My, How Time Flies

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delay, but we're back with some big news. A lot of things have been clicking into place recently, and we're just about ready to come out with the Alpha Version of the final product. This comes with several different announcements: first, obviously is the date of the Alpha Test, Alpha versions of the game will be going out August 6th. Secondly, we're actively looking for play-testers, so if you have a touch enabled phone and want to give isoChronal Panic! a try post a comment and we'll arrange to send a version to you in the upcoming Alpha test.

These great steps forward started with a breakthrough started with our finally nailing down Touch technology. We're looking to make a blog post about that as soon as we get the Alpha out the door. Jon is going to be tackling that article because it involves a lot of technical detail. So look forward to that coming up.

Other than that things have been a bit less glamorous, mostly we've been smoothing out the animations and doing touch ups to all the visuals. If you want to see how things are looking now, check out the most recent version here.

Look for this blog to be a lot more active in the coming weeks.

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