It was a while since the last update here. Mostly because we have been to busy actually working on the game to make an update. Since we decided to enter Microsofts Dream Build Play competition we got a harsh deadline looming above us. We have been successful in moving to the new content and are producing levels in it. It’s just all the small details that takes time coming together.

However we have some nice news. Our second trailer has pushed above 5000 views which is quite nice.

Not as much as we are aiming for in the future of course But still nice to see it continue to climb over time. Except for that we are in a big getting things done phase. We hope we will be able to show you more soon,

So as usual we have had a turbulent time here. We discovered 12 of March that there was a Nordic game Indie Night this year too after have looked for it earlier this year but since it wasn’t announced we had assumed there wasn’t going to be any. But it was and the deadline from submissions was a week from then. As we are in a major stage of rebuilding and remaking parts of the game we didn’t have any level playable newer than the ones from CyberLan during the fall.

So we really had to get into getting things done mode and somehow get models and game play together enough at least for a video. I think we finished up loading it just as the deadline approached and started filming 45 minutes before deadline so it was tight. While not all parts are the ones we are gonna use permanently and some parts from different environments got meshed together to make it we did get it up and running with our newest gameplay mechanic with player controlled lasers and mirrors working together.

While we can’t show you that just yet I can give you a small teaser image from work on one of our current environments it’s currently very much in an early stage it’s mostly a lighting test

Except for this we are still progressing well with creating our new environments. And I would also take this opportunity to welcome Phil Jones who will be doing his internship here at Defrost games until september.

Due to sickness in the group (yeah it’s that time of the season) We have opted to prolong the current build until the original deadline for build #4. However this does not mean the time is being wasted instead we have had time to revisit and polish some old systems to see if we can push them to the next level. One of these system was our Fake GI bounced light solution (one of three GI systems in the game) which had been a bit of a quick work since true realtime GI took to mush of a poll on the 360 for our taste. But it wasm’t until now we had time to go back and make a second pass to push it from barely useable to an actual tool for lightning our levels.

This is only the bounced light so in the real game there will be the direct lightsources too of course (and textures etc). Another thing we have looked over are our reflections before we used local cubemaps but an issue was that they didn’t really matched up with the world now we do some raytracing inside the cubes to make accurate lookups which means we can sue them for real reflections like mirrors or really shiny floors and it will just work. And will work with glossy reflections etc as well And it’s pretty much free to which we like alot

So we just finished build 2 this Monday, but we waited with this post until we could launch the new website. I hope you like it. People using internet explorer below verision 9.0 will experience some issues but for everyone else it should all be working now. Some images needs to be updated with new screens but all in all it’s up and running. Thanks to us now running on a pure WordPress back end it will be a lot easier to change layouts and add extra features as we progress.

For the build overall things wen’t well we closed down 36 official tasks this period and a lot more unofficial. Amongst new features is a new collisions system that allows us to attach data to surfaces in the collision mesh like being reflective for laser beams or  being lethal on touch for the player. And with that we have added force fields as a new gameplay element. Which will allow us to create very dynamic puzzles where the environment is constantly changing. We also got our new GUI in which is looking very nice and clean. And a lot of small stuff. The game is coming together slowly and surely soon we hope we will feel ready to show even more of it.

Hello everyone.

For this year we have decided to make some changes with the update process for the site instead of adding new posts here and then we will mainly align the updates with our development process. Since we work on a build for every 2 weeks schedule this will mean that you should get at least an update every second week on Tuesdays so that we have some time to collect our thoughts after the build deadline on Mondays.

Anyway while we can’t tell you about everything we are doing we can share some information. This month has been quite turbulent as we have had to move our development progress away from wave as Google is closing it down. We have found a decent replacement for wave in using shareflow instead but it has some issues still that we hope will be worked out. But when it doesn’t bug it’s quite nice.

For this build we have been focusing on making the PC version an Equal partner to the 360 version of the game while there still remains some work we are confident that it will all be worked out during the next build. Since not everyone in the team has an xbox we felt this was an important step to make work as smooth as possible. However due to the game being based on XNA only DX10 level cards will work out (However for example a 8800 gt in XP will work fine even though it’s a DX10 card on a DX9 OS).

We are also making a major overhaul of the gui components of the game which we hope we will be able to share with you soon. So look out for the next build post and we will hopefully be showing pictures and not just words