We had two booths on the show floor, one in the IGF pavilion, and one at Unity‘s booth. Our plan was for two of us to man the booths while a rotating third would take in some talks, but we had forgotten how humans need to intake food and output waste so we ended up just covering for each other the whole time. We’ll need to do a GDC Vault day to watch everything we missed. We did get to see a couple of indie summit talks before the show floor opened though, and the FTL and Kentucky Route Zero postmortems were great. Fascinating to see how much FTL had changed from the prototype, and also how many placeholder graphics just never got replaced before launch and are still in there–I love that stuff.

By the second night we’d also learned an important lesson about air circulation, and how cramming too many nerds in a tiny bunkbed room is not necessarily as odourless as we may have implied in our trailer.

But I’m forgetting the whole reason we were there–we were nominated for an IGF award! That’s us onscreen there for Excellence In Visual Art. It ended up going to Kentucky Route Zero, but that was okay because KRZ is gorgeous and we still got to keep our free drinks.

And finally, here’s a roundup of all the kindly journalists who took the time to talk with us about Lovers:

• Chris Plante & Russ Frushtick in a great Good Cop, Bad Cop for Polygon (also Spaceteam and Samurai Gunn!)
• Olly Quinn plays a round with Adam for VG247
• Jessica Conditt writes about it for Joystiq
• Press Pause Radio’s Best of the IGF
• Evan Campbell interviews Jamie for the Indestructible Art podcast (also Super TIME Force, KRZ, and Knights of Pen & Paper!)
• And lastly, Gamasutra’s Road to the IGF interview on how this all got started in the first place.

Update: We are proud to announce that we will additionally be exhibiting Lovers at Unity’s booth right in front of the main entrance to the Expo.

• Wed: 10am – 6pm
• Thurs: 10am – 6pm
• Fri: 10am – 3pm

Press Update: We are setting aside the hours of 2pm – 4pm on Wednesday, Thursday and 2pm – 3pm on Friday where the whole team will be available to talk to at the IGF Pavilion booth. All other times during the expo we will try to have one of us available.

Drop by the booth or make an appointment to talk by contacting us at info@asteroidbase.com

Excellence In Visual Art
Incredipede (Northway Games and Thomas Shahan)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Guacamelee! (Drinkbox Studios)
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (Asteroid Base)
Year Walk (Simogo)

We’re using Unity to build Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, so everything is made of polygons–though most objects are just transparent textures mapped onto simple planes that face the camera. There are no lights, we just crank the ambient light all the way up. We’re handling assets in a few different ways, evolving our process as we get more comfortable with the engine.

THE PLAYER CHARACTERS

The main characters are a bit of a time capsule from our early prototype, before we learned animation scripting in Unity. The characters are first animated in 2-D using After Effects, and then the animation frames get rendered to a sprite atlas texture (a big grid of all the animation frames). In Unity, each character is made of a single plane, to which we assign the sprite atlas texture. The plane only displays a zoomed-in piece of the texture though, and we can show different frames of animation by changing which zoomed-in bit of the sprite atlas texture is displayed.

The one place where the player characters get some scripted animation is with their squash and stretch. By squashing the whole plane a little when a character hits the ground, landing from a jump feels more physical and reactive, and doesn’t interfere with which animation frames are playing–you hit the ground running and squash without breaking stride. Super simple, but it adds a lot to the feel. There are a few other places where we do similar things.

THE “SPUTNIK” ENEMY

This simple bad guy is assembled from planes. This was the second character we built, and all the keyframe animations were made in Unity, with separate animation files for each of the moving parts (NOTE: This was very silly; there’s a reason skeleton armatures exist). One of the tricks I borrowed from Tomb Raider 1′s trees is the criss-crossed planes for the legs–they can rotate around the body in 3-D, while still showing form from any angle. And when we script the playback of the enemy’s animations to react to its movement, even this simple guy starts to feel more lively.

THE JELLYBOMBER

With this enemy we built and animated a straight-up skeleton rig in Maya, while still limiting the geometry to front-facing planes. After animating movement cycles for the four cardinal directions, the cycles can be dynamically blended and speed-changed in code to react to the creature’s positional movement. This is the real power of using 3-D rigs for 2-D characters–all the procedural animation control. We also use this to trigger cracks appearing in the glass as he takes damage (the crack planes are otherwise scaled down and hidden behind the body), and we have the jelly’s eyes blink and dynamically track the player’s position.

THE GREEN MONSTER

For this mini-boss we utilized Unity’s ability to separate clips into animation layers. The head and the body are part of the same rig, but their animations play back on separate layers. This gives us the ability to blend together the various movement animations according to acceleration and direction, while at the same time the head’s idle, charge and shooting animations are triggered according to the enemy’s logic independent of how it is moving.

THE POLISH

Since we’re aiming for a vectory neon look we’re naturally going to be suckers for bloom, and one of the benefits of a fixed 2-D view is that we can just bake glows and bloom right into our textures. Also, because our assets are quite light, we can afford to be be pretty liberal with particle effects. And to help stitch all the elements together, we found that placing a few slowly-shifting large polygons in front of the camera, each with a texture of just some faint blurry colours set to additive blending (“flare”-type) really helps sell a glowy space environment with subtly shifting light.

This weekend we are pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime at Gamercamp. We will be unveiling the Arcade Edition of the game which we feels represents a distillation of the frantic action and pacing into a shorter and sweeter play through.

You can come and play it at the games showcase on:
Saturday 10am – 1pm
Sunday 1pm – 4pm

We hope to see you there

We would like to extend our thanks to Bento Miso and Digifest for giving us the opportunity to display our current build at Digifest this year. We had a great time meeting everyone who got to play the game.
Big ups to Robby Duguay for being able to explain the game better than I could.

We were featured this week in the Bonus Level podcast with Chris and Lance. I met Chris at Digifest this weekend and played a few games with him. On the podcast he told the story about how he immediately thought, “This is a game me and Lance need to play.” I can’t say how awesome that reaction is.
// Listen Here

Thursday October 18, we were invited to show Lovers at the Toronto After Darkcade. We were also joined by Drinkbox Studios and their game, Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attacks. We had a blast being able to debut the game to the public, and would like to thank Alex Bethke and everyone at TADFF for giving us this opportunity.