Blog post #19: End of the year is dawning to all of us.

It's been a while, but there's more than just alpha demo to be happy about this fall. And more to now that we have managed to squeeze out the alpha demo and we found out a lot of things that didn’t work and things that did work. For the first, it was going to be demo, but we ended up making an alpha, which was way better for our small team and we get to test some ideas and really iterate.  

Like Harkness' movement, which is now partially free and partially 2D, and then we faced into problem about the walls. And now Harkness can be seen through some walls. So it's a nice silhouette. Glad we made some rework with Harkness' design and overall shape.

Gyostage
We were happy to be part of this year's Gyostage here in Kuopio. And we get to really try out VR so that was great. Wish we have something more to show and playtest the next year, but overall, it was great.

Nordic Game Week / Peliviikko
Also, we were invited to take part in Kuopio Peliviikko that is part of Nordic Game Week (which in part is part of International Game Week. It's like the Inception, which is a good movie, you should watch it). 

But nevertheless, it was a great way to be part of local gaming culture and IGDA Kuopio is going to make more for the next year's events. We had plans to make the alpha demo for this event, but because some technical difficulties we barely made it, and even that was just a pre-alpha we reworked for wider playtest.

Our graphic team making last adjustments to the alpha demo.

We get to see Kuopio based video game cover band Sinfinian on stage and that was cool.

‎Junction
Part of our team, @olenbluu to be exact took part in Junction 2017 and it was a blast. 

'I was pretty much on new territory because I ended up doing more graphic than I have ever done to any playable demo of ours. It was truly a learning experience for me and I hope I get to do more work with Blender and Krita and maybe be more use for our graphical designer @dicenete in future projects.'

If you're interested the prototype made in Junction and full team credits can be found from https://devpost.com/software/no_name_team-project


And of course Finland celebrated 100years of Independence. Our local IGDA had pre-holiday party and so many things happened this year that it’s impossible to even start listing everything great in this year for us.

Holidays are still coming (you cannot stop them) and we're drafting the schedule again, learned a lot from this alpha demo phase (we changed some of the movement choices and made some tweaks on control, like mentioned) but nevertheless we're happy with the way things are going at this rate and most of all, we are all feeling confident about Peace Quarter being the game we are proud to make.

Happy holidays from all of Rx3 Team

_Rx3 Team

Blog post #16: Debug.Log(“Hello World”);

Ok, this is my first entry here and I hopefully have some time to write more about coding and the development side of Peace Quarter.

As you may have noticed if you are a longtime follower (hopefully there are longtime followers) we develop our games with Unity. I handle the developing and coding side so our creative members can focus on that – being creative - and get their awesome work come to life in our game world.

We have come long way understanding how to work as a team and that really has its marks in my work as well. I used to mainly code stuff that needed to be switched from code if someone wanted to alter the way things work. This approach can be seen in earlier mobile game “Gemfall Workforce Inc – Harkness’ shift” and especially updating it. Everything we want to change comes back at me! That is bad for the team because they necessarily can’t get forward and time being quite the rare asset it slows down the development. It even might lead to some nighttime coding sessions to get the project at speed again.

So, to tackle this “lesson learned” I now develop assets for the team to use the Unity’s editor to modify key components. Development of these “tools” may be little slower but it keeps all team members at pace. You could think almost as the most valuable thing for me to do is try to reduce my work (Am I making myself unemployed?). Of course, there still are some things you can only change at code level but usually, they are bigger issues that we have noticed. I’d say developing games is constant learning. I would say my skills with Unity, C#, and programming, in general, have increased multiple times in a quite short time. One reason of course also be that as a small team the area of everyone is huge. That leads to a very versatile skill set that is useful. 

Another very good experience for team work was participating in game jams. There’s nothing like getting the whole team sitting at the same table and discussing. The feedback is instant and usually, the project is on fire (not literally!) at those times. This is the main reason we set up our office. We have a large table – ok table made from 4 tables and a book self – where we all sit and usually do our own parts. But the time we get pieces together we can all witness them first hand. 
It’s also very good that we as a starting indie team have finished some smaller projects and thus have seen the complete life-cycle of smaller game projects. If we had gone along and started Peace Quarter full steam without completing any other projects I think we wouldn’t even get this far. We also do some side projects with web sites and of course, small game prototypes for later use and I would encourage all starting programmers to first learn to finish stuff – small stuff at first – and then just start writing bigger games, programs, websites etc. You gotta start small you know.

Also for the guys and gals just starting to learn to program, it really isn’t hard it just takes time and willing to learn! There isn’t a better time to start than now. There are numerous tutorials online and game engines have become available for anyone to make their own games!

- Rx3 Team (Ville Räsänen, coding and programming.)

Blog Post #13: New tech demo plan

How we must make hard cuts to designs and ideas we love. Not only in Peace Quarter, but also in other projects too. But especially in Peace Quarter. We would love to fill it with everything we love and thought in the first place.

But, not everything is usable or even clever to put in your work. It may seem like it is the best thing ever, but like they say in writing, 'kill your darlings'. It doesn't necessary mean that the idea is bad, it just, you cannot do everything even if you like to do. Like, at the moment, our graphic designer is pretty convinced she will make new model for Harkness and visit Harkness design with new eyes.

But famous ‘kill your darlings’ example is closer than we would like to admit. We had this idea that Harkness would repair things along the way. He still does, but at that moment we thought we would introduce three key ways to repair, fix/build/connect. We had them all figured out. For what you would use them and how they would affect the surrounding world.

But that didn't even last for our first tech demo, we took those ideas away and instead left only repair.

In tech demo we had our core mechanics displayed. TSUP, MTV and teleports. (And in a note of tech demo we’re on our way to make a new tech demo, showcasing new Harkness model and little from the first playable level, Finite Horizon. You can follow for more news from here or from any of our social media, we tend to be happy we’re able to do the next tech demo.)

We were happy with all of the core mechanics we had in the first tech demo. But we decided to merge some of them together to make it more simpler and hopefully easier for players to grasp the idea. It’s always hard to start guessing how much too much or too little, and middle-ground is harder to find that you would think in the start. 

We see how good we did once the new tech demo is completed and we get some feedback.

_Rx3 Team

Blog Post #9: Progress bar

This is our friendly reminder that we have made progress with the game, not only by getting most of the narrative scripts done, but also by starting soon with assets. We have almost set with the first draft for the short story that is going to come with before the release of the Peace Quarter and then with the released game for backstory, because we love backstory and lore.

Lately we have been busy taking part in different happenings locally and being part in events in near region that promote healthy game culture. Which is nice, because did we wanted or not, were part of the gaming culture by just being and then of course just being gamers. So, it's great to see our gaming culture being treated nicely and presented for kids all ages as a legitimate hobby rather than something only nerds do in the basement. And we know as a fact, that can't be true, because no one of use is living in the basement, so we don't qualify as a gamer? Maybe gaming is just something normal like playing sports or collecting postmarks. You can be passionate for it (like, I don't know, start making them) or treat it as a hobby and nothing more. And that's okay. And of course, everything between those two. Maybe you're passionate about gaming, but not passionate enough to start making yours or passionate enough for some game to start competitive gaming.

GemFall Workforce Inc. has been downloaded past two months a lot, or at least more than we imaged by now, because it's our first game and all and some of the idea was to just make a game and get to know our own working process with it, so it would be ready when we need to start with Peace Quarter. But it has been better and we thank you for downloading and trying it out. We really appreciate it. Thanks.

Our first promo art for Peace Quarter is also in the corner (of your eye) and soon we post it here and it's going to rain rainbows and kittens. Talking about kitten, Oh My Kitties release have been delayed a lot lately, but that is, in a weird way a good thing, because it means we have much on our plate. But we're doing it and going to give you a Oh My Kitties - out of open beta, ASAP. Meanwhile, you can still download the game from Google Play Store in it's open beta stage you can also try out our cool clicker app that our coder made.

It helps if you're working in anywhere where you need to count people, or coffee cups or anything.

_Rx3 Team
Now working on: getting the narrative scripts to life and finishing the promo art. You will see, you all will see. 

Other: Binge watching Firefly because it's going to be taken from the Netflix. 

Next stop, promo art. Stay tuned.