Well, okay. I guess this was inevitable, but I still felt weird about posting it. The old engine for Physix wasn’t moving anywhere so we (after much discussion) have switched to Unity 3D. I guess the biggest thing that needs to be said is that we made this decision back in November. The major problem with doing a massive engine switch on this scale is that we basically needed to start from square one. If what you’re thinking is “Yikes!” you’re on the same page as us. Luckily for us, 100% of all our media is salvageable (and we already did) and we still have all of our level designs and neat little puzzle ideas stashed away. I guess it’s just more of a “mechanical” square one, as we have to code all of our mechanics from scratch again. It’s no big deal, and honestly the game will be better for it.
We started the conversion at the beginning of March, and if all things go well, we’ll be making the IndieCade deadline of May 1st with sort of an “Alpha-demo” (or is that a “Demo-alpha”?). It’s a long push, but both of our programmers are working diligently and even if we don’t make this one, we should be poised to submit to the IGF deadline in October. Throughout this month, I will hopefully be posting things more frequently, showing off the new things being implemented so no one’s in the dark. One of the amazing things about Unity is that it is simultaneously more robust and ultimately easier to get the desired effects we want than our old engine, meaning the content pipeline is much much faster.
As for our other projects, Collapsus and Fly Guy, Collapsus is nearly finished, but it’s on hold while we work on Physix (we are just a few guys, after all) and Fly Guy is undergoing some serious design changes as our prototype that hit Kongregate wasn’t exactly “explosive”. Though to be honest, we knew it wouldn’t be. That’s why we put the prototype out there: so we could make the real game better. The only problem is that we didn’t get much feedback, though from what little Kongregate feedback we have, as well as a multitude of personal and professional feedback, the final mobile game will be spectacular.
We’ve also started working on a few other smaller projects, many of which will never see the light of day; but for those that do, we’re going to try this new little idea. It’s called “Wraith Minis”. Whenever we have a little tiny game that some of our team members made in their free time, or just all-around team efforts made just for the fun of it, we’re going to release some. Most of them will be for free on iOS, Android and web (ad-driven, of course), and they should theoretically come out more often than our other “major” projects. Of course this doesn’t mean that we’re going to be whipping out little project after little project, as these are just things that we’ve done in our free time; and it wouldn’t be fair to our team to make these on a regular basis, it wouldn’t be fair to expect you to play an entire library of our pet projects and it wouldn’t be fair to our big projects, which would be neglected and start to cry.
In all honesty, that’s pretty much it. There’s not as much comedy in this as I usually try to do, but we’re technically in “crunch” and I haven’t gotten much sleep. Hope you all like the changes.
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