Hot on the news of Tuesday, we also just found out that Unmechanical won Best Artistic Achievement at this year’s Nordic Game Awards, the yearly developer gathering and award ceremony for the Scandinavian industry.
We are all pleasantly surprised how our little game gotten so far. With no special/social features, no multiplayer, and just three hours of linear singleplayer we are very happy with what we managed to accomplish.
I am proud to announce that we’ve reached the 100 000 copies sold milestone with our game Unmechanical (PC+iOS)! To celebrate this we’ve released the free variant Unmechanical Begins.
If you haven’t tried our game yet there really is no excuse anymore to give it a go and see what Unreal can do on mobile :)
Also for another 57 hours the PC version of Unmechanical is up on a pay-what-you-want basis on Indiegamestand.com. Pay above the average (1.23USD) and you will also receive two old prototype builds as well as the soundtrack in three different formats.
As for the rest I am currently still working on my secret new expansion project for this website, some level design work for clients, along with handling all kinds of things at FutureGames, our education. I’ve been busy following up on our internships for one. Over the past two months I’ve visited places like Yager, Guerrilla Games, DICE, Starbreeze, Paradox, etc. I have recently also been by the mobile games giant King to give a short lecture about Unreal Engine development to some of their devs, and over at FutureGames I am currently running the students their third and final game project. This time in collaboration with the Swedish developer Fatshark, who are acting as publisher for our students.
Last day of my daily updates. When I posted about my Rekoil and KFS work yesterday, I wrote that levels like Sawmill only took me about 18 hours to make. I recorded my screen while working on the Prison level for Rekoil, and while updating the Oilrig for KFS, and turned those recordings into timelapse videos of those levels shaping up.
The KFS Oilrig took me 2 hours 45 minutes to go from what I received from the art team to polishing it up, and the Prison level took 20 hours about + another 8 hours of unrecorded work to set up the entire level from start to end, including the creation of placeholder art. I did not prepare anything for either of these two levels/videos so what you see is just improvisation. The only thing I had when I began work on the Prison was a rough idea of the general shape and idea of the level, but no sketches or anything on paper, nor any concepts.
The Oilrig was mostly made already, but lacked effects and styling when I received it. It was particularly easy to do because it was a cutscene level, so you can get away with a lot. There were only a couple of angles to take care of and I did not had to think much/anything about performance.
There are some things that I could have done better, or put more time into if I would have had that, for example the outside of the Prison is rather flat whereas the inside has the tendency to be cramped plus too disconnected from the outside, and the inside also has a bit too flat lighting and detailing going on, but those smaller problems aside, as an illustration of my drive for efficiency and my usual no-nonsense-just-do-it approach to everything I create it gets the point across. I want to give my clients fast but quality results because my time is their money.
If you have epilepsy/photosensitivity you should probably not watch these, the screen jumps around aggressively and it goes really fast.
Portfolio
I have finally gotten around to updating my portfolio. I updated some info, added a 5th level page for the era 2011-Today, and added all the work that I have done in the past 1.5 years about that was missing, and I also made the website more compatible with iOS devices.
Rekoil
Still working on Rekoil. We are moving forward at a solid pace, though like usual things end up taking a bit longer than expected. We are still very much so in need of your support on Steam Greenlight.
Here are the levels I have worked on. Many of these were team efforts. Details on who did what are on my portfolio’s fifth level page. In general I did little gameplay design on these, and was mostly responsible for the level art side of things. I did a lot of the detailing, some of the major architecture, and I set up the lighting, texture and light color pallets, effects, etc. Overall look and feel basically, visual polish and styling, along
Levels like Sawmill I am particularly proud off. I made those entirely myself, and I did it super fast. You are looking at just ~18 hours of work from start to end. I got more on that tomorrow in the form of two videos.
Kung Fu Superstar
I did some quick work on their new environment a while ago, video of that coming up tomorrow. The team tried to get funding secured via Kickstarter, as one of the first UK teams to go onto Kickstarter + with testimonials from people like Peter Molyneux but none of that seemed to have helped. It never met its goals so the project was canned unfortunately.
Here are some screenshots of the newest environment I worked on plus some new shots of the previous stuff I helped out on. I mostly did visual polish and special fx/materials/lighting work. Credits to the whole KFS team for all the rest.
Day three of my 5 days of updates!
Unmechanical was awarded Best Game & Best Sound at BIG, the Brazilian International Games Festival.
We also received some boxed copies of the game, of our German retail distribution partner CrimsonCow
iOS wise we are quite a bit behind on our schedule. We had planned to release the iOS version of the game in September, but that obviously didn’t happen. We discussed the game with some external people and came to the conclusion that in order to for the game to have a reasonable chance of success, we had to support more iOS devices. The original plan was to go for iPad2 minimum, but over the past 4 months we’ve been hard at work at further optimizing the game, and we can now proudly say that we got the game working on pretty much every single iOS device out there.
We are now supporting iOS4.3/iPhone3GS/iPod 4th Gen/iPad1, and everything newer than that. We did tons of heavy modifications to all of our content and to the engine itself. I’ve learned a huge amount of deep technical stuff by doing this kind of work the past year, so it has been very valuable on a technical level.
The game is scheduled for release some time later this month, or in February. Most likely. No promises there.
Some new iOS screenshots. These are in-game shots of the game running on iPad4.
Huge update tomorrow! Dozens of screenshots of my latest levels.
I’ve been interview and featured in The Games Machine, one of Italy’s biggest gaming magazines. Thanks to Carola Cudemo from indies4indies.com for setting it up!
Got some new Unmechanical media and info tomorrow, with dozens of screenshots of all my recent work and some timelapse WIP videos coming up day 4 and 5.
I am going to post one update a day for rest of this week, to give you an idea of everything I have been up to in 2012.
Hourences.com
As you may have noticed Hourences.com got updated.
FutureGames Class of 2012 – Game Project 1
I am still teaching at the education FutureGames, and once more we’ve thrown our students into the deep end right away. I think the results have been particularly good this year.
Together with Tobias Lundmark I made a video of these games. All footage was captured directly from an iPad2.