Every year ModDB hold a contest to nominate the best THING in various categories – we’d love to be nominated for Indie Game of the Year and get some more exposure for Frozen Synapse.
As MoDB is a community for games currently in development, you can vote us in as a interesting project even if you haven’t had the chance to play the game yet – we’d really appreciate it! Tell your friends too. Thanks.
Here’s how to vote – sorry this is a bit complicated…
1.) Sign up for a ModDB account here – you must do this for your vote to count fully.
2.) Sign in to your new account.
3.) Go to our ModDB page and click on the button in the Nominate for Indie Game of the Year 2009 section.
Greetings all and thanks for your recent feedback on the background – we’ve made some progress…
The background is still interfering with the foreground a bit too much, but that should be fixed with our new floor layer (coming soon). I’m planning a few things like glow and fading lights to add a kind of lattice effect behind these cuboids too, and Johan should be working on a design to accompany them. That will be it for this iteration of the BG, I think – I’m pleased with progress.
There are so many art tweaks that need to happen: I want to add some flicker to the glow, and also some colour cycling effects for specific events, then there are all kinds of little touches that need to happen. Matt’s currently working on integrating the particle system with projectiles, so bullets will throw off little sparks and light up the area they’re in a bit more.
While examining things closely for art I came across this amusing animation bug we’re calling Sniper Bunny-hop…
Despite protestations, this is unlikely to make it into the final version!
Ian is currently working on something really special for multiplayer. We wanted not just to have random matches between players but set things in more of a context…a world, if you will. Initially, we thought this kind of thing was too ambitious, but I’ve seen Ian’s new design doc and it completely blew my mind. He’s come up with a system that is 1.) practical and 2.) might just allow everyone to contribute to a kind of persistent world. I won’t say any more right now, I don’t want to promise anything as this is in the very early stages, but it could be very exciting. It has something to do with this…
Ambiguous, huh? I’ll keep you posted!
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Welcome to all our new listeners! This week, Ian and I bang on about charity, the death of console gaming, MMO’s for children and all kinds of other delights. Enjoy it with your face!
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.
I’m sad to announce that for a while we will be doing Village every two weeks, instead of every week.
We’re very busy at the moment preparing Frozen Synapse for release, and my hope is that we will go back to weekly once that happens and we have a lot more traffic to the site.
We love doing the podcast, and we love our loyal listeners – please comment with any thoughts on this move.
I mentioned a couple of posts ago that our original concept artist had departed to pastures new. He was kind enough to recommend a new guy to us, so please welcome Johan to the Mode 7 fold!
Johan and I have been thrashing out some of the issues to do with level backgrounds. Here is a current-ish in-game grab:
Some of the issues people currently have with the level art are:
1.) It doesn’t look like there’s any floor, and the characters are floating in space
We found that having a tiled floor, or a flat bitmap floor, or a coloured gradient floor looked incredibly dull, hence the idea of the transparent floor. We wanted to keep the good bits of that idea, but address people’s irritation with the “floaty” effect.
2.) The background walls are confusing
There are randomly generated fuzzy walls under the level, to make it look as though you’re peering down through many different floors of the building. This effect has never really worked as intended, and ultimately ended up being a bit confusing.
I thought you might like to see some of Johan’s early work on addressing this problem. Something we’ve found is that it’s good to do little “sketches” of different aspects of the issue before moving on to a full image of the new concept. So…
One of the first things Johan did was to strip everything back to give a clearer outline of the level.
Here, he tried some experiments with a glass effect on the floor.
Next, he looked at “tech” elements – small 2D symbols and text snippets. This is the direction I wanted to go in.
We ended up with this composite image, showing the tech stuff mapped onto cuboids and incorporating the glass idea. I think things are looking better already, but now he’s busy fleshing this idea out.
I still want the idea of depth and perspective in the background, like you’re looking down into a huge cityscape: the cyberpunk aesthetic of a city of data! I think by extending and randomising these cuboids, as well as creating some other elements, we’ll be able to get this effect without the annoying “floatiness” creeping back in.
And now for my final Singapore-based update on LIFE…
It’s a little bit difficult to get hold of books in Singapore. No trouble in this shop, though! Luckily they’re all in English…
We went on a dodgy harbour cruise on a dodgy Chinese boat. There were lots of these things.
If you’re in Singapore, have dinner at Equinox. Flipping amazing view – quite inspirational for the city in Synapse!
These little dudes are everywhere.
I always miss home hugely after being away for more than a week, but arriving at the airport and seeing this….who POSSIBLY thought this was a good advert for the UK? Cheap buses to SOLIHULL – a completely miserable place next to Birmingham. Appalling.
This week, we discuss Activision’s charitable intentions, shock games as public service announcements, indie point-and-click adventures, Robbie Williams, Mark Ecko and all of the other games industry nonsense from the past week. Enjoy!
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.
