Yesterday was Aduge’s 3rd birthday!!!

Young! For all of you that wants to understand better what the hell is a sound designer, we found an interesting text - but portuguese only… (Portugal portuguese, btw).

We will start a brief-post-serie about what Tsar sounds will be and from where all this idea came from.
To begin with listen to Peter and the Wolf from Prokofiev (with a bonus: this version has Bowie as narrator!). It’s a composition written in 1936 at Soviet Union in which each character is represented by an instrument. More info at wikipedia, an interesting reading.

And what about Tsar? Yeah, this idea was our starting point, mix it with the game’s conceptualization and in the end each character will be represented by a different instrument!
Wtf? How can this happen?
Stay tuned, more sound updates soon!

Whew. It’s been months since the last update. Last time I made our regular round of updates, we were returning from our holiday breaks and in the middle of our pre-production pretty much.

Well, here we are, at May’s doorsteps, and now we are finally entering the full production stage. So, where are we? We are finishing a gameplay mock-up on Game Maker to test some last ideas and the general feel of the game and finishing up the final touches of preparation for production. The mock-up has pretty much all game mechanics in a simplified, leaner way. It’s working for us to test some gameplay dynamics and adjust certain aspects of level design and the level of difficulty. It will be more vital in the future when we will be working on the full functionalities of the final software, the mock-up will be a testing fallback for game design to address gameplay problems and to find solutions in a simpler environment.

While the mock-up code is being done by myself, the graphics were quickly drafted by Ingrid and Pirin and sound effects quickly assembled by Marcel and Beto. They are now working the kinks with how visual and aural assets will be produced, both technically and creatively. Vermonde is currently in Berlin studying Marketing and drinking quality beer. However, he is also in charge of testing our new engine and tackling some of the more difficult technical stuff that will be used in the game. Namely, dynamic 2D lighting and shadows (using normal mapping and simple geometrical math to do the trick), dynamic sounds (without the use of expensive middlewares, it is a little tricky) and solving algorithms to satisfy our robust AI requirements (the troublemaker of the lot).

Well. There will be more updates and posts following up soon! See ya.