It’s official that Otherside has gone Gold! I’ll be posting a downloadable version by the weekend and possibly setup a webplayer version as well, we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime here’s our trailer we made to be played during our Pitch and Play

For the past weeks we’ve been crunching hard to hit our Alpha milestone. Here’s where we’re at:

• Feature complete – Every game mechanic has been implemented. All that remains is a lot of tweaking.
• Level 1 fully functional & dressed – 90%
• Level 2 fully functional & greyboxed – 50%
• Level 3 fully functional & greyboxed – 50%
• Level 0 (the “Hub”) fully functional & partially dressed – 70%
• Character model is nearing completion
• Refined mesh
• Fully textured
• Rigged & weighted
• Animated (walk, run, jump, fall, idle, move cube)
• All essential assets completed
• Nature doodads (trees, rocks, mushrooms)
• Architectural pieces (archs, floors, walls, stairways)
• Thematic props (lightpost, speaker, portal)
• and many, many more
• Most of our audio assets are now being fitted into the game.
• We recently received the second take on our main theme from Tom Stoffel and we’ve been humming on his sweet tunes since.

After our pre-alpha shown above and the final alpha since, we’ve made a lot of progress. A new playable version of our games will be released in a couple of days.

Starting up again straight after New Year’s, we’ve been roughly 1 month in outright production. Over the course of this month, there has been some drastic changes to our game. Please give it a try and let us know what you think, it’ll only take 5 minutes!

Download “Otherside Pre-Alpha 1″
What’s changed:

• Switches are a thing of the past. Most of them anyways.
• Cube movements are now triggered via a mouse gesture system. As long as you’re within range, you can move any dynamic cube.
• First person view is out.
• Target mode works in 3rd person view now.

What’s coming:

• More engaging surfaces, with smaller size cubes & rails in top of the larger cubes.
• A large quantity of additional art assets. Can’t keep using a signpost as a make-shift switch for much longer…
• Custom character model.
• Tutorial level.
• Re-engineered mouse gesture system.

Another concept level for Otherside! Leave some comments, let us know what you think.

As it stands now, this is the plan for our first level. In it, the player will have to assemble the ‘sun’ for this world. The location of this area to all other levels will dictate which direction the lighting for the other areas will come from. Designing this level has cemented our idea that all levels we design should have some form of assembly to them. This train of thought came from the idea that this world space is a work in progress and Lily will end up having to complete some of this work in order to progress.

Check out our PDF, enjoy our art concepts, and leave comments too! Team Hotsauce always welcomes feedback.

Cick to review the Art Bible PDF for Otherside

A detailed walk-through of our first prototype of level 1, covering design choices and examples of the direction the game is heading.

(yay!)

Working without a plan is a terrible idea.. therefore a proper plan is needed to execute an awesome idea to fruition. Here is a breakdown of a schedule and task list for Team Hotsauce, and a taste of the role for a Project Manager and what tasks coincide with the responsibilities. It’s not all glory, but without a strong plan its hard to judge how much work needs to be done. Let the battles begin!!

Here is the Task List for Team Hotsauce.

Here is the  Timesheet for Team Hotsauce.

Want to play it for yourself? Click here to play Prototype #1!

Well hi there! So for my first post on our project blog I’d like to present a playable demo focusing on our core mechanic of moving cubes! For those that don’t know me yet, I’m the Tech Lead for this project  and will be taking care of the programming and implementation side of things along side my teammate Jacob. For this pre-production period I’ll be working on prototyping our gameplay mechanics and preparing our TDD (Technical Design Document) before the end of term.

Currently my goal with programming is to create a bunch of drag-and-drop components for our Level Designers to make putting together our levels as easily and efficiently as possible. As of now I have the pieces needed to lay down the basic layout for our levels so that we can begin whiteboxing. Programming the actual movements of the cubes took quite a bit of trial and error but was actually pretty easy to complete. The more difficult part was reducing the number of scripts (intially 3) into 1 and modifying the options seen by the designers to make it easy for them to implement switches. I wanted to design them in such a way that when you choose what type of movement the cube will have (Rotate, Flip or Slide) you will only see options/variables related to that type. It took me a couple days to figure it out but eventually I was able to set things up in such a way that our designers will be able to setup switches and cubes without having to go into the code at all or sift through a crowd of variables for the specific ones they need.

Different options displayed based on type selected

With this completed we’ll be able to get the base layouts of our levels whiteboxed and planned out. My next task will be to start putting together puzzle components to put on our cubes to add more gameplay. In the meantime I’ve posted a brief walkthrough video (top of the post) of the prototype level and have it embedded at the end of this post if you want to play it. If you find any bugs in the demo please let us know by reporting at bugs.playotherside.com, any feedback provided will be greatly appreciated. The controls are pretty simple;

Hope you guys like it, I’ll post another demo and video when our first level has been put together by our level designer, we already have it planned out and it just needs to be assembled

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