BLACKHOLE

Got it. Done. Finished. Auriel is completed, just like the rest of the crew of spaceship Endera. The dubbing dialogues in both Czech and English are mastered, cut and on Friday the last ‘bother’ awaits me – fixing and detecting of the missing dialogues. Because when you’re doing something as mechanized as this, you’re sure to make a mistake somewhere. Surely, I’ve joined some dialogues together, or disconnected the others. Some of them are sure to be TOO long, so they’ll need to be divided into ‘parts’. This all I’ll have to deal with in the next few days, and then the final correction for which I’ll ask someone to come and take care of will come. I couldn’t do it again.

The final correction is basically just about sitting down with headphones and listening to all the dialogues while you keep checking if they’re the same as the screenplay. You find the mistakes and mark them. We fix them. Simple as that. But it’s a bother.

In the end, the game has 1 hour 45 minutes of dialogues, can you believe that? It’s huge! Now I need to personally make sure the dialogues are not longer than the gameplay. Because then the game would seem way too speech-y, and you should always have 60/40, or better yet, 70/30 ratio between the Gameplay and the Story.    

Just the game into will take you 15 minutes. And before you make yourself familiar on the Entity and find out how to operate the game, 2.5 hours will pass like nothing.:) And only then everything starts… but no more spoilers for you. I just wanted to say that we’re more than content with the length of the game. We think it’s not too long, but also not too short. :)

You can see our trailer on GameTrailers.com

It won’t be too big of a deal to most people. But to us it is.

You know, when Tomáš and I first started with Indian, we often gathered inspiration and material on website called GameTrailers, and actually, it was mainly their now cancelled series GTTV. The redactors of GT always pick very good games for their database, they include the bad ones too, but never on the first page. If you browse through such a website with respect, you don’t even dare to hope they’d be interested in you, after you’ve sent them your original trailer and never see them post it.

But… we finally have a trailer with the official logo of GameTrailers! It’s awesome. The story trailer probably caught somebody’s attention, and even though it has 4 likes, 4 dislikes and 0 comments, in the past 16 hours it got over 1000 views, and we find these to be very important 1000 extra views. We’re happy :).

Gelu still fixs broken tilesets

Tomáš is also nearly done, but we’re still battling the tile sets. The marked tile sets are slowly being replaced by the fixed ones, and Radek is also starting to faint from all this. He doesn’t know where to jump first. Little communication problems are common in all teams, but thankfully, we use Asana system, which divides our work into smaller parts so we don’t forget what’s our biggest priority at the moment. Anyway, there’s been a little inside joke by Gelu:

[8. 1. 2015 22:04:55] Gelu: I don't give a s**t on this!!
[8. 1. 2015 22:05:39] Gelu:  I mean, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.

No one ever said this would be easy. :)

We have solutions for integrated graphics

We’ll need to test it, but I think Peter from YoYoGames and I managed to create a new functional version of Game Maker Studio that supports detection of graphic cards – or well, the actual type and name. Thanks to this, we’d be able to detect most of the integrated cards at the very first start of the game and set their video memory accordingly. Meaning: immediately load the right textures into VRAM.  

You won‘t be able to play the game with FULL HD textures on laptops, it seems. But generally, it makes sense. Laptop graphics aren’t powerful enough for that. Note: this doesn’t apply to when you have nVidii or AMD on your laptop. But if you have nVidi or AMD with share VRAM – meaning shared through Intel chipset, it won’t work, sorry.

Also note, that isn’t our fault, but the laptop makers fault. As I have mentioned before, we’ll be happy to make a version that supports laptops, BUT that cannot be said about 70% of the game industry. If you go to a shop these days, and loot at the basic conditions of all games available, most of them will tell you that it does not support integrated graphic cards. At least we finally know why. 

Anyway, it’s a good thing we can now manage to make it work and not cash somewhere along the way. :) Generally, laptops do have FULL HD resolution, but less pixels, so you probably won’t even notice the optimization of textures. Because they’re still not in the JPEG format, but non-compressed textures. Mwahaha. The game looks pretty anyway!

Over & Out.

See ya tomorrow! :)