It’s something we couldn’t have done when we were travelling every 3 months: a game played in a 10’x10′ virtual reality space, where you walk around (yes, walk around in VR!), building gigantic tinker toys and rolling them off to solve puzzles. If you remember the original Fantastic Contraption, it’s like stepping inside of that world and putting contraptions together with your own two hands.
Colin’s been working on it with Radial Games while I finish Rebuild 3 mobile and I’ll be joining them shortly. It’s way too exciting a game to pass up.
We’re showing it off at the HTC Vive PAX booth this weekend so come over to the Sheraton to try room-sized VR. Feel like you’re finally living in the future we were promised back in the 80’s. Yes, that future is coming!!
Banner for our PAX BoothAugust was a busy month for Northway Games. I helped Rich and Colin launch Deep Under the Sky, a psychedelic arcade puzzler about alien jellyfish. It’s so gorgeous… just go watch the trailer for it then nab it on your iPhone before I remember to end the launch sale.
We showed it at CIGGRAPH in Vancouver, then Deep Under the Sky and Rebuild at PAX Prime in our first ever PAX booth. It was an unbelievable experience. I had no idea there were so many Rebuild fans out there! Every time I looked up, someone new wanted to know if I was the Sarah Northway, creator of Rebuild, and could they shake my hand. It was so – I want to say humbling, but it was the opposite of that. It was good, very very good.
Now that Deep Under the Sky is out, Colin’s coming aboard the good ship Rebuild to work on the programming and balancing. We haven’t properly worked together since Incredipede so this is going to be fun. Colin’s first task was to track down the memory leak, which we hope is now fixed in the 0.666 update. He’s also working on the new relationships system (one of the Kickstarter stretch goals), and on balancing happiness and fort policies.
In the new update I also added 60 new backstories (written by Stephen Gray), 11 survivor perks, and 5 new main leader jobs. I finally hooked up the Steam deluxe edition with 5 more main leader jobs for a total of 15 to choose from. Here’s an overview of how they work and what each one does.
All about jobs in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville
The first thing you do in Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville is design your main character. She (or he) will lead your fort from humble defensive camp to glorious city-state. She’s your most important survivor: the only one (at least initially) who can learn any skill, and unlike the first two games, she can’t be killed.
Brandy bear was born for this role
Now comes one of the most important choices in the game: pick your leader’s profession from her previous life, back before the infection started. This determines her starting skills, equipment, and a fort-wide bonus that affects the whole game. Choose well!
Main leader starting professions in Rebuild 3:
Job
Skill
Equipment
Benefit
Politician
leadership
top hat
start the game with an extra survivor
Shop Clerk
scavenging
crowbar
25% discount while trading
Doctor
engineering
doctor’s bag
all injuries recover 1 day faster
Retiree
building
hammer
all survivors are +10% happier
Police Officer
defense
pistol
all firearms grant +1 defense
5 new jobs added in version 0.666:
Job
Skill
Equipment
Benefit
Priest
leadership
megaphone
start with a church and create more devout survivors
Hobo
scavenging
backpack
5 extra housing spaces
College Student
engineering
calculator
schools and bars are 25% more effective
Construction Worker
building
saw
half materials costs when building
Gang Member
defense
shotgun
no happiness loss from death or injury
5 bonus jobs for Kickstarter & Steam deluxe edition:
Job
Skill
Equipment
Benefit
Rock Star
leadership
guitar
earn faction respect twice as fast
Pizza Delivery Driver
scavenging
car and sword
start with the driver perk
Programmer
engineering
science book
start with a lab and 9 researched techs
Real Estate Developer
building
safety hat
all build missions take 1 day
Pro Gamer
defense
chainsaw
extra defense but all enemies are twice as powerful
These are of course subject to change during the beta as I discover which ones are pleasingly overpowered, and which are just too exploitable. The bonus ones are supposed to be a little crazy… probably not recommended for new players.
In a future update I plan to add extra perks for your leader that she’ll earn from major events in the campaign mode storyline. Once each city is suitably rebuilt (or escaped from), she’ll be travelling on to the next one with some select teammates, so the job you choose will be even more important. For now, these jobs add a bit of diversity to the skirmish mode and something new to try.
I’ll leave you with another picture from our PAX booth:
Rebuild backer Andy Moore with his zombie self on a banner at PAX Prime 2014
But I’ve been wanting to make this game since way back in 2010! Back then Sarah and I were in Honduras and I had just started to write Incredipede. Our internet was terrible and we didn’t have any books so entertainment for the dark-hours was not easy to find. Fortunately in one of the bright-spots of our internet-connectivity I read this article written by Tim W. about a prototype someone named Richard Edwards had released for free online. I played it and fell in love with the feel and the mechanics. It’s got a wonderful Scorched Earth kind of gameplay but is more immediate and arcadey. I played the short prototype through but since it was so hard to download games I had to squeeze more fun out of it, it was the only game I had!
Working in Honduras
I started making extra challenges for myself and the game kept getting more and more fun. I’d remove a mechanic in the game so that it would be harder and the game would get more fun! I even wrote up a blog post about the challenges in case you want to try them.
After playing for a few days I wrote Rich a long gushy email about how much I liked the game and a bunch of annoying design notes about other directions he could push or pull the game. I was really excited about him doing a full version. He wrote back a friendly email saying he was working on some other prototypes and wasn’t sure BrainSplode was the game he wanted to polish and release. Much to my sadness.
About a year later Rich released Pineapple Smash Crew, a game about running around abandoned spaceships throwing grenades everywhere. It’s a really fun game and he released in on Steam and his own site. He dropped me an email asking for some feedback on the game just as I was leaving for Tokyo to show an early version of Incredipede at SOWN. We talked about Pineapple Smash Crew and I tried to convince him to make BrainSplode again. Infuriatingly, he demurred and instead went back to prototyping stuff instead of making the game I wanted to play!
At Tokyo Game Show for SOWN
A few months later Sarah and I were in the Philippines with some friends. Here is where I found Thomas Shahan and started working on the art for Incredipede. But I also couldn’t get BrainSplode out of my head. I decided I had time to do design work on a new game and work on Incredipede at the same time so I wrote Rich and said basically “Dude, I want to clone BrainSplode, can I clone your game?” And Rich replied with something like “No… unless I do the art”. Which was pretty much the perfect answer from my point of view!
Mike Prepares Uni in the Philippines
I didn’t have time to write the code for the game so I emailed my friend Mike Boxleiter who wrote Solipskier, 4Fourths and some other games I really like. He was working on Gasketball with Greg Wohlwend but had a two month window where he could work on another game. Luckily he was into it and he even came to the Philippines where work started on the new game. With Mike writing code, Rich doing art, and me doing level design we’d do it small and lean and crank it out in two months! And everything went great! For two months. But as everyone of you have predicted two months was not long enough to finish the game. After two months we had a pretty nice little half-finished game but when we lost Mike I couldn’t take over coding because I was in the middle of Incredipede and Rich didn’t want to do the entire game himself. So it went up on a shelf.
We shipped Incredipede from Mexico!
And it stayed there until April of 2013 when I was finished with Incredipede and Incredipede mobile and was finally looking for the next game. Now I had the time to write code so I emailed Rich and pitched him on restarting the game using the Incredipede engine. He was keen so BrainSplodeDeluxe was reborn!
We asked Mike for a price to buy him out of the partnership and he gave us very reasonable terms. He did a lot of fundamental design work on the game when we started and deserves credit and cash for his work.
So Rich and I started anew about a year and six months ago! It started as a small game we were going to crank out quickly but, as these things go, we got more and more attached to it and more and more excited about it until it became a for-real beautiful full-hearted creation. The last year and a half of development on Deep Under the Sky has been some of the most fun I’ve had making games. I got lucky again with Rich as a collaborator. He’s great to work with, produces amazing art and has brought all his make-that-game-feel-amazing design chops to this game.
And so after that first email written four years ago finally there is almost a full version of BrainSplode in the world. Coming this summer: Deep Under the Sky!
You landed in Panama city two months ago. You haven’t been in a car or a city with a population over a few thousand people in as long. The only sounds you hear all day are the chatter of birds and the few people living in your little corner of San Cristobal, a small island off the east coast of Panama.
Right now you’re floating, face down, in the ocean that surrounds the island. You’re staring at a jellyfish. The jellyfish has a fat, translucent, mane and long tendrils that trail off into invisibility. Soon, dolphins will leap by the reef and somersault for joy, an octopus will come hunting in the coral and you’ll eat raw oysters you collected off the stilts of the mangroves. For now the water is warm, the jellyfish is new and beautiful and you aren’t thinking anything. Not the game you’re writing, or the Kickstarter your wife is about to start, or how you have to make another long boat trip into town because you’re running low on dried beans.
You bask in the warmth of the water, focusing on now, on the life all around you, and the shoo-shaa of your breathing through the snorkel. In a few months, when you’re surrounded by the busy, vibrant metropolis of Buenos Aires, you will think back to this time on the reef and decide this is what your game should be about. Deep Under the Sky is a video game by Rich Edwards and myself. In our game, you take on the life of a strange species of jellyfish who live on Venus. These Venusian jellyfish are different from ours: the extreme pressure of the atmosphere makes their environment both like being under water, and like floating in the sky like a lost birthday balloon. They have the same problems as the rest of us though: they need to find food, and they need their species to flourish. The Air Whales help with both. Life in the clouds of Venus is a dangerous compromise between life-buoying pressure and deadly heat. Beneath the sky on the surface of Venus, the temperature is 450 degrees Celsius and the air pressure is 92 times that of earth. The jellyfish would be instantly incinerated there.
Higher up, where the temperature more tolerable to life, the pressure is too low to keep beings aloft. The Air Whales solve this problem with huge siphons that hang ten kilometers down to the hotter air beneath. They act like living zeppelins kept up by hot air drawn from the depths below. The jellyfish fly from one whale to the next, so each pod of Air Whales is like a life-sustaining archipelago, or a coral reef.
They also look to the Air Whales for a meal. The Whales are constantly leaking hot air through vents to keep themselves neutrally buoyant. Colonies of microscopic bacteria live off the hot air drawn up from deep under the sky. This creates an ecosystem where the Jellyfish feed off creatures just as tiny as their Terran brethren do.
This is the world our game lives in. It’s wonder is inspired by encounters with iridescent comb jellyfish, the dance of colour-changing cuttlefish, and by swimming on a moonless night in an ocean aglow with bioluminescence, where a hand pushed through the water seems to burn with green flame. The gameplay is inspired by riding and tumbling in waves too powerful to control, skipping across the water on a kiteboard, and the feeling of leaping off a cliff, momentarily weightless, before plunging into that quiet, blue-green world below.
But the game is about “now”: the flow of this moment into the next into the next. Your own mind not focused on the fact that your internet connection has been dead for three days, that a dog stole your flute, that the mosquitos will be back tonight. You’re just floating and enjoying the jellyfish.
I said I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, but here I am tooting the horn: you can now play the Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville beta on your Android phones and tablets!
How to get it: preorder the full game from rebuildgame.com includes Windows, Mac, Android & Steam keys too.
But wait, don’t get TOO excited. It’s still slow, unlikely to run well on anything that costs less than $300 or is more than 2 years old. I’m rather thrilled at how much better it is now than a month ago, but there’s a long way to go.
Colin using Rebuild as a stylus… to play Rebuild.
In my career of porting PC games to mobile (all 4 years & 4 games of it), the hardest part is always graphics optimization. It’s given me a renewed sense of wonder for games like Assassin’s Creed and the Elder Scrolls (which Colin and I were respectively binging on last month). How do those games look so amazing when I can barely drag 20 flat buildings around the screen without losing 10fps?
Obviously engine plays a big part in it, and Adobe AIR (aka Flash) is known more for its ease of use than its speed. But the other big part is, I imagine, the thousands of man-hours spent making sure every last drop of system resources is used optimally. Mostly it’s about CPU vs RAM. Lots of little moving parts need more CPU power. Fewer bigger objects requires more RAM. Hit the ceiling on either and your framerate plummets or your app crashes. So if you’re wondering which new tablet to buy, MEMORY DOES MATTER. And I mean Random Access Memory, not what people call storage space on iPhones in their Orwellian desire to confuse language and oppress free thinkers.
Post apocalyptic religious leaders can have any hairstyle they want.
Anyway speaking of binging on games, I’ve been playing a lot of Rebuild this week. Well, I do that every week, but it’s easier now on my phone because I’m less tempted to stop every 5 minutes and tweak some variable. I played a whole game with no scavengers, which was successful thanks to trading with Gustav & the Pharmacists. Even though you have to wait for stock to replenish now, you can horde resources and sell them at a huge profit when a faction is desperate enough to pay double. Haggling is less punishing now so I ended up with a leader who was a part-time trader, part-time preacher.
For the next big update I’m going to focus on getting the rest of Stephen’s events in, working on the happiness system, and starting campaign mode where you’ll be moving from village to town to city.
(Adam’s handiwork. I think the one in the middle is Adam himself!)
