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Firing Back Up

After a long needed break so that some of us could finish Uni, we’re starting to get back into gear and work on Singularity again! If you want to stay up to date with progress most of it is probably going to be on facebook; https://www.facebook.com/ProjectSingularityDevs/ Right now we’re just doing some quick rebranding and mocking up our new logo for our team alias; GLITCHED UMBRELLA!

In regards to development I’ve been prototyping a new mechanic; Discharge Spheres. These little suckers will latch onto you if you come too close and hunt you down until you drain or manage to break contact for long enough to escape. It’s lead to all sorts of shenanigans already, with potential on the horizon for a death ball minigame where players try to run null spheres into eachother for a giggle!

That’s all the major announcements for the moment. Again, I’m not sure how much activity our blog will have but the facebook page will definitely be the place for updates soon! 

Cheers,

-J

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Post PGF

Hey Guys! Perth Games Festival was amazing. We met some cool devs, got some great feedback and most importantly got to watch a lot of people try out Singularity. As the project lead it has filled me with a lot of confidence and hope going forward! We also got to go up and talk on a live podcast with Pixel Sift; https://www.pixelsift.com.au/ (not sure if it’s getting uploaded but still had a good time) So right now we might be a bit incognito. The festival has put a lot of things into perspective and we’re going to start transitioning from doing this as a student project to doing it independently. This means a lot of things, such as working out how to improve our workflow and planning for the future. It’s all incredibly exciting though and I’m keen to see what comes of us continuing to make Singularity into a full blown game. In the future there’s a lot of things I’d like to add to the game including;  - New Mechanics - Fleshing out the story/world building - A toned down single player mode - Difficulty options so that everyone can enjoy Coop - Online Coop (See above for reason as to why this would be awesome) Things are going to be busy for a bit, but we’ll try to make sure we keep everyone in the loop if anything interesting happens. For now here’s a look at how the recent visual overhaul went! Cheers, - J 

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Prepping for PFG

Things got a bit hectic lately. We’re getting everything ready for the Perth Games Festival where we’ll sort of be presenting the game to the public for the first time. It’s nerve wracking, exciting, and grindy as all hell. We’ve all been focused on getting as much last minute polish in as we can, as well as trying to finally fix a myriad of bugs (goodbye “Teabagging” bug). Unfortunately posts might be a bit scarce for now, but enjoy some WIP stuff while we’re busy finalising things.

- J

Some more finalised UI ;)

New death animations

Ominously Ominous...

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Polish

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve continued trying to polish up and redesign some of the visual assets. Thanks to our artist’s lovely new idle animations, he now has to retroactively add swooshing hair to all of “White’s” existing animations. 

The new mini energy bars shown are also part of the polish. We noticed that players didn’t realise just where their energy was at with the current bars in the corner of the screen, tunnel vision becomes a massive issue when you’re focused on platforming. So far these new bars feel really good and I think they might inform some of our other design decisions in regards to UI aesthetic.

We’ve also taken another look at a mechanic that might not actually be present in the upcoming early demo of the game, the “Recharge Station”. The idea behind recharge stations is that they would be able to give players a set amount of energy, and could be used to either ease up the difficulty of a level or as part of larger puzzles when combined with switches.

Lastly, we’re currently working on some short teaser trailers that should give you guys a small snippet of how the game actually feels, so stay tuned for that.

- J

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Initial Playtesting

This week we had our first proper playtest sesh and it was amazing. A lot of work went into smoothing out parts of the game (such as proper level transitions) and it really paid off. We left a nice first impression on people and more importantly it feels like the core gameplay is really enjoyable. Even when people were frustrated and at each other’s throats, pairs of players were determined to beat some of the more difficult levels. It’s filled us with a lot of joy and confidence in where the project is going and the work we’ve sunk into it so far, I’m also super keen to try and get more test builds out to people in the future. For now, here’s the pretty animations our artist has done for teleportation in/out of a level.

- J

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Oh look some gameplay

With our goal of getting playtests rolling within the week we’ve started getting together some levels for a full sequence. It’s been interesting and some puzzle/challenge designs are enough to test friendships. Here are some excerpts of game play from a few of the different challenges we have so far.

-J

-Drop Till You Stop-

-The Pillars of Nub Wrecking-

-So You Think You’re a Ninja?-

-NINJA THIS THEN-

-The Zebra Loop-

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Animations and Playtesting

This last week or two we’ve been working on adding in some more finalised art assets as well as gearing up for a round of playtesting.

In order to do the playtesting I’ve been trying to mock up a tutorial so that we can see how much of the game players are already picking up intuitively and how much needs to be blatantly explained. Initial testing has been interesting but clearly I don’t always explain everything properly (according to some of the testers). In the art department Gus has been creating some awesome animations for the characters and it’s really added a lot to the game now that we can watch the munchkins run around. Here are some raw animations for the white player (whom we are starting to refer to as frosty even though they’re made of pure energy!)

- J

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Core Mechanic Progress

Currently I’ve been working on getting all the core mechanics into the game and I’m about to start trying to push out some of the advanced mechanics as well. With way more effort than I thought was going to be necessary I managed to get our energy beam “platforms” to be able to turn on/off and move around a set of waypoints.  Super excited to finish implementing things so I can start testing out some level ideas as well as seeing what our level designers come up with. We’ve also been trying to do a first pass on several animations.

- J

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Over the last week I've been trying to implement all of our core mechanics. So far most of it is implemented with varying degrees of roughness (for instance the players have a tricky time "riding" and jumping on each other's heads, but it's totally possible). One of the biggest mechanics, "Energy draining", isn't quite finished yet but once it is we'll be able to start properly testing the core gameplay as well as designing interesting levels. In my eyes it's pretty critical that we get this mechanic going so we can judge how best to tweak and use it for more advanced gameplay. Enjoy some screenshots of the game now that we're actually starting to implement sprites from our brilliant artist.

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Level Concepts

Our core mechanic is this energy system, one of the basic uses of this system are the “beam platforms”. These platforms are made of “black” and “white” energy respectively, allowing the player of the same energy type to stand on them (however while they do this their life/energy will be drained), whilst the player of the opposing energy type will fall through it. Using these beams as obstacles will force players to consider both how much life they have left and also creative ways to get both players across a platform that only one of them can stand on (given that the players can also stand on top of each other).

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Above is some concepts for character design.

One player is black energy (male), the other is white (female). If they collide then their “energy” or life will transfer between them. These energies interact with each other in mysterious ways, sapping and charging each other as they come into contact.

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In a World...

“Set in the distant future, the Earth has been ravaged by a never-ending radioactive storm. The land is eroding away with acid rain on a daily basis due to the technological growth of mankind. The conditions are borderline uninhabitable, were it not for the very same technological growth that made the world as it is today. The corporations that now govern the world developed and distributed this technology, allowing mankind to live under the unrelenting storms in dystopian mega-cities.

However, this had ended in the general population shackled through debt, owing their entire existence to the financial behemoths that tower over civilisation. Their logo is a ‘brand’, a reminder that humanity continues only through the grace of their patented technology. Inevitably the only way to repay these mounting debts is through forced labour to the corporate overlords….”

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Welcome to the Simple Productions blog. Over the weeks, we will be updating you on the progress of our game in the making: Projekt Singularity.

“Projekt Singularity” is designed to be a co-op platformer; the aim being to solve problems and manage resources under pressure. For all you Dystopian Science Fiction game addicts out there, this is the game for you!

 Our team is currently working together to design basic levels and character interactions. The Art Team has been designing characters using a pixel art style, and working together to create various animations. The Tech and Design teams have also been working closely together to design and create prototypes for simple “walkthrough” tutorial levels. Hopefully by next week, these will all be finalized so that we can move on to more complex level creations.

 Our team, Simple Productions, is a group of five students from Murdoch University in Western Australia. As part of a semester-long project, we are making this game in hope to enter it into gaming festivals and create publicity. We will be updating this blog weekly to give you more insight into our step by step progresses. Until next time,

-S