Eidolon Games

I am taking a step back from Aurora Redemptus for a while. I’ve spent four years on it, it has changed and morphed many many times. It looks very different from how it looked when I first started and I’ve learned a lot of lessons. I am unable to continue work on it, really unable, I just can’t do it, it’s like trying to lift a 1000 pound weight.

However, something else I am unable to do is to step away from game development entirely. So I will be playing around with things, trying new projects, new ideas, seeing what comes up. I’m hoping that given time I will be able to come back and get Aurora Redemptus to a more finished state.

I very much want to do right by my customers and fans. If you have purchased the game and feel unsatisfied, please get in touch with me and I will arrange a refund. I offered it for sale because I wanted to get it into the hands of people who were excited to play it.

I hope that you’ll still drop by here to see what’s going on. In the meantime, I hope that life is good for you.

I’ve been spending the past while working on multiplayer and match-making infrastructure, fixing bugs, all sorts of stuff unrelated to the narrative of the story. I’m feeling like the narrative is getting pushed farther and farther into the background. In fact, I’m planning to release the game without the narrative, as a multiplayer game with some single player missions. I’m going to add some options for procedurally generated combat for single player, they may not make the release, but they will be high on the list for free updates. Most people I talk to haven’t really been interested in the single player, what they are really interested in is the gameplay, which really is the strong point. I want to make sure that players have access to as much of the gameplay as they want. I don’t want everyone to have to wait for me to figure out how to tell a narrative before they can play and enjoy the game.

Right, all of that said, I want to talk about why I am still doing a single player story campaign instead of just doing a multiplayer game, why I believe that narrative is important, and why I got into making games in the first place.

Possibly my most favorite game ever is Xenogears. The combat was pretty good, for a JRPG (which I don’t believe is saying much), but it wasn’t something I would want to play in absence of the story. The exploration helped tell the story, it really added an extra dimension, but again the story is what made it important. The story though, holy cow, and the music, fantastic. I loved them both dearly. I can’t adequately describe what an impact that had on my psyche. Another game in the running for most favorite? Metal Gear Solid, I loved that game. I’ve really enjoyed the whole series, but Metal Gear Solid, Snake Eater, and Peace Walker have been my favorites. I’ve just barely started playing Phantom Pain, so I’m not sure where that one will come in. There are many other favorites, Command & Conquer, Max Payne (especially the second one), Resident Evil, to name a few. Those games are all pretty narrative heavy, even if the Resident Evil games did tend to get a bit absurd as they went on. Narrative has always been very important to me in games. I believe that no matter how great a game mechanic may be, a mechanic that is given a good narrative context will always have greater potential to affect someone than a mechanic without narrative context. And that’s the really beautiful thing about games, the thing that sets them apart from, and makes them superior to other forms of media. I want to have missions in my game that have some meaning attached to them. Where you’re not just fighting the enemies because it’s fun, but also because the character’s fates hang on it.

So the narrative is important, but it is the mechanics that make it a game, and the mechanics are what make this the greatest art form yet. Mechanics make it personal, they draw you in and everything becomes more important and affecting because it’s about YOU. I love stories of lost worlds and ancient treasures, Indiana Jones type stories. But I think the Tomb Raider games gave me a stronger sense of wonder and mystery than any of the Indiana Jones movies. I wasn’t watching another character move through ancient tombs, I was exploring the ancient tombs myself. When it’s you performing the actions, they carry so much more weight, especially if there is any element of choice, even a small one makes a huge difference in investment. You can participate in other mediums passively, but games require a degree of investment to even get started.

Music sells it. Music has the ability to summon emotion entirely on its own. Good application of music can turn an otherwise boring thing into something touching, here I’m thinking specifically of the ladder climbing scene from Metal Gear Snake Eater. It’s a two minute climb up a ladder requiring no more interaction than holding up on the analog stick, very boring. But a vocal-only version of the theme plays in the background as you climb the ladder, which, for me at least, made the scene beautiful. That scene for me was one of the most memorable in the game, and has stuck with me since the first time I played through it.

So the combination of narrative creating meaning, mechanics making it personal, and music tying it all up sets games up as potentially the most powerful artistic medium we’ve seen yet. I don’t know how well I’ll pull it off, but I want my game to have an element of meaning, beyond just being a fun game. And that’s why I want to include a single player campaign.

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks. I’ve been working hard on getting the special ability system up to snuff and implementing some special abilities. I added two special abilities to the game, and created a couple of levels that use them. One of the abilities creates an impenetrable shield around your ship, nothing gets in…or out. Your weapons are disabled while the shield is active. It’s pretty cool, it lets you get your ships in past defensive fire, and pull them around behind the enemy. The other ability is a mine layer. You can drop a series of mines which will then detonate when an enemy gets close enough. The damage radius is larger than the trigger radius, so you can catch a couple of enemies in the blast, although it will damage your ships as well, so stay clear. I’ve added a total of five new levels, not all of them use the special abilities, but you do get to play around with them. They aren’t available in multiplayer yet, I need to do a little bit of balancing with them first. I also added a couple of new ship designs. I think they look pretty good. I need to make some changes to differentiate the ship designs more. There is a small amount of difference in maneuverability, but most of the difference is just in where the component mounting slots are.

I was working hard to have this all done this week, in time for the Salt Lake Gaming Con. I’m going to be showing the game there all three days with several other indie developers from the Utah Games Guild. I’m really pleased with where the game is, I’m going to have my booth set up to have three people playing at a time, and they will be able to play multiplayer against each other as well. Last year I only had one station where people could play. the hope is that people will have to do a lot less waiting to play.

The final bit of news is that my game is active on Steam Greenlight. You can head over there and vote for it. When it gets enough votes it will be allowed onto the Steam storefront. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it certainly helps.

Multiplayer over the internet is now available on the Humble Store! It’s actually been up for a week or so, it just took me a bit to get around to posting about it.

The internet-multiplayer isn’t really meant for you to log on and find dozens of games available, it’s primarily designed so that you and your friends can play without having to be in the same room. Which reminds me of another exciting development: There is now a Mac version of the game. You can head over to the Humble Store to download it. Finally I’ve integrated an auto-patching feature into the game. When you start up the game it will check to see if there are any updates available, if there are then it will let you know. You can then click on a button and it will download and patch the game for you. I’m hoping that will make it easier for you to know about and obtain the latest updates.

Currently I’m working on adding special abilities to the game. Often when playing the game, especially in multiplayer, the battles are reduced to the ships circling each other hoping to get a few shots in every now and then. It’s boring and takes forever. So I’m adding special abilities that will let you change up the status-quo. Sick of circling your enemies? Try dropping a turret on the field, or go invisible for a turn, or boost your engine output, or set off an explosive wave around your ship, or drop some mines. Lots of possibilities, they should make the battles more interesting.

The final bit of news is that I will be showing the game at the Salt Lake Gaming Con in about four weeks. It’s going to require some hard work to get things ready, but it should be worth it. The show was great last year, and I expect it will be fantastic again this year. If you happen to be there, stop by. There will be a lot of other games on display made by other Utah indie game developers.

I had some nasty bugs show up last week, which I finally got sorted out. This week I am devoting time to having the game automatically download updates. I often worry that people will buy the game, download it, then never check back for updates. So, the next version I release will have the ability to check for updates, and download and install them.

Once I get that done I’m going to focus on the single player campaign. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about. It should be lots of fun, and give me a break from the multiplayer. My hope is that if people are interested in the multiplayer, and use it, then they can email me about updates they would like or problems that they are having. That way I only address the things that people will really use, freeing me up to make some good progress on the single player.

It’s been a busy two months since I last posted. I’ve been working on getting the multiplayer working and doing my best to iron out the bugs. It now supports games over the internet and local area network. I mentioned a few posts ago that it felt like I was working on a multiplayer game with a single player component. I now retract that statement. I was doing some thinking about it, and while multiplayer is definitely going to be important, it isn’t going to dominate the game. With a small indie game like mine it would be difficult to get enough people online to support a bustling multiplayer scene. I’m kind of intending the multiplayer to be something for friends to do together. It’s unlikely that you’ll meet a lot of new people playing the multiplayer.

That said, I’ve got an idea that I think might help. In addition to the current game list I’m going to add a list of intent-to-play posts. Basically you can indicate that you are going to be online Thursday evening at 6:00, and anyone who wants to join is welcome. That way you’ll be able to see a larger sampling of the people who are playing the game.

Anyway, I’m intending to have the multiplayer update on the humble store this week. Following that I’m going to be adding some new features that I’ll talk about in a later blog post, and then get on Steam Greenlight.

It’s been over a month since my last post. I’ve been really busy and haven’t had a whole lot to share. That’s one of the problems of working on a good sized feature, every week I feel like I’ve almost got it, so I wait another week to post about it. Anyway, networked multiplayer is working, I’m focusing right now on polishing it up some and removing bugs. It works over a local network, and presumably it would work over the internet if you knew your hosts ip address. Apparently Unity has a matchmaking service of sorts, I haven’t read into it too much, just that something along those lines exists. I’m hoping it should be pretty easy to hook up to the match making service, but I suppose we’ll see.

I’d also like to add the ability to add an AI opponent to multiplayer games. The primary benefit from that would be that you could now play a game by yourself against the computer. I’ve become very aware of the fact that there isn’t a lot of single player content, hopefully adding an AI option to multiplayer would help that.

I’m also planning on adding an information box of some kind that will check my website for any sort of news updates. The idea being that I could inform people when there is a new version of the game available. Right now I don’t think I have any way if they aren’t following the blog. I am planning on adding a feature that would check for updates and allow you to download and install any patches the game, I bought a third party library that is supposed to make that easier, but I haven’t been able to take a good look at it yet, and I’m really trying to get this update out soon. We’ll see what gets included.