The Unintended news and moving around + Masters of Doom

Bujaka bujaka!

So. I have no officially moved and working from the new apartment. I had to get rid of my old desk and buy a new one so officially I did not work on anything from home during the last couple of weeks.

Reason for getting a new table was to save some room. I wanted to try and put my piano under the desk somehow, so I bought a desk that can be raised a bit to appropriate level.
It's a bit of a dominating part of the room but it kinda works.. sort of.

Anyway now I'm finally back to working on Unintended and a lot of things happening in the game development news.

First off, it seems Valve is removing the Greenlight program and replacing it with a more expensive but totally uncurated version called Direct.

I think it's a step towards the right direction. I don't quite see why would they just not hire a small team to curate the games and let fewer games in. It's baffling to me how all these scam games get through. I was under the impression that they are still hand picked from the greenlight system. I guess that is not the case. Anyway it's a good sign that times they are a changin.

As for my little unintended project. I'm not quite sure what to do with it now. Should I push for greenlight early? Or just fork up the money later? I'm fairly certain it will be the hardest couple of months ever to get through the greenlight, since everyone wants to get past it before it becomes expensive. The game is not really that visually impressive or interesting, (it's not really the main point) so it might be hard for me to get through at this point. I was going to add more eye candy gradually as the game progresses on and really work on the trailer a lot. This anyway sparked some interest to get back to some of the things needed for a clear presentation of the game.


For example I've redone the title screen and added some context to it too.

I also worked on a much more complex background painting, but decided to scrap it and keep it simple instead. Now while doing this, I still discovered some issues with the player selection screen and some other problems at the main menus, so I started to polish them a bit. I might be naming the main characters soon and creating the final two playable characters. I think the game also needs a story cutscene at the beginning. So maybe I'll first work on the mud-king-boss-encounter and an intro cutscene soon after that.

On other news.. Someone recommended a book that I should read called Masters of Doom.
I have to say that, five chapters in, I would already recommend this book for anyone interested in videogames and their development or history.  It's very good so far. Carmack is such a genius.

I also went to the movies again and watched John Wick 2. It was very entertaining. It's interesting to see that no matter what genre, if you have passion for the craft, it will come out great. 8/10


So that's about it for today.
I'll get back to you in a week or so.
Good luck and Stay frosty

The Unintended 2017 and The Mud City.

So.  It's 2017.  Happy new year everyone!
I've been working on the mud city lately and it's starting to come a long.

I wanted this place to have a significantly different type of mood and some weirdness to it, so I went about it from the music angle. I had and idea that the Mud people are being held slaves by the Mud King. I listened some funk at the time and that gave me the idea to start work on a marching beat first and then bring the rest towards that. I also added a ton of moving effects to the town. Some of the mud pipes are animated, and some mud splashes from mud geyser every now and then.

I've started to work on the houses and I do have a pretty good idea of the puzzles that we are going to be seeing here. Task here is to find a way to the castle and you will need to visit the houses to find it.



Most of the houses have some internal puzzles that all together come to a bigger whole.
The houses also need a variation to the main music and also the castle would need some new music.
Hopefully we will have some of that next week.

-Johannes

Ufc 205, Us Elections and Multiplayer.

Well now..
Quite the week we've had. Trump was voted the president of the United States, and there was a historic first ever UFC event in New York. I just finished watching the fights and I have to say it was pretty incredible night of fighting in Madison Square Garden.

The US election is kinda weird. You can win the popular vote, but still lose the election makes no sense to me.

I haven't had much time during the week, but I did manage to squeeze my few hours in anyway.
Mainly I've been still working more on some the issues that came up when I added the multiplayer feature. Anyway it seems to be finally working now around 90% certainty.

There were still quite a few bugs looming here or there, but I did manage to finalize the camera movement, added support for multiple inventories and things like that. I think this still warrants quite a few changes on some of the basic systems, like conversations with npc's and player item slots.

I also started working on a first boss encounter which I found quite interesting. Hopefully I'll be able to show you that during the next couple of weeks.

Maybe that's enough nonsense for today.
I'll try to keep these more detailed when I have actually something interesting to show.
Until next week.

-Johannes

The Unintended Atmosphere

Hello Again.
So.. What happened during the week? Well I worked on Lucius mostly.  Hopefully I can start showing some stuff on that too. It's pretty hard to show anything when it's not 100% ready. I did manage to squeeze a couple of days of Unintended developing also. This week I mainly focused on improving some of the atmosphere in the game. Even though it's a fairly simplistic game, I still want the game to evoke some feelings when your are playing, and I want to give the feeling of awe from time to time.

It's not easy, especially when I'm not that talented of an artist.
I worked on a one significant cave mostly. It's the same cave where the pathfinding monsters are first met.   After the first room I wanted the player to arrive to a open pit area with some heroic music to let him know that he is now travelling a meaningful path. Could there be a boss coming soon?

Well maybe not just yet. Few mud based puzzles and perhaps then we can introduce our first boss. I'm quite happy how the background turned out, but I feel like there's still room for improvements in the overall area. I created couple of new songs during the week and I was fairly happy with this one.


In other news:
There were a lot of interesting announcements during the week. Nintendo finally revealed it's new console Nintendo Switch and a trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2 was also released. I've not owned a console for years, but now for a first time in a long time, I feel like I might buy one.
The new Zelda looks incredible and so did Red Dead Redemption. They also released a trailer for the Logan movie and that looked very interesting too.

Talking about movies:
I watched Captain Fantastic during the week and loved it. I think it's one of those better movies in a long time. It reminded me of Little Miss Sunshine for some reason.
I give it an 8.5 out of 10.  It was very good.

Another thing I watched was an old movie from 1987 called The Princess Bride. I've never seen this before and I was amazed. It was surprisingly watchable considering how old it was, and it had some cool scenes with very strange comedic and acrobatic acting. It featured "Andrew the Giant"who I've heard about a lot, but never actually seen him in a movie before. It was almost like a cross of Monty Python's Holy grail and The NeverEnding Story. They just don't make them like this anymore.
I give it an 8 out of 10.

Well.. I guess that's about it for now.
Have a good week and Play well.

-Johannes

The Unintended, Mafia III, Lucius and Soundtracks

Hello Folks,
Another busy week. I've been doing quite a few extra hours at the office and Lucius stuff is coming along nicely. We are currently working on Lucius III, but haven't really given any official announcement yet. The script is fully done and most of our design is fully done. It's gonna be tight money wise to make it all happen, but we will try our best. I really like where the story is going and how it's all going to end. Lucius III is going to concentrate much more on the story and hopefully we will be able to give some real depth to the characters this time.

Mafia III was just released on Steam and it looks like it's getting raped with reviews. Currently it's
Mixed (55%) with 5,713 reviews. It's interesting that it's currently lower than Lucius II. After reading the reviews and watching some of the YouTube videos, I feel like it kinda tried to do something similar to Lucius II with a sort of similar result. I know they are not really comparable but it's interesting to see them battling with similar issues.  Basically I think they tried to add more freedom after making  a game that had a focus on the story. I guess they ended up with a lot less stable product with more bugs and also the story seems to have suffered a bit.  Frame rate locked to 30 and major crash issues seem to be the bulk of the problem. I felt like there were going to be some issues with the game when I was looking at the videos near the launch. Steam can be a rough place sometimes. On the other hand I'm glad to see Quantum break doing well on Steam. Congratulations to Remedy, our fellow Finnish colleagues.

There are certainly lessons here we need to also remember when releasing Lucius III.

I've been also working on some more  puzzles for Unintended. I created a complicated tunnel network where you need to solve different types of puzzles to get through. It ended up being pretty complicated overall thing. I had to create system for myself to keep track of all the entrances and exits. Here's a picture of a desert with some tunnel caves.

This is something what most of these caves have inside:

So.. that's something I guess. I would like to be able to use more time for this, but I need to prioritize Lucius overall and it's currently taking quite a big chunk of my time.

That brings me to my last point. We had some emails and messages about the Demake soundtrack and it's availability online. So I decided to release it on some of the major online music distributors.

Here's a spotify and itunes link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5FySxFUSuCBIJ0YDeCHr2j
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/lucius-demake/id1161260852

It should be also available soon in Amazon, Deezer, Google and Tidal.
We are also looking into getting the soundtracks available in Steam. Not sure if people use those, but it doesn't hurt to offer it there too.



It's October and Halloween is coming. The Lucius games are going to be on many sales during the upcoming month and the first one is starting tomorrow on Steam. Hopefully they do well, so we can put more resources on the sequel.

That's enough rambling for one post.
See you in a week or so.

Cheers!
-Johannes

What is this blog about? Reviews, Lucius or Unintended?

Hello,
This would be my first post. In a very Finnish manner, I will start by apologizing. Even though I'm the main person who writes the stories of our games at Shiver Games, I still feel that my written English is not up to par in many ways. This blog is meant to be just my random thoughts and ideas as they come. It's mostly for my own benefit and I do not intend to edit it too much. So for this I apologize.

So what is this blog really about?

I do not really know. In Finland we have this law that everyone needs to have at least 5 weeks of vacation each year and most seem to keep four of them during the summer. This summer I decided to start my own game project separate from my company that does mostly horror games.
If you are not familiar with them then please check out these links:

http://shivergames.com
http://lucius.shivergames.com
http://lucius2.com
http://luciusdemake.com


We mainly publish our games in Steam and that's our main source of income. We also do retail and several other digital distributors.

Shiver Games was founded 2010 and we've been pretty much Lucius oriented the whole time. This year was my first year during that time, that I decided to actually keep this famous Finnish vacation. During this five weeks I decided to start my own side project that I'll work on my free time.
I've named this project Unintended. This project with the combination of buying some recent hardware made me feel like I should share some of the things that encounter from time to time.
For instance: I just went through some years of trying out different types of wireless headsets for gaming and felt like I should write about some problems on some of them and some really good features on some. Also it's an area that I find interesting, since many people do not give a **** about wireless connection on headphones and I actually do. I'll try to write these reviews of these different headphones soon..

I will also try to post some progress of my own project and our next Lucius project.

So anyone interested on the next Lucius might also get some "inside-scoops" every now and then.


Kind Regards,
Johannes Aikio