Developer Diary 10: A New Year

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.

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