The game I’ve been working on for the last six months is going to be shown at the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show! This will be the first public unveiling of Incredipede. Currently only a few friends and family have played it.
In keeping with this non-announcement there is no trailer, no screenshots, and no description of the game.
Stay tuned though. All will be made clear on Friday September 16th at SOWN! We’re flying to Tokyo!
The Rebuild 2 main menu may be the creepiest art in the game.
The Rebuild 2 playtest is over and was a huge success. I sent the test out to 63 applicants, and of those 45 played at least once and 21 sent me some sort of useful feedback (and get their names in the credits – thanks guys!). A couple shared their access despite being explicitly asked not to, but it was worth the risk and I had some security to impede ne’er do wells. So far my faith in humanity is intact!
Some testers were above-and-beyond awesome, playing lengthy games on multiple difficulties, finding all the endings and rooting out my many grammatical errors. They found dozens of bugs I’d missed, and helped me make Nightmare difficulty (now called Impossible) harder than ever.
Being fans of Rebuild 1, they weren’t as good at finding noob issues, so I did some extra tests with people who’d never seen the original. In person is best for this, although I find it nerve racking to watch people play my games. Like every other aspect of the game, the tutorial got an overhaul.
Playtest stats broken down by day and difficulty
I collected stats using Playtomic (formerly SWFStats), including the fact that a few games went 300, 500, even 800 days. That’s dedication!
Playtomic wasn’t ideal for such a small test. I broke down the survivors, squares, and food by day and difficulty, but when I added map size it all got out of order and became a wall of numbers. I needed more options to sort and filter, or download the data in an xls. I also logged any errors as custom metrics, but without room for stack traces all I knew was how often each error happened. Again, not what Playtomic was designed for, but it would have been useful.
What Playtomic does do well is analytics for published games, like Google Analytics but simpler and more game-centric. I wish I’d put something like it in Rebuild 1 so I could at least know how many plays that game has. 6 million confirmed on the big portals… maybe another 2 or 3 from the hundreds of smaller sites?
Anyway, with help from my army of volunteer playtesters, Rebuild 2 is now (just about) finished, and is off to sponsors for bidding. The process usually takes a month, so you’ll finally all be able to play the new game in September!
Until then, here’s a very brief Rebuild 2 trailer I cut together:
You really may have to guess, as the face modelling doesn’t always produce a perfect match. But I’ve been having fun putting my friend’s faces into the game with the FaceGen Modeller, then mix-and-matching their hair and facial hair.
Terrifying new art from EvilKris
The major components are all in, and I’m starting to slog through balancing now. In the end, some stuff still didn’t make it in, but Rebuild 2 is closer to what I imagined the original should have been. I hope you’ll agree!
I’ll probably do some private testing soon so if you’d like to be considered for test duty, please leave a comment on this post.
Edit: the playest is over, thanks everyone for helping out!
EvilKris and I have been working hard on Rebuild 2. Skills and plots are in with about 30 other changes, and there’s another 20 to go. Recent additions include renaming survivors, saving in multiple slots, shotguns, helicopters, prostitution, and more kittens.
There are also new buildings and I tweaked the map art to use more gradients and textures. I’m still working on the blood bar; need to make room for more information up there. It’s still pretty similar but here’s how it looks today:
New buildings in Rebuild 2
EvilKris is nearly done the new attack screen art, small illustrations to go with various events and possible outcomes. These will be in a kind of a comic book style, hopefully not too gruesome for the squeamish but showing a more realistic depiction of life in the land of the dead. He has more art on his blog.
Colin and I are having a great time in San Francisco. It was a big adjustment (especially weather-wise) from the beaches of Costa Rica, but seeing all our friends again has made me wonder why we left.
Last month we went to a bizarre concert: Mike Patton and noise-music duo PIVIXKI, consisting of a mad, energetic drummer and an even madder more energetic pianist. But it was the opening act that caught my attention and wouldn’t leave my head.
Bill Gould and Gigante Sound (Jared Blum and Dominic Cramp) opened with music from their new album The Talking Book: a collection of dark and atmospheric soundscapes that were so moving and so amazing to hear live (I was right up front). I kept closing my eyes and could imagine playing Rebuild to the music. It was perfect. I contacted them later in the week and licensed a few songs for the sequel. So, presenting the soundtrack to Rebuild 2:
The Talking Book – Rebuild’s new music
You can hear samples on their site or on Amazon, but the 30-second snippets don’t do it justice. I fell asleep last week after listening to the album and had a vivid dream of a zombie-ridden future.
It was actually quite a sad dream. Most of the people I loved were dead and our chances of survival seemed bleak. I wondered if it was morally right to make light of such horrors, even if they are fictional.
