Retrofitting data
The last couple of months we have spent preparing for what looks to be a busy fall, we will have more to say about that in coming updates but for now I am going to stick to the somewhat dry topic of data inheritance.
The last couple of months we have spent preparing for what looks to be a busy fall, we will have more to say about that in coming updates but for now I am going to stick to the somewhat dry topic of data inheritance.
Last week we showcased Backworlds at Norwich Gaming Festival for two days. We brought some updated visuals and a new demo where we have tried to limit the scope so that visitors have a chance to finish it in one sitting. We learn something new about how to show our demo at every event and…
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Last time, we talked a bit how we rebuilt our text handling system and mentioned that this was mostly used for the menus – the biggest reason we did that when we did was that we recently also finalized our menu system. There’s a bit more to be said about that, so join us today…
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Hello! In our ongoing effort to replace temporary systems with more solidly designed ones, I recently converted all player-visible text in Backworlds to Unicode and as a result was forced to rethink how the font rendering works. We do not have a lot of text in Backworlds, practically none in the game itself, but the…
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Juha and myself have both been traveling recently so this update is a bit later than usual – like always, I spend the holidays back in the winter darkness of Sweden hacking away at the thornier parts of the Backworlds codebase. Recently this has been less about making fancy new features and more about cleaning…
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We are at Halloween again, so in the spirit of the season I will resurrect another corpse of a failed design and put it on display to scare the children!
As we are working more and more on production-quality art the work we do on tools tends to get more pragmatic – it is mostly fixing bugs and any new features are carefully considered in terms of how much they will improve our workflows and/or visual quality. Not that we didn’t do that before, but…
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We got a booth at Dublin Comic Con this year as part of Pulse College Indie Game showcase, so I went over with my girlfriend to get some people to try Backworlds. We brought the same part of the game as for State of Play, which was the tutorial and the first world but this…
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The past months we have been working away on production-level art and during that process have tried to figure out different aspects of our workflow and rules to help the art compliment, not get in the way, of game-play. The first area where we felt happy with the level design is the inverted gravity backworld, so we…
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“Parallax” is, quite simply, the name for the visual effects where objects seem to move differently depending on the viewpoint – in media we typically refer to parallax scrolling as a way to add depth to a flat scene by having several layers of background that we move at different speeds. It has been used…
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