Asteroid Base

Following up on Matt’s last devlog, I’m going to wrap up our character creation process by discussing how we are rendering the characters in Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. Warning: It’s very Unity-y.
// More

So 2013 was a crazy year.

Last January, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime was admittedly a side project, something small that we were planning to tie off quickly, since the three of us were all busy with our paying jobs. And then IGF happened, and then PAX 10 happened, and it was an amazing experience to see real live strangers playing our game and responding to it. Throughout the year, the more effort we put into the game, the more we seemed to get out of it.

It was in the spring, after IGF, that we started thinking that maybe somehow Lovers could one day grow up and be a real game, so we dove back into design work and came up with a more robust spec. As well, we went through all the super fun legal processes to make Asteroid Base into a real company, while still keeping up our other contract gigs.

For a while, this part-time development style worked great, because it allowed us to ease into the whole indie game studio thing. But needless to say, working part-time and rejigging the scope has ended up making the dev process take longer than we originally planned—-sorry about that!

So finally, to ring in the new year, we’re pleased to announce that going forward, we’re going to be focusing 100% of our time on Lovers. All we can say is that we think the wait will be worth it when it’s finally done!

I recently had a chance to assemble this screen-cap footage from earlier last year showing our modeling/rigging/animation process for Lovers:

Although it’s a 2D game, we’re creating the assets as 3D geometry, using flat planes with transparent textures (more on that here). This might seem like a lot of trouble for one tiny little bunny friend, but the 3D approach lets us re-use the rig for all the humanoids in the game, including the player characters, just by swapping textures. It’s handy.

Software: Photoshop, Maya, Unity.

Last week we had a nice long chat with the podcast Guys With Pencils, and the episode is out now! I love their show (they interview artists and animators and game designers and folks like that) so it was super cool to be part of it. We tried hard to avoid talking about our illustrious mayor Rob Ford–find out how successful we were here.

Phew! I think we’re finally recovered from all the craziness that was PAX Prime, so now I’m able to actually write about it. As you may or may not know, our experience at PAX came about because we were selected as part of the PAX 10. It was a really great honour to be picked and shown alongside the likes of Avalanche 2: Super Avalanche, Badland, Escape Goat 2, Gunpoint, Owlboy, Ridiculous Fishing, Rogue Legacy, Sokobond and Towerfall.

Image curtesy Cellar Door Games

One of the best parts about showing at PAX had to have been seeing couples come up to play Lovers. At several points during the weekend we would have a whole lineup of couples waiting to play. The process was all very similar each time: They would talk strategy before they sat down, they would play the game, and they would leave arguing. Mwahaha. Ryan Letourneau (Northernlion)’s PAX @ Home serves as a preview of the arguing that I hope will become the staple.

Another highlight was when James Portnow from Extra Credits surprised us with the Extra Credits Innovation Award. It came with a hefty trophy that is now being fought over by Matt and Adam.

Extra Credits Innovation Award 2013

After PAX wrapped, we had one last day in Seattle, so we checked out the EMP Museum. It was cool to see three of the inspirations for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime all within 10 feet of each other in the sci-fi exhibit:

And finally, press! At PAX we talked to a bunch of nice press folks, which is always great for an indie studio. Here’s a round-up of some responses people had to Lovers.
Penny Arcade Report – Feature
Giant Bomb Panel – shoutout from Alex Navarro
Games Radar – Best of PAX 2013
Game Trailers – Indie Game Manual: PAX Prime Edition
Sprong – Preview
Warp Zone Paxpocalypse – Best of PAX Prime 2013

We’re happy to announce that Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime has been chosen as an Official Selection for IndieCade’s Night Games programming. The party will start at 8pm in the IndieCade Village and Lovers will take the stage at 9pm.

Quick update–if you’re at FanExpo in Toronto this Sunday, stop by the Bento Miso/DMG community booth to play a bunch of rad games, including Lovers. We’ll be there on Sunday, showing some of the new stuff we’ve been working on, in booth 1941.

And then next weekend we’re flying out to Seattle for PAX, where Lovers is part of the PAX 10!

Okay, back to crunch time.