Since the last update, we’ve been concentrating on optimizations and bug fixes on infinite. Since then, the game has seen significant improvements. We’ll go over each section and break down the changes that we have made over the past few weeks.

Most noticeably is the visual style of the game. Up until now, everything has been “placeholder” artwork until we settled with a style we were happy with. While the feedback on the old art has been very positive, we tend to be sticklers on making sure everything looks right, revising content several times over until we are satisfied. We’ve tweaked our coloring system to not be so “bloomy” in terms of colour saturation and some of the recent screens we have shown (either on site or Twitter) did not have enough space-like feel to them. Here is an updated look at infinite:

You can see how different the game looks now, we find it leads itself more to a space look than previously. One noticeable thing is the background of the game, while not final yet, this is our in-game visualizer that performs effects to the beat of the music. We still have some work to do on this system, but we have a basic version of it up and running currently and we plan to enhance it further. It adds some striking visual elements to the game, changing shape and colour.

Another key feature that has been updated is the HUD. Still requires some minor tweaking, its near the final form that we want the HUD to appear. Gone is a countdown clock in the top right, now replaced by a visual timeline bar to indicate time remaining. This cleaned up the display quite a bit.

Performance has seen a rather huge overhaul. We’ve rewritten some systems, better memory and texture management, squeezed out every kilobyte of memory we could out the system RAM. In the older builds of infinite, we were looking at frame rates of about 15-24 FPS, using up roughly 80-90% of  RAM for texture memory. While playable, it was clearly not optimized (since it was not our goal yet) and we knew we could push it much further. Optimization was our focus this week and what a vast improvement. The latest build clocks in a solid 60 FPS (on iPhone 4 and and iPad 1st Gen), dramatically changing the overall feel of the game, everything runs silky smooth. RAM usage has been reduced drastically, now only uses roughly 20% of system texture memory.

So what is next? Currently we’re updating our colour system to improve the pallet choices, the flux system and galaxy map needs some minor work, mainly visually, and general gameplay fixes, and pacing. Still a little bit to go in terms of work, but we’re at the point where everything is coming together. We hope you like what you see so far.

If you would like to learn more about our game development, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and/or G+ to get the latest information.

We’ve updated our online shop with a new shirt design from our new game infinite. Shirts are available in mens and womens styles as well as a plethora of colours to choose from.

We hope you like the shirts, every purchase supports the studio directly, wearing it helps us spread the love.

Buy Nexus Merch!

Trying to keep with more frequent updates as we near beta of infinite. In this update we’ll be going over our new galaxy generation system that we hinted at in our previous blog update. While not a main objective, the galaxy is your main hub and a system of visual progression for the user. Previously we had discussed and shown off our old galaxy generator, while it worked great, we felt it did not apply itself well to a sense of user accomplishment. In the old system, galaxies were randomly generated on the spot but displayed the entire galaxy at once. Every time the user started a new game, they got a new galaxy. We felt this made the galaxy lack ownership towards the player, instead of having a galaxy that was being evolved over time, that showed the users dedication and progression, the user was slapped with a randomly generated image that they probably wouldn’t care much about. So how did we fix this?

We started from scratch on an all new (third iteration) of galaxy map. When the player starts the game for the very first time, they are presented with an empty galaxy as shown below.

This is the core of the galaxy, still a new born, but needs the users attention and dedication of playing the game to evolve into something rather vast. When the user plays the core game, we account for multiple variable trackers that determine how the user plays, what they have built, etc. These variables then determine how gas is formed, the more you play, the more gas grows in size, new gas becomes formed, and ultimately the shape and style of your galaxy changes. Here is an example of a rather evolved galaxy that has grown through many play sessions.

As you can see, the galaxy is perpetually generated based on the users gameplay. Every galaxy will be unique to each and every player, meaning that no two galaxies will ever be the exact same. The player might start off with a ring style galaxy, after playing several times, that galaxy might transform into a spiral galaxy, elliptical, etc.

This new system improves on the faults of the old generators. We feel it adds a greater sense of accomplishment and diminishes the feeling of a useless menu or graphic that we had thought previously. Keep in mind, what you are seeing above is not final [visually] as we are still in alpha, but is a general idea of what the final game will entail.

If you would like to learn more about our game development, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and/or G+ to get the latest information.

Over the past month, we have made some significant progress on game development as well as some interesting new life choices. Before we dig into development, I want to discuss what has been going on personally. March 30th I have officially quit my day job that I had retained for the past six years,  a decision I made because I felt personally it was holding me back from what I love doing. Development was slowed down when trying to figure out work schedules for everyone and really hindered progress. This is something I definitely took notice last year and wanted to change that. After securing myself financially, I took the plunge. I handed in my notice, two weeks later I was officially done. For the past two weeks since then, I have been working as a full time indie, running Nexus, making games, as well as living a healthier life style. I couldn’t be any happier.

So let’s talk about infinite. Since the last developer diary, we have made some pretty considerable progress. We are extremely close to hitting beta, we’ll hit that status once the basic forms of certain systems are in place. First, let us go over the immediate difference of the games visual aspect, here is a render of what the game looks like currently, minus the anti-matter (work in progress).

As you can see there have been a number of changes. We had a goal when developing the visuals, keep a minimalistic approach while retaining elements that worked for gameplay purposes. Previously the game used white quite a bit, while it made the objects contrast with the background, the visual difference was far too stark. After constant refinement, decided to adopt more of a 1960′s retro movie poster style: bold lines / edges, flat colours, basic geometrical shapes, simple yet gets the point across.

The HUD has been cleaned up and modified, previously in the old picture there was a white circle in the corner, that is a flux button (will get to flux in a moment). In newer builds, we added the ability to use two fluxes and visually, we had two respective buttons, one in each corner of the screen. After using this system for a while, presenting the game to others gave them the instinct that they were on-screen analogs, that had to change. So now our new system has them in the left corner, should hopefully avoid confusion!

Previously we had discussed how we have a system in place that remixes the gameplay dynamically, we still have that system in place, another addition we have is every time the gameplay remixes, so will the audio and the visual colour pallet of the game. This colour shift will also affect the galaxy map, but we’ll save that for another developer diary.

Next, we would like to discuss the flux system that we alluded to earlier. The flux system is a “perk” system that we have implemented. These are modifiers to the gameplay that you can use that add special effects to either your orbiter or the play field.

 These fluxes are unlocked throughout the game and once enabled, can add special effects such as “time lock” or “light speed” to the orbiter, giving you an advantage in tough situations. As said, some effects also change the dynamic of the play field instead of the orbiter. The two blank ones are still to be implemented, a work in progress.

Since the new update last month, we have received quite a large amount of positive reception which we are very pleased to hear! We have shown off the build to specific people and they are much more pleased with this game than the initial concept for infinite. We plan on doing a proper video soon, probably shortly after beta, while we did post a teaser video on our twitter showing some gameplay of an old build.

If you would like to learn more about our game development, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and/or G+ to get the latest information.

Today we have some major topics to discuss about what happened with Infinite and what’s going to happen. Last month, we did a review of the entire game and how we felt about its fundamental gameplay mechanics, style, direction, and personal enjoyment of the game. We came to the harsh realization about Infinite, the game did not meet our quality of standards and completely veered off our original vision. We were just finishing off the tutorial in game so we could have a build ready to send to our testers. During this, we noticed how overly complex the game became. We’ve had a rough time during it’s development, we never pin-pointed a specific genre and features felt tacked on. This hurt the game since we overwhelmed it with mechanics that took several procedures to operate, slow paced gameplay, and a general lack of fun. All these issues with the game made us really start loosing the passion to work on the project and started having the “just get it done” mentality.  Now we know we had some serious issues.

So, what did we decide to do? We knew the game was not good, no point in trying to save it. We scrapped most of the game, months of work, thousands of lines of code and refocused on creating the new gameplay, something that retained our original vision of creating star systems; pick-up and play, unique, replay value, and most importantly, fun!

With these in mind, we ended up reverting and modifying an old original concept back in our prototyping days, funny how that came full circle. Thanks to the lessons we have learned from making the scrapped version and clocking in many, many hours, we were able to quickly code up a new playable build in about a week, all clean code and far more efficient.

So without further adieu, here is a screenshot of the new version of Infinite.

Keep in mind, the game, nor visual style is finalized yet, but is a close representation of the final game. We’ve trimmed off quite a bit of fat from the previous version, we still retain orbiting gameplay, however with no more orbit rings, health systems, resource management, unit building / upgrading, etc. to worry about, instead you have a single orbiter in which you collect matter and avoid anti-matter (both not shown), the more matter you collect, a larger planet you build. Simple, “touch anywhere” control of the orbiter and simply touching it creates the planet if you had collected matter, the planet then starts orbiting the star. Your ultimate goal is points, you gain points by collecting matter, but by building planets, not only does it add a multiplier to your score, but also adds time to the clock. There is a bunch more to the game but this is a very brief rundown of the basic gameplay.

Not only now are we excited to be working on the project again, the gameplay is very much a huge leap compared to the old game, much faster paced, and more fun. We decided to aim towards an arcade style, points based game and we think these mechanics blend very well with the genre. We also have retained our other goal; infinite gameplay, no need for separate levels, dynamic loading system adds new level elements to the game. Simple put, what you see above is the only “mode” or “level” but we dynamically add new content to the level on the fly, all seamless. The only end to the game is when you run out of time or exit.

So as you can see, we’ve been through quite a bit! We are making absolute stellar progress on this title and we hope we can have it ready soon. We appreciate your patience, the end result will be much worth it! If you would like to learn more about our game development, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest information.

This week, we’ll be doing an overview of the new unit and upgrade menu system. Infinite has some elements of a strategy game in its DNA, the basic structure that is quite common in some real-time strategy games such as unit building and unit upgrading is featured in a light, alternative form in infinite. First, lets go over the unit system.

The menu system we wanted to be very simple, elegant, and match the overall feel of the game. Keep in mind, the visuals for the menus are not final, but is a step in the direction for how we want them to appear.

As you can see, this is the unit selection menu. On the left, there are five units, these range from planets of different sizes (for example, a Mercury sized planet all the way up to a gas giant like Jupiter.). There are more units available in the game including non-planetary units.

Beside the planets is a resource metre, unlike the resource metre that runs in the HUD, this will show the resource cost for each unit / upgrade that is required in order to build. Once you have selected your unit, tap once to show the units cost, tap again to confirm your selection (this method is not yet final).

This is the upgrade selection menu. Same concept as the unit menu, however, based on the upgrade mechanics. Once you have selected your unit currently in game, this menu will appear, allowing you to further upgrade that unit. As shown, there are currently four types of [planetary] upgrades available. Basic upgrades such as a single moon to orbit your planet, or advanced upgrades such as planetary rings. These upgrades have special bonuses and effects to each planet. The four shown here are just some of the upgrades available.

Once your unit or upgrade has been selected from the menus, we then move on to the build phase. For this phase, we’ve added a time based construction method. Select your unit and this build icon will appear on screen.

These build icons will replace the menu when it is time to construct or upgrade the unit (keep in mind both build icons will not appear together, only one will appear for its respective menu. We are just showing both for demonstration purposes.). Normally the circle will be empty with only a “+” symbol in the middle as the touch indicator. To build, hold your finger on the circle, the inner (gradient) circle will begin to grow larger towards the outside circle, if both circles meet, the unit construction / upgrade is complete and the result will appear in game. If you release too soon, you must start over again from the beginning of the build phase. Depending on the unit or upgrade, each will have a different timing variable that will determine how long you need to hold the build icon for, usually the better unit / upgrade will take longer to construct.

This is how our current unit and upgrade system works and looks, bare in mind this is not final and will probably change in the end product. One thing I would like to mention is that the menus will be hidden and tab on the edges of screen will allow you to bring them up anytime, this will allow the user to have more screen space to see the in game action.

If you would like to learn more about our game development, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest information.

We are in 2012, a fresh new year and a chance for us to really set ourselves in the right direction. We hope everyone had an excellent holiday and a happy new year! This update we have quite a bit to cover, we have had some major progression since the last update. First and foremost, let’s talk about Nexus. The biggest factor in holding back our development has been time, we were lacking an adequate amount to pour into development and attempt to work on the game as much as we could, when we could. We have (and will be) doing some pretty major life changes to ourselves to accommodate more time towards Nexus, over the next month we can work far more than we ever have and quite soon we will be working full time at Nexus. This is a big step for us personally and is a greater leap towards realizing our dream.

Another big change is that we have now hired on a new member to the Nexus family, his name is Daniel Brear. Daniel will be our new lead programmer and is currently tasked to be working on our new unannounced project in development. We are very happy to have him on our team, his experience and skills will help the development progress improve greatly.

Now it’s on to infinite. Since December, we have worked quite a bit on revamping and implementing new systems towards the gameplay. We have also been working on trying to achieve a performance mark on the older generation of iOS devices. First, we’ll go over some of the new changes to infinite.

We have redesigned the HUD for infinite (as shown above), as seen on the previous screens there was only a “hit point” system. In this new version, we have expanded this HP system to be more cohesive to how the planets HP actually work. We have now included a new style resource system that shows the current amount of matter collected (previously was just a numeric value). If you look at the top of the image, you can see a very long horizontal bar stretching across the screen, this is our new experience point system. Not quite as in depth as say an RPG, but every action will earn you experience points that go towards unlocking new content. This helps improve the flow of the gameplay as well as gives the users a visual perspective on their gameplay progression (your current level will be shown as a numeric value in some form so you will have something to compare to other users.). We wanted to keep the HUD extremely minimal but also show enough information to keep the user understanding of their current status.

We have also done quite a bit of code rewriting, not only has this help performance but also has us doing better code practices to make everything run faster, smarter, more efficiently. The core gameplay has seen quite a facelift code wise and our galaxy map is now half the amount of code than its predecessor. Removing useless functions or by having one function to run multiple actions instead of many independent actions for example. The effort was well worth it.

We have been also refining the gameplay, improving how gravitational forces work in the game, working on new units and enemy types. We have other parts of the game that we are working on still, just not quite ready to show those off just yet, soon enough however. We want to nail the gameplay first, once we have the feel just right, then we can be more comfortable working on other scenarios for game types.

As we have stated before, we have been working with the talent of Tyler Jones of Indiglo Rush who has been composing the soundtrack to infinite, we have been receiving constant updates to the musics progression and from the sounds we have been hearing, the tracks are coming along quite well. He has been setting the mood of the game and we hope to share some of these samples in a future update.

Infinite is a very experimental and difficult game to develop. We plan on doing a private testing session soon to gather feedback on how we can improve the game. We are pushing ourselves to make this a great, unique game experience that we hope everyone enjoys. 2012 is a big year for us, not just Nexus, but us personally.

If you would like to learn more about our game development, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest information.

One year ago we have released Gravonaut on the Apple App Store, a scary time for us, our first app into the wild. Gravonaut has been successful for us, many high scoring reviews, free updates that add a slew of new content to the game and even award nominations. It all started with this teaser image:

To mark Gravonaut’s first birthday, starting today, December 20th till December 26th, Gravonaut will be FREE on the App Store in all regions. Those who have purchased and enjoyed our game thus far, thank you for your support! Those who have yet to pick it up, please accept this gift and try it for yourself, we hope you like it!

Infinite has seen some major improvements since our last developer diary. Previously we have stated that we were having issues with getting optimal performance on the older iOS devices such as the iPhone 3G or iPod Touch 2nd gen. After much code cleaning we have managed to get the game running at a stable and playable framerate, a major increase from before. We are still aiming to have infinite run on the older iOS devices. This was only some of the early passes at optimization thus far, once we hit that phase fully, performance will be higher.

Today we are going to be talking about the galaxy map. The galaxy map is a major part of the game, it acts as your hub overworld for all the games levels. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working on our galaxy generator (which we have been previewing over twitter recently.). This generator is fairly simple in concept but is very complex. The generator has sets of variant designs of galactic gas clouds, depending on how you play the game and where you place your stars on the galaxy map will affect which clouds form, their position, alpha index and which tone from the colour spectrum your galaxy will glow. The more stars you have, the more dense and detailed the clouds become and the larger your galaxy appears.

As you can see from the image above (which is completely randomly generated! Not yet finalized) there are many layers, patterns and colours to this galaxy. For testing purposes, this galaxy has no stars in it, in game, there will be many. This is a full zoom out perspective of the galaxy of its current size. The more you play, the larger the galaxy becomes. There is no size limit to your galaxy, it becomes literally infinite. Every single person will each have their own unique galaxy, no two users will have the same. Visually we have worked with more realistic graphics and while it looked really good, it did not mesh well with the rest of the game, so we took a more stylized approach to the galaxy visuals to match how the solar systems look.

We have also implemented a pinch to zoom system, this will allow you to get a very close perspective of your galaxy and see all of your stars up close. There are some more features we have planned for this that we are not quite ready to talk about yet as we are still testing out this feature. The above image is an example, you will be able to zoom in much further than what you are seeing now.

Previously we have revealed our two game modes “Prime” and “Eclipse”, these are two of several modes that will be in the game. In order to access these modes, you tap the galactic core and  bring up a menu where you select the mode you wish to play. Once you have your mode selected, you are then to place your star anywhere in the galaxy that you have unlocked. At first, you have a small area near the galactic core that you can place your stars in, once you have reached a certain number of required stars, you unlock the next tier that expands your placement area, again, the more you play, the larger your galaxy becomes.

What is beautiful about the galaxy map is our seamless transitions and loading system. From when you’re at the main menu which will zoom in towards your galaxy, to when you place your star and zoom in on your solar system, it is all seamless. This is very important because we wanted to have that connected feel and add to the whole grand scale of your galaxy, not broken up by load screens and obtrusive menus.

The galaxy map has been a very big task and challenge for us, however it is a key part of the game. We have a few more plans we still have to implement including some social features that we are looking into as well. Some stuff is placeholder or will change by the final version so take what you see as a representation of what to expect in the final game.

Remember, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest information and development progress.

Over the past month we have been really cracking down on memory issues regarding the older generation of iPhone and iPod Touch devices, it has seen a significant improvement since our previous developer diary and we still plan to target the older generation devices.

Overall progress on development has been great, the galaxy map is still a major development task, but is progressing rather nicely and the previous issues we have had, are now solved. In the mean time, we’ve been tinkering with updates to the overall graphical style of the game. The first screen capture we put out during our reveal was a rough pass at art. Since then we’ve put some more time into feeling out a new updated graphical style, what you see here now is still not final but is much closer to the final product than before.

As you can see, we’ve played more with the colour pallet, not so blown out as before and the colour tones have a more space feel to them. The background has a grid overlay that adds a little texture that really helps the white planets stand out more.

Previously, the HUD was based on text on screen that showed the units “health” as well as the age of the system. Went more for a geometrical representation of the health to also include moons (moons are used as a shield system, more on that later.). Also right now, we have rid of the age system, this decision is not final but it is something we are looking into to see it’s importance to gameplay.

The HUD design is not final, but it is a step in the right direction for now.

Next up, a preview of our second game mode. Infinite will feature several game modes to choose from, right now the main one you all have seen is the standard “Prime” game mode. Now we would like to reveal our second mode, “Eclipse”.

In eclipse mode, the solar system has a second, smaller orbiting star, when this star passes through (as dictated by the dotted path of orbit), any collision with the star causes instantaneous destruction of that unit or matter. Matter near the secondary star are also affected by the strong gravitational pull which can yield some rather interesting results. This really changes the dynamic of the mode and adds the element of timing and precision control. The art for this level is not final and we are also still working on the orbit path of the secondary star, so the results will change with the final version.

In later developer diaries, we will be revealing more game modes, some of which have a more drastic look and gameplay style to them.

Lastly, this week we have met up a gentleman by the name of Tyler Jones of Indiglo Rush, a very talented composer and DJ. We’ve been in contact for a few months now, Tuesday we met in person to make the agreement for him to compose the soundtrack to infinite. We think his work will very much complement the style of the game and really improve the users gameplay experience. Audio has a very heavy involvement and is not something we wanted to short hand. We will be previewing his works in future developer diaries, so stay tuned.

That is it for this major update. Remember, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest information and development progress.