Christmas is over and a new year has dawned, we’re now officially back to reality. That first week back at the office is always the hardest, adjusting yourself back into the daily grind while simultaneously, aligning your body clock back to something reasonable. We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We’re very excited about what’s on the horizon from Polyinteractive Games. We have a lot of super exciting announcements to make that we will be periodically revealing over the next couple of weeks!
The festive period was not only a good chance for everyone to see friends and family but it allowed us, for the first time as a company to all come together at the same time in the office. This resulted in a very productive environment where we were able to hit a plethora of milestones. It was exciting seeing everyone hard at work; writing on a whiteboard about level design, naming conventions, LODs and figuring out how to get them into the build efficiently. On the other side of the room the programmers were deep in conversation, about the best way to implement mechanics, (which I assume was extremely technical and beyond mortal comprehension) In the middle of the room we had the 3D artist quietly working away on his latest creation and finally at another whiteboard (we have a lot of them…) we are defining milestones we need to hit over the coming weeks. It was a mixture of emotions, seeing all the working parts in one room churning away together.
The New Year dawned and with it rose a new build containing oodles of improvements: animations, environments, textured environments, fully functioning game mechanics and audio. We’ve had the below sound clip for a relatively long time but this has been the first build where it’s been implemented fully into the game itself.
This is the introduction theme that the players will hear once they launch the game. This is by no means the finished product either, this is only a snippet but it gives a good idea of the motif that the soundtrack will be based around. Soundtracks are something which can give a game it’s identity; Indie Games especially are renown for having unique soundtracks which add to the experience a la Fez & Bastion. There is also the consideration of certain titles that are recognisable from their soundtrack alone; Final Fantasy, Legend Of Zelda, Mario, Doom and so on. It may be only a small snippet but it gives you an instant insight into the aesthetics and style the game is aiming for.
The second thing the new year brought us was a new build. We didn’t post much in regards to games development over the festive period and this wasn’t just because we were getting drunk whilst playing the new board games we got from a certain Kris Kringle. It was because, although we’d done a lot of work on the game, there wasn’t much visually which we could show. The fruits of our labour came to fruition however, we were finally able to implement mechanics and content that got us excited. Principally this was a combination of base textures on the units mixed with animations, culminating in our units actually walking, charging and attacking! As it was pointed out a few times in the studio, we’ve certainly come a long way from the rows of tic tacs slowly moving towards each other.
Idle
Walking
For reference, here are the aforementioned tic tacs:
It’s a phenomenal difference and these are just the base animations. We’re not quite at a motion capture level yet but it’s definitely a starting point.
We’ve shown off some of our environment assets before but now we have got some new objects we would like to share with you:
This is the campsite for the Spartan army, this will be situated where you first spawn units it at the start of the game. As you can see it only has the “base” textures on it for now, we are pleased with the way they have turned out.
We’ve been gone for a few weeks but we hope it’s been worth the wait (If you have been waiting that is…). It was a busy period for us over the holidays and we’re really excited to show you the results.
Thank you again for reading and see you again next time!
Steven
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