Hey y’all! We hope you’re staying safe and healthy in these times. Dang it’s nearly June already, weren’t we supposed to ship this thing in June?
I’ll get this out of the way at the start: Genesis Noir is now due to launch around early October, rather than June. Due to a few months of slower work due to working from home and such, and a few other things we’ll mention below, along with a really exciting thing we can’t talk about until August, we felt like we needed this additional time to avoid completely panicking and ending up with something unpolished and buggy. However, due to this delay, we’ll be doing the following things:
- Professional QA / bug testing
- Finishing interactions and bits that would have been cut entirely
- Adding accessibility-minded control features (detailed below)
- A lot more playtesting and polish
- SECRET THING (shhhh we can’t tell you until August)
With that out of the way, we’ve written some stuff about what we’ve been up to lately, so check it out!
Jeremy’s Tech TunnelHi, Jeremy here! A lot of my time over the past few months has been spent deep inside the inner workings of the game engine, making sure controllers and mice and keyboards play nice with all the menus and user interface bits of the game. A result of this is some great accessibility features like fully remappable controls, keyboard character movement, and seamless switching between any of these input methods at any point during the game. Yes, you can now use a controller in one hand and a mouse in the other at the same time; truly a back-of-the-box feature! I joke, but accessibility stuff is pretty important to pay attention to.
This work was kickstarted (heh) by the requirements of the Xbox certification process. Also called “lot check”, every game console manufacturer requires your game to pass a pretty tricky set of tests to ensure that if your game breaks, people will blame the game creator and not the console itself. It basically comes down to testing things related to the area where the console’s features sort of mesh into the game’s features. How many controllers are supported? Is there multiplayer? Do achievements work, and is your save data uploaded to the cloud correctly?
Part of the reason for the delay is the fact that the Xbox process was particularly difficult, mainly due to the fact that an Xbox Live Account is required to write save data for any game, and you can sign in and out of this account at any time while the game is running. Additionally, Xbox Live Accounts are attached to individual controllers. This leads to situations like the following:
- Mid-game, the player disconnects their controller, then plugs in a second controller which is logged in to a different user than the one that was playing. This other player doesn’t have any Genesis Noir save data, they can’t be allowed to continue the game.
- Mid-game, the player connects a second controller that is also logged in to the same account, but only one controller can be used at a time.
- The player lost internet connection while their save data was uploading! Oh jeez that’s bad!
The main solution to the first two items is a really involved messaging system state machine thing, where the game basically follows a flowchart to determine what actions to take in what order, depending on what controllers are plugged in and what users are logged in and whether save data exists or not.
In the case of scenario 1, the game shows a message asking the player to plug a controller in and press the A button, followed by a message saying that the user profile changed, where pressing A will allow the previous user to sign back in, or pressing B will return to the main menu. In scenario 2, we just ignore input from the second controller entirely, and scenario 3 is solved by keeping a local copy of save data on the console which is used as a backup when online save data is unavailable.
All this together is a big amount of work that I never imagined we’d have to deal with. Most of the heavy lifting was handled by Plastic Fern Studios, who we’ve partnered with to do the bulk of the porting work, but I effectively had to rewrite the entire way the game handles inputs in order to ease their work on creating the messaging system. Overall, we’ve ended up with a stable console experience for the game, and with a pretty good suite of controller options and button remapping features on all platforms. I hope this allows even more people to play our game!
Evan’s Marketing MakingsI’ve been working on getting marketing materials pretty as we get closer to release. The two biggies are the key art (a term for the main image that gets used everywhere) and a new trailer.
Our current key art is one of the first pieces of concept art I made back in 2014 (gosh! time flies). I had a few drawings on my site and people would stumble on them and send me nice messages. A couple asked if they could tattoo this image on themselves. An author asked if she could use it for the cover of her book on Calvino. I figured there was something to the cosmic longing in this image that grabbed people.
This image has served us well in the world of big images on the web but on Steam and other digital store pages there are many places the key art needs to function. With the smaller images, our current art becomes really illegible. Outlined art disappears into grainy little pixels very quickly. Look at this. What is this? It’s so tiny.
I’ve been beefing up our logo and attempting to find an illustration that holds up at such small sizes. I’ve tried many iterations. Take a look at all my iterations! (This isn’t even all of ‘em)
We ended up with these two images.
The drama of the Big Bang rocketing towards Miss mass was a nice moment, but we found this illustration did not hold up at different aspect ratios and scales as well as the solo No Man illustration.
Here’s the illustration in portrait aspect ratio to prove it’s flexible.
I’ve also been working on a new trailer that’ll announce our release date. Fellow Traveler has got
Good up North to help us put it together and we’re really excited by how it’s taking shape. I’m really looking forward to releasing it to the world. Here’s a little taste from the trailer WIP.
I had fun animating this little drinking spin for the trailer. We’ve also included some text in the trailer, so I’ve been adding typography directly into the game levels to capture in context. Gonna be neat I think :)
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Hope you’re all well and thank you for your patience! We’re working hard and excited to bring you a well crafted cosmic adventure :)
E+J
