isoChronal Panic! 1st Monthly Tech Demo Live Blogging Extravaganza

Hey everyone, we've been sort of quite for a bit, but that's all about to change right now! For the last couple of weeks we've been really putting our noses to the grind stone to get the game into a shape where we can start showing it off. To get us all motivated we agreed to have monthly tech demo's and live blog our progress.

Before we begin some quick notes to get everyone caught up on changes made in the recent months:

• First up there are going to be some changes to the blog. Rather than have everybody making separate posts, I've been designated blog master. As such, I'll be collating the information from Jon and Ethan into two blog posts per week, and if they make any huge breakthroughs on the game, they'll come in and explain it to you first hand.
• We've made a lot of upgrades to our production process, the most evident being our switch over to SourceForge for version management. We had been using Dropbox previously, but we found out that for whatever reason, Dropbox was losing our files from time to time and costing us serious amounts of time and effort keeping versions straight. The migration to SourceForge wasn't easy, but it's really helped to pick up the pace of progress.
• We've also reworked the code architecture for the game, making it much more streamlined. You'll be able to see pretty much all the game mechanics implemented on the browser version posted below, with Touch Screen implementation to follow soon.

So to give you some sense of how this looks from our end, right now we're working at a computer lab, getting everything in order for the ongoing tech demo's by integrating all the work we've been doing over the last few weeks into one coherent game. All of the alpha art is in there, and our most up to date tech.

Looking at what we've made it's all looking pretty good, but there's still some work to be done. Seeing how it all looks together, the art style is starting to click, but important items like the Timetanium or the Time Portal definitely need to be called out more, either by making them glow, or just being brighter. Also by a happy accident the time portal jutters and wobbles, implying instability, but it could definitely use some visual effects to get that across. On the technical end of things, copies aren't colliding with the obstacles and sometimes get lost as a result. Also while we've proved our level swapping code works, the stage it switches to is just the background with no objects. We need to start building more levels to really put the game through it's paces.

That's it for our first tech demo! See you next month where hopefully things will be ready to move into playtesting. If you want to check out the game so far, you can find it here: http://users.wpi.edu/~jonsaunders/isochronal_panic/panic_index.html

Bringing It All Together

Hey everybody, we here at isoChronal Panic! are getting really close to having our first level done. All the art is in, and I thought I'd give you a look at how things stand now.

Originally we thought we'd really stress the outlines of the shapes with thick border lines around each shape, for example if you were looking at a 3D cube and could see three of its faces there would be an outline around each of the three faces. However we moved away from that, and instead emphasized our shapes through contrasting colors. You can see the difference in the two art styles in the example below:

This is the original design for some wall pipes throughout the lab, see how there is a thick dark gray outline around all the shapes? It certainly helps the pipe stand out, but you can't really see the small bolts for their outlines.

Here's the same pipe again, although we changed the look to match it's place in the level. The different segments of the pipe are differentiated by contrasting shades of a certain color, in this case gray. The bolts are a light tone, the pipe itself is medium gray, and the fittings are dark gray.

Don't our game is as dull and lifeless as all those brown and gray games on the consoles, there's a lot of color in this game, and adding more a lot of color was one of the big things we did in the first levels art design. Take a look:

We've got some nice warm chemicals for the chemistry set on the table . While the desk itself is brown, it helps the brightly colored vials and beakers stand out.

The wet floor sign from before, now a lot cleaner and focused on the bright yellows.

We even have some rich blues with the redesigned blueprints. check out the fold lines on the  paper, the blue prints now look like they've actually been handled by someone.

As you can see, a higher level of detail has been added to the new art assets. We're trying to make the different objects interesting without overloading the art with details you just aren't going to see. Here are a few examples:

Now the window looks out  on more than just sky. This view gives players a sense of where the lab is in space. They can now tell they're on the ground floor, (which makes sense), and that there is a city out nearby. The city is just an skyline, but there was no reason to get too detailed with the city itself.

The rug has a bunch of little fibers and knots in it's weave. If you look closely you can see that they're all just the same shape. Areas of more solid color just don't have the little details in them.

Even the stage itself is more detailed, there are now little cracks in the floor, and the whole lab seems to have a lot more texture to it.

Let's see how this looks all put together:

Alright, can't wait to start playing in this new environment.