Blogs - FreedomFaction

We are proud to announce that Freedom Faction Productions has started Pre-production of our next project. Very little information can be disclosed about the project at this time but working Code name for the project is Red Thunder. Due to early release of this information Fraction Productions management had few details to disclose about upcoming game. Matthew Blancher, the project's technical lead did release a statement. He stated “Some ideas are still being tossed around but we’re steering towards a robot based theme.”

Many members of the Freedom Faction Production team have wanted to do a mobile game like this for a while, and with mobile devices getting more powerful we have decided that Red Thunder was a good time to start. When reached for comment Tyler Harl, the game's art director, stated “The production team is looking to release the game across android first then in due time to IPhone users as well”. Matthew Blancher agreed that the game would be released on the android as well but Matthew also said “the game could also possibly be a on a browser platform as well”. In either case the Android platform seems to be the priority platform for the production team.

Leaving the brain storming meeting Red Thunder seems to be shaping up like an RTS adapted to the constraints of a mobile platform. The is still really early in preproduction and has yet to test proof of concept so many of the game play specifics are up in the air still. When asked about them how they felt about the project Matthew answered “I'm excited about this game. It's a new genre for our programmers and it seems like a project properly scoped for us to get familiar with Unreal 4". He continued saying "I am a little concerned about design though, RTS Style and mobile are really far outside my personal experiences”. Tyler said “I’m excited to work on this new game. It’s going to have some great aesthetics that will be appealing to both kids and adults alike.” When asked about a production timeline or when this may be released Matt said “We are hoping to have something for summer 2016 but we’re still in early pre-production". However Tyler expressed that Summer 2016 may be a tad optimistic with the size of current staff.

Written by Manny Castillejo

Don't Forget about us. Faction Productions is back in studio and hard at work on Iron Raven. I'ts been over a year since you've seen any updates so we'll get you back up to speed in the weeks to come. The Programming team is hard at work integrating multiplayer into the existing Code. The past week has been primarily focused on the handling of inventory and server client relations. The Programming team has seen lots of changes over the past several months. The programming staff has expanded. We now have two senior level programmers along with a rookie who has made some pretty big accomplishments of his own, and let's not forget our brand new programmer who joined today. Next week we'll have an interview about their experience switching to a new development method.

In other news the team has also made some strides in Motion Capture animation. We have successfully taken a character from Maya through Mocap and into UDK. Manny has been hard at work looking into a technology called HumanIK which allows us to take a skeleton with animation on it and transfer that animation to another skeleton that has been set up with a character. There has been many complications along the road of figuring that out. Toast is also hard at work texturing that.

Monday we kick off our winter production cycle. We've agreed to post updates every two days in an attempt to get us closer to a playable alpha build. The Last couple days we've been hard at work prioritizing and researching various topics for our assets. Right now there is a heavy focus on Scaleform since it is the primary technology in place for menus and the HUD. We're hoping to have a functioning very rough draft by Saturday morning. Keep checking for more updates. We should be posting more pictures and videos.

So as of this week the Level is finished, aside from resolving 6 or 7 lighting errors. Production is starting to slow down mainly because all the people on our development team have really only work with levels and we're all trying to shift our focus to the other aspects of the game. Only problem is that those other aspects aren't really apparent to us. We're beginning our character modeling this week and hopefully have some of the other member look into our heads up display.

Its such a game trying to juggle social media and an actual production. We keep trying to assign someone to actually be in charge of updating everything. But anytime we tell someone its their job, they invariably get wrapped up in school, or family, or putting a level together. It kind of helps that tumblr automatically updates our news on our webpage, facebook automatically updates twitter, and if we could figure out how to make twitter update this, that would be amazing. Still, we have a fairly small team and a fairly busy team. So I figure since I'm trying to update all of the media stuff (not content wise, but technical wise) I might as well add some content.

So what's up with us? We basically have the first level done. Yay! Now to get to the really complicated stuff. Like modeling characters and coding a weapon system. Is it weird I don't feel like going into details? We're not using the UTGame base, but the UDKGame base, which means its slightly more complicated for us to code all the things needed for a first person shooter, but it also means less modifying existing code to suit our needs.

Well that's basically what's going on with the game. I'll try to get someone to actually update this regularly. Even if all it says is hi, we're still trying to figure out how to program things.

Candace.