you die and try the level over again immediately. Since the levels are generally shorter than a minute if you run through it without stopping, we feel it doesn't detract from the experience.

Hope that answers your question! Cheers! 

[Stache Studios]

Hey, everyone!

We've been hard at work trying to finish up everything we can. Here's a list of some of what we've done:

- Made a ton of levels.
- Tested and gotten rid of a ton of levels after finding they were ridiculous
- Lots of performance tweaks on the engine
- Started adding polish bits like the intro story and the nicer menus.

GREENLIGHT
Also, Greenlight has launched! If you have any interest in this project, we'd really appreciate it if you could give us an upvote! So check out our Greenlight page and show us some love!

Cheers!