Archive: April, 2012

Infinite Shirts Now Available

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!

Developer Diary 14: A Galaxy Is Born

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.

Developer Diary 13: Refined Development

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.