After almost 4 years of struggles I am happy to announce that Project Temporality has gone gold and that we are now finally finished. The game is currently available with 20% discount for preorders at Desura where we will be launching on 7th March (Any purchasers will of course receive a complimentary steam key also when we launch at steam. We are sitting pretty at spot #26 at greenlight now).
So how do you wrap up a road so long and winding as what we have traveled ? This journey begun as a simple husband and wife project back in fall 2010, just a way for me(Niklas) and my wife to do something interesting together. It was supposed to be a quick project to play around with XNA and release to XBLIG before we moved on to the real project. And while I had plenty of experience from my Massive days Carolina had never made a game before.
But somehow out of this something special was born. We started realizing it when we did our first focus test and everyone (even those who don’t normally plays puzzle games) liked it so much that we decided to try and take it one step further. and there's where road started winding back an forth, as Carolina due to her studies wouldn’t have the time to be the sole Artist anymore. Thanks to some friends we manage to get together a short playable demo for Dream build Play 2011 where we reached the semifinals despite being so early in development.
We don’t need to document all the bumps in the road but finding artist that had the time and the skill-set to work on the project took time and work, especially since we all worked from home during weekend and evenings. But that gave us time to ramp up the technology and perfect our custom engine Sparta3D , for the record the game does run on xbox360 and yes it looks almost the same. We spent a lot of time on physically based lighting,parallax corrected local reflections high quality temporal SSAO solutions to make the art we did produce look as good as possible. And we thin you will agree with us that the game can look quite stunning sometimes. But that's not the reason why we created a custom engine, we just didn’t have a choice with the vision of making the fourth dimension as accessible as the other ones we knew we had to move forward and backwards through time seamlessly and that is not supported in any middle ware engine. This also makes sense as you would have to remove a lot of optimizations to support it. But for our goal it was clearly important, we also wanted to create a vivid but sharp look with nice high res but soft shadows everywhere which meant that pre-calculated light maps just wasn’t going to cut it. We needed to be all real-time all the time. And while we have some pre-calculations for bounced light that still holds true today.
But after that the production on the game started for real, and while it has taken a lot of time to build all the content considering our Core team consists only of 4 persons. We have finally reached the end after what feels like endless iterations of art,maps and puzzles.
And we are really happy now to show of Project Temporality to world and hope that you will have as fun playing it as we had creating it.
It has a very nice to have if you quit and March 7
cool