We just completed our latest game jam!
You are “Edge of Grey” – a mercenary framed for the crimes of a serial killer called the “Monster of South Glenn”
The game is an action/rpg/adventure with an old-school vibe and fairly complex fighting mechanics.
Escape from the catacombs to clear your name and get revenge. Prove that you ARE NOT THE MONSTER.
Check out our entry here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=22273
As we head into 2015, we wanted to share an update on our projects.
What Remains
We are adding tons of polish to the game, including new interactivity, story, sound, characters, and most importantly scares. The atmosphere is being taken to a whole new level.
Skurvy
Skurvy development has continued. Eric has done some amazing new assets, including a large Spanish-style colonial fortress. We are still considering game play designs. Some of them might change what you’ve seem so far considerably.
Our goal is to release both of these titles this year. We hope you are looking forward to them!
Happy 2015!
Our entry into the Asylum Jam is a freakishly unfinished but fun horror adventure in which you navigate the halls of a pristine 1930s manor – which happens to be the very place the Old Gods are being summoned. Can you stop it? Ha ha ha ha, maybe.
I told you it’s unfinished, didn’t I?
We plan to go full on this project, so let us know what you think!
Thanks to all the other Asylum Jam developers out there! These are some great games!
Today, I wanted to give everyone a preview of the game we are currently working on, Skurvy. As with any of our games, Skurvy started out as a simple idea. The biggest challenge we’ve faced as an indie developer is resources. We have a lot of ideas for games but being just three people, there are many concepts we don’t have the manpower to realize. We noticed this trend in our jam entry games. We always ran out of time to implement the idea we came up for the jam fully. Minimalist Horror Story, Ten Seconds of Night and particularly Brass Bastards were not finished to our satisfaction. We had great ideas for them but didn’t have the time to implement them completely. We will talk more about that in a future post. At best I’d say each of those games is half finished. So, a few months ago Eric came to us with an idea for an interesting and straightforward game, a pirate themed rogue-like FPS. He wanted to do it with a simple graphical style and did a few mock ups.
We are currently upgrading our website with an all new theme, which includes features like game pages with video & galleries, new popups for our web playable games, and more!
Continue reading New Website Soon
We entered the Indie Speed Run! This is a 48 hour jam, which really taxed our team. We had entered the two 72 hour jams before this, and missing those extra 24 hours made this a lot more difficult. We got the themes of Industry and Oven Mitt. Creating a oven-mitt factory management game didn’t seem exciting enough, so our team came together to create a very simple first person game set in a steam punk looking factory. The goal of the game is to reach the last room and repair the factory’s main mechanisms. Along the way you have to unlock doors by repairing them with cogs you pickup, as well as dodging/fighting the factory’s robot guardians, The Brass Bastards.
We had a great time with this one. Eric did an especially awesome job by pumping out so many assets!
We have entered the 27th Ludum Dare as a Jam entry. This will be our second game jam, and we can’t wait for the theme to be revealed so can get to work!
We really enjoyed creating our last entry in April, Minimalist Horror Story. We received some amazing feedback on that game, as well as placing 7th in the Mood category.
Here is a post-mortem of our Ludum Dare 26 entry, Minimalist Horror Story. Check out our entry here.
What we did
Eric Lewis – Art & Nap Design
As the Art Lead, I designed the assets (art and geometry) for the game after doing some concept roughs of our idea. I used 3DS MAX for the models and Adobe PhotoShop for the credits and titles.
Sonny Mcknire – Code & Evil Design
As a Programmer & Designer I helped define the concept and game play. I designed and created the monster with a combination of a model I asked Eric to make and lighting effects and particles built into Unity. I also programmed the creatures behavior and assisted Brad with character control and scripting the key placement.
Damon Frankfurth – Code & Light Design
Bradley Erickson (Mesidin) – Code & Level Design
I laid out our level plan in Unity and I placed/play-tested almost all of the beautiful assets Eric created. I had my finger dipped into 100 other pies as well, such as item interaction/selection, candle melting, cameras, scare triggers/scripting, menu setup, etc…
What went right?
Eric
We initially planned on The geometry in the game to have simple textures but after some tests, we all agreed that the untextured, raw geometry looked awesome in the Unity Engine with default shaders. This made it a whole lot easier for me to build more assets (50+) to make our game even better. Also – we planned the game well – the sketches and idea were very simple. We ran out of time and were forced to leave out some sound effects, which turned out making the game even scarier – the lack of sound between scares makes it more exciting.
Sonny
I think a lot went right. The mood was perfect thanks to some sweet lighting work, the monster works well, the theme was adhered to, and I like how the game controls.
Damon
Brad
We finished a game! That is exhilarating. As a cherry on top, people played it! During development the thought had never occurred to me that strangers would be actually playing this. The comments and feedback have been incredible. I am proud of what we accomplished for our first game. As to development, grayboxing was surprisingly beneficial. We had a plan on paper for the house as well as a design with measurements I worked up the first night for the layout of the house. We ended up changing quite a few things when we could actually run around a graybox of each floor built with unity cubes & planes. This allowed us to change things quickly before Eric had put any time into it at all. Finally, I exported the final layout as an .obj file so Eric could build the actual geometry in 3DS Max using my layout.
What went wrong?
Eric
Some really good ideas were dropped because of time constraints. We had a shadow that would pop up in a window with light behind it, like lightning… spiders and rats that would fall on the player or run out from under furniture… there were quite a few good ones.
Sonny
The candle burning out didn’t work correctly. I wish we had more time to implement more scares, and there are issues here and there like getting stuck in the attic, lights poking through the level, the rocking chair not working correctly, etc… that we couldn’t address due to the time constraint.
Damon
Brad
Since I was involved in a lot, most of the bugs lie at my feet. This is frustrating, but I am just glad at this point that the game is playable. For post-compo, I plan to fix the raycasting on object highlighting, the candle melting sideways bug, plus hooking up all the drawers with the interaction system, adding the doors upstairs, and adding all of the scares we originally planned, including more sounds. Eric built some incredible assets that didn’t make it into the compo version, so I would like to add those in.
We had a great time participating. Thanks for checking out our game, commenting, and being such a welcoming community to newbies like us! We will continue to enjoy your great games over the next few weeks! There’s some incredible titles in this competition!
Walthrough(spoilers):
Cross posted at: LudumDare.com
We completed the Ludum Dare 26 Game Jam! This is the first game ever completed by our team. The crunch of the 72 hour game jam really helped us kick it into gear and wrap up a fun, short little game. The theme for this jam was Minimalism. We took that and applied it to the horror jam. In our game, Minimalist Horror Story, is a FPS adventure set in a haunted house. The
