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Southampton Game Fest

So we decided now was a good time to test the game on the unsuspecting public. My long suffering concubine helped me print out various flyers and a huge poster, and we dragged three laptops to Southampton, for their game festival.

Reactions were very positive across the board – our test subjects played the game for an average of ten or fifteen minutes as they worked their way through the demo puzzles.

One of our laptops had a graphics card – the other two were running on software emulation, but still managed to be perfectly playable. The apple mac threw away some of the textures because… well, macs. Still, for an experimental build on a frequently idiotic platform, it acquitted itself quite well. I shall allow the laptop to live.

A frequent suggestion was to get ourselves a twitter and a facebook, so I’ve dutifully added these facilities. New links have been added to the home page. I have no idea what to do with Twitter, but I’m assured it’s essential. We also learnt a fair bit about the game’s learning curve. Some players, like Marci, took the game apart like a surgeon – I think she’s played a fair bit of this genre before. Others required a gentle nudge here and there – which isn’t surprising, the puzzles would normally be encountered after the player has learnt a lot of the mechanics.

  Business cards are a must at trade shows.

So many thanks to everybody who played the game across the day, and kept our laptops in constant use. We had so much enthusiastic feedback, we’re more certain than ever that this game is worth completing. We’re still many months away from release, but we might go to more of these game shows – actual human interaction is very healthy, plus we get to see which parts of the game require further work or explanation. Many thanks also to the Southampton Games Fest 2017 for hosting our game and providing a pile of power adaptors for all our kit.

On this page you can also find the images we used for flyers and posters. Tip – when printing a poster that’s around two metres tall, black doesn’t necessarily come out as well on print as on the screen.

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Tunes

Using a bewildering array of poorly understood midi equipment, I’ve set a bold new standard in perfectly adequate game music with this title theme.

Featured equipment : Novation Remote LE 61, M-Audio X-Session Pro, Chase digital piano, lots of pretty samples and arpeggios, including Rob Papen Blue 2 and my knackered old Roland D-10 synth. The tune is currently barely mixed or positioned – that’s a job for studio time.

Naturally the game will require many further tunes. One thing we’d like to do is give the deserted halls and corridors a bit of personality. Many of the humans who used to work in the abandoned labs have left their personal music collections where they used to work – and we’ll have a sufficiently eclectic mix of electronic and acoustic music playing from their radios. We intend to contact some bands who might wish to have a tune featured in the game, and anybody is welcome to send us material they’ve written.

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Introducing Atlas

Unity’s level editing facilities can be a bit of a pain. Which is putting it mildly. I actually know some of the people people who currently work at Unity, but sadly not their home addresses. Yet.
So in the meantime, I created Atlas.

Atlas is a state of the art level editing tool that allows our handsome designers (Robin2 and American Donald) to throw various intriguing levels together. It handles all the object editing, linking and layout that would be an unimaginable nightmare in Unity. I actually can imagine that nightmare by employing my powers of memory – which is why I wrote Atlas in the first place.

One day I may even make Atlas into a full app – although it might take a little while to make it fully generalised for any game. But for now it serves me well, despite the creaky XNA underpinnings.

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Level Designer

I need … a level designer! Some thrusting young buck with a keen interest in game design, looking for a leg-up in the industry, or some wizened old crone who’s keen to show these young’uns how things are done – either is absolutely fine. Or anywhere in between – we believe in equal opportunities exploitation here at Jubber Towers. There will be a monthly stipend to go with the job, which might well suit somebody looking to do design work in their free time or at weekends – you won’t need full time commitment to the project. Here is Atlas – the tool I built for the design work. It rather brilliantly meshes with Unity so you can build and test levels immediately from home – and won’t require a full licensed version of Unity either.

editor4atlasatlas_ed

If you’re at all interested, give me a shout on the contacts page and I’ll respond within moments (unless England are playing football, or I’m in a pub drinking heavily)

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Menus

An RPG without a menu is like a restaurant without a … menu.

To that end our game is going to require menu popups, than can be opened or closed on demand. The menu presence on screen needs to be modest and unassuming, so you can keep the main screen mostly free for running away from things while screaming. Stacked menus are the way to go, with a big shiny button to close or open everything at once.

Of utmost importance is the inventory screen, where you will hoard your modest collection of stuff. Also a Stats screen where you can increase your various lowly skills. A Map – sure, we’ll stick in one of those too. A Radar? Why not – it’s only my precious coding time you’re wasting.

map stats_empty

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The inventory screen currently contains a vast number of rocks. Rocks seem to be a staple of this particular genre, and I’m happy to slavishly follow the trend. Of course by the time the game is made, these may have changed to Future Rocks, Space Cubes, Robo Parts or somesuch sci-fi shenanigans.

inv system

 

After much swearing and weeping I’ve convinced the inventory to handle useful tasks like stacking items of a similar type, and all the usual things like transferring items to the world, activating health packs and making sure you don’t put a rock in your gun slot. Madam. There are also tons of multi-function buttons, so you can track armour values, total stamina or go to a full screen scrolling map, depending on preference. We can even handle touch screen, mouse or buttons. I’m a people pleaser.

One last addition – a comms channel. This keeps a record of all the text and dialogue you encounter, plus it features doorpad hacking facilities that I have no idea how to implement yet. So there’s that.

comms

Can you see any signs that I’m overusing the one texture pack I bought? No, you cannot. You’re just happy to be here, reading out-of-copyright quotes from Ernest Hemingway

In many RPGS, especially those from our friends in Japan, it is quite easy to lose track of your next objective. The comms screen will remember your most recent conversations and directions, which should prove handy if you’ve recently taken a blow to the head.

As an aside, note the out-of-date ocean, which I will soon be updating with something slightly less polluted.

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Robots

 

“Give it a gun barrel with lots of sciency bits on it” I explained to Mr Jim in painstaking detail. “And a turrety bit that rotates and comes out of the floor” I elaborated. Mr Jim snarled and muttered and made some pencil sketches. “You’ll be wanting knobs on it I expect”. “Yes!” I agreed enthusiastically “lots of knobs and some lights too.”
sentry

Of course I had to make it detect the player without draining the cpu, make it rotate and lock on and stick some sound effects on it, but Mr Jim had done the heavy lifting and our vicious sentry droid was born. Not terribly bright, but persistent. And he can work with his chums to cover an area, which should be handy.

His robotic counterpart, who patrols the corridors is also taking shape – a shiny floating insect like thing which has to navigate the world without falling off bridges, bumping into the furniture and generally making a fool of itself. Of course he might be centuries old hence the occasional glitch – hurrah! an in-story explanation for crap AI. I’ll file that under handy excuses.
patrol

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Where Did All The Humans Go?

 

In which Robin and Mr Jim begin to create a futuristic world entirely populated with robots.

Good evening. I am Robin Jubber Esq., and I will be your coder and designer for this epic journey into a world I have not yet finished building. Mr Jim has kindly agreed to handle the artistry, and we may be joined by other fine gentlefolk as the game progresses. Mr Mark King (from Level 42!) and Mr Bryan Henderson (from Scotland!) may well provide assistance on the musical front. My girlfriend might be pursuaded to help with the game testing, although this post is probably the first she’s heard about it, and I’m now in trouble.

 

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The Setting

It is the far future and mankind has achieved remarkable things. Space elevators, interplanetary travel, teleportation – all now bordering on the possible. Or they were. Mankind seems to have simply upped sticks and vanished from the home of his birth. Or her birth as the case may be. Was there some sort of unexplained apocalypse? Everything still seems fine. No asteroids have smashed into the crust and covered the world in ghastly glowing space dust. No super volcanoes have erupted, covering the world in thick, choking igneous dust. You cannot detect high levels of radiation, as if global thermonuclear war had covered the world in horrendous radioactive dust. Cataclysms, dust based or otherwise, seem to have left Earth completely alone. It’s a mystery – and while robots are not famed for their original thought, some have banded together and started making decisions. This needs to be investigated!

The Premise

You are a robot, much like many others, and you have only recently rolled off the production lines. Your have no particularly noteworthy skills, but your manufacturing process is both cheap and swift. If, and indeed when, something goes wrong on your adventures, a replacement will be found post-haste. Your production line has been tasked by the robot council to investigate where the human masters all went. Why did they leave so suddenly, and why didn’t they take their forlorn robotic chums with them?

Your Quest

The last location on earth still drawing large amounts of power is a laboratory complex in the Atlantic ocean. Robots with quite large robot brains have decreed that you must be sent there to investigate where the hell the humans have got themselves off to. Did they travel up the space elevator in the centre of the labs, and if so, where to? A space elevator that doesn’t lead anywhere is just a very expensive, very inefficient, suicide ladder – and according to the available historical data, humans have always preferred efficiency when it comes to killing lots of other humans. It’s a puzzle, and you had better go and investigate. You feel like you were made for this mission! And of course, you literally were.

 

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