This is it – the year that we realise our dreams of being an indie games company with the release of our first game, Dr Kvorak. Fellow indie developers will understand just how huge a deal this is.

We start the year with only a few hectic months to go. The game-play is finally locked so it’s now a matter of crunching assets and adding visual polish to the game. It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? And yet the final part of the mountain is always the steepest and we’re gonna need superhuman levels of endurance to get to the top. So bring on those mega-dose energy drinks – I hear Kvoraid is the newest and grooviest beverage to hit the market, so bring it on brother Greeboo….

Sorry about the lack of updates folks!

Since our last update in mid-November we’ve  been working primarily on one thing: the start of the game.

After a brainstorming session over a rather splendid coffee last month, we realised that it probably wasn’t a great idea to render an introductory short film-clip as the start to the game, no matter how cool and swooshy it looked. This is because the iPhone and iPad can’t play a movie from inside an app, so players on these platforms wouldn’t be able to learn what the game was about without us doing a separate introduction for them.

It has always been our plan to avoid doing three separate versions of the game for the PC,  iPad and iPhone. After all, this was one of the main reasons we chose Unity as the game development platform, so we could develop multiple platforms under one roof. It therefore became obvious that the game needed an introductory sequence which would work inside its own environment, and so the last month has been spent putting this together.

We aim to complete the new in-game intro sequence by the end of Christmas. Yes, that means a working Christmas, but with a smidgen of Yuletide festivities thrown in too

A Very Merry Christmas and A happy New Year to All!

This week we have been playing with the new MotionBuilder.

Although it’s taken most of the week to sort out its quirks, the new version is nevertheless very cool. The goal was to get Dr K’s character created in Max and then fully animated in Unity. Rigging and enveloping went well thanks to Biped and BonesPro, and after a very long week wrestling with the new U.I. of MotionBuilder, we finally had Dr K strolling happily around inside the game. He doesn’t walk with a limp any more either!

This weekend will see us starting on the re-vamp of the Dr K. Movie which will open the game. We’ll be using MotionBuilder for that too.

But now it’s Friday night and time for Battlefield. Have a good weekend, everyone!

This week we’ve been working on the sound design: adding pops, whirrs and buzzes to the various elements of the game.

For those who are interested in the tools that we used, these were ACID Pro 7, Adobe Soundbooth, plus various synth modules and sample CD’s.

We also discovered Absynth 5, which is a semi-modular synthesizer. Wow is this synth cool! So flexible and its effects section can do all sorts of interesting things to your sounds. We certainly lost a good many hours making synth patches from samples. Great fun!

This week has seen the redesign of three of the user interface pages to allow community features, as well as extensive work on the database back end for the map sharing and ranking features.

We have also been fortunate enough to spend some time with more play-testers who loved the game, so much so that they were disappointed when they ran out of maps.

Next we will be moving on to polishing the audio, but not before the team takes a small (but well-earned) break to play Battlefield 3. Looks good. Really good!

As always, it’s been another week of 24/7 Kvorak-krunching.

We implemented the game-play tweaks from last weekend’s play-testing and further refined the Dr K story, continued working on level design and the meta-game, plus more rendering, more de-bugging etc, etc. Oh and we made a new cybernoo – these are bad guys in the game, and yes, they’re far too cute to be evil!

Our weekend was spent watching more folks play-test the game. We were delighted that our testers found the game so completely riveting that they lost all track of time. Thanks everyone!

There is no better way to test your game than to watch others playing it. After seeing the way different people played, there are some improvements to be made and several issues to fix, but all in all the weekend was a complete success.

Other than play-testing, we rendered one more scene in the Dr K film. After that the weekend was largely gone so we relaxed by playing the new downloadable content of Portal 2 – great fun!

This week was largely spent doing level designs – we are now heading to the completion of around 25% of the initial levels. Much of the time has been taken up with play-testing these levels, re-adjusting them, testing again, and so forth.

We have also been adding art-work and rendering the Dr Kvorak movie, plus we fine-tuned the game’s back story (O.K., let’s be honest, there was a LOT of fine-tuning!)  so all-in-all it was a very “full-on” week.

The weekend will see yet more intensive play-testing. You can never have too much of a good thing!

Yet another busy weekend here at Team Freek.

Rich changed the texture on one of the major components of the Dr K movie and started re-rendering the film using State Sets, continuing the move away from Layer Pass Manager. He also took one of the concept aliens from Dr K’s  meta-game and made a 3D model from it.  The other members of the team continued to work hard on additional alien artwork(an alien a day keeps the boss at bay!)

Oh and just in case you thought it was all work and no play, Rich reports that he went up three ranks in the Battlefield 3 beta and Sam is doing very well on Fable 3 thank you very much.

There must be a life beyond gaming – but where?

During the first half of the week we added some new game-play elements, modified one of the existing game-play elements and built a large, fully functional tutorial level.

The second half of the week was the first chance we have had to put the game through some detailed play-testing. Although the overall response was good, we found that we needed to make the levels shorter, at the beginning at least. Whereas the hard core gamer breezed through the lengthy tutorial level and loved it, the novice testers found it bogglingly difficult and became frustrated with the puzzles. So some changes were definitely needed!

As a result, we split the tutorial level into three so that it wasn’t daunting to the casual gamer. Oh and we changed the map editor to make level creation faster, modified the HUD to give more information to the player and added more collectibles.

Thanks to our play testers for all their feedback!

This weekend will see two members of our team working furiously on the art work for the meta-game and Rich will be re-working part of the Dr Kvorak film. So much for rest and recuperation, eh?!