First impressions of GoD Factory: Wingmen on the Oculus Rift

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:16:01 +0000

So, today on our Kickstarter update we’ve shown what gameplay “looks like” with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Here’s a spoiler: it rocks.

Here’s the link to the update, there’s more information there!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninedots/god-factory-wingmen/posts/501597

GoD Factory: Wingmen will be available for Mac

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Wed, 29 May 2013 15:09:58 +0000

It’s always a complex question to know whether or not we’ll support additional platforms. However, after some careful considerations, it seems that given the technologies we’ll use, both the engine (Unity) and plugins we use, we should be able to port with relative ease to the Mac OS. We’d be glad to bring the game to more people, especially when it doesn’t cost us much to do it. One key point to us was the ability to have as many people populating our matches to make sure we have a strong community. We should be able to have Mac players and PC players fighting each other (or together) in the same matches.

Here’s a link to the kickstarter update announcing this. It also contains a pretty picture!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninedots/god-factory-wingmen/posts

Our Kickstarter is up!

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:37:41 +0000

So, this morning we’ve launched the kickstarter campaign. Anyone willing to help us out should share the page on social media, tell their friends about it, and pre-order the game (or more if you fancy some kick ass exclusive rewards).

Wallpapers! Kickstarter is on the way

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:26:33 +0000

So, setting up a kickstarter campaign when you’re not in the US can be pretty problematic. You have to find someone in the US who will accept to host the campaign for you and who is trustworthy enough to manage your funds, there’s stuff to figure out about taxes, etc. Making a KS campaign is rather complicated on its own as we have to figure out the best rewards, the lowest price we can possibly get without hurting ourselves, we need to make the video, write the text, etc. Anyway, the good news is that all this work is pretty much done and soon enough we’ll have the approbation from Kickstarter to run the project. Meanwhile, since we had to make some screenshots, we re-used some of this content and came up with some wallpaper images, so here they are!

(Click on the images to display them at full size)

We’ve been invited to take part in the Bonus Stage event

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:46:53 +0000

Nine Dots has been invited to showcase its games at the Musée de la Civilisation in Québec City for the Bonus Stage event next Saturday. If you want to come and try GoD Factory: Wingmen, we’ll have 4 game stations for those interested.

Here’s the link!
https://www.facebook.com/events/378531178928307/?fref=ts
______________________

Nine Dots a été invité à présenter ses jeux au Musée de la Civilisation à Québec dans le cadre de la soirée “Bonus Stage” samedi le 11 mai. Si vous voulez venir essayer GoD Factory: Wingmen, nous aurons 4 stations de jeux pour les intéressés!

Voici le lien!
https://www.facebook.com/events/378531178928307/?fref=ts

Ongoing Greenlight and upcoming Kickstarter

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:59:48 +0000

Graphics and pie charts!

So, it’s been a little over a month since we submitted GoD Factory: Wingmen on Greenlight, and we wanted to be as transparent about the process as possible. We’ve observed some slight spikes both after the video by TotalBiscuit and the article on the Penny Arcade Report, which allowed us to keep some acceptable momentum for quite a good run. Sadly, since then we’ve slowed down on major announcements and it stalled our progression a little, as you can easily see on that green line on the lower right graph.

I admit that I expected the amount of votes would be higher following these high profile mentions, but it seems that people in general do not bother so much with Greenlight. From what I understand, there simply aren’t that many users actively rating games on Greenlight, I estimate at maybe 30,000 or so, and everyone else must be dragged to the platform from external sources to get a high enough amount of “Yes” votes.

Interesting fact: it seems that it takes more or less 50,000 “Yes” votes to be high enough to be selected by Valve. Given that we are currently at 7,500, it’s not so bad! We still have many things to announce and many reasons to gain some coverage, so I dare say, with cautious optimism, that we might actually get through Greenlight with a little luck and good support from our audience.

One of the main reason to drive traffic to our Greenlight page is that soon, we’ll start a Kickstarter campaign to fund GoD Factory. If we play our cards right, the cross promotion between kickstarter and greenlight will drive traffic to both pages. I sure wished it wouldn’t be the case, but I think we might not be able to finish the game without some external help. On the bright side however, running a campaign on Kickstarter is both an excellent way to spread the word about our existence and a great validation of the players interest for such a game. We will also have some GREAT rewards for our backers Just like with Brand, we’ll have perks that allow contributors to add a personal touch of their own for everyone to see. It should be up in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

As for those who supported Brand last year, know that the Unity remake/port is going very well and that even a year later we still support the PC version of the game (we’ve done pretty much all we can for the Xbox360 version and we’ve changed tools since then, so our updates won’t be compatible with XBLIG, sadly).

That’s all for today folks!

The environment in GoD Factory: Wingmen

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:50:03 +0000

Just because the game is in space doesn’t mean that there won’t be any level environment in the game. Aside from the enormous carriers, we intend to have some unique looking hedron shaped asteroids, shipwrecks, space stations, satellites and even HUGE statues called “GoD monuments”. These god monuments will sometimes even be animated and will usually be placed far from the level, as their main purpose will be to decorate the level with something fancy to look at.

We’ve captured some very raw footage of some work in progress with the environment so that you may have good sense of the scale we are looking for. Of course, being all WIP stuff means that it will change before the release of the game, invariably for the better

Porting Brand from XNA to Unity

Pierre-Tuan Vallée — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:07:12 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, we’re porting and upgrading Brand from XNA to the Unity engine. We started this less than a month ago and got fairly far in this short period of time.

We use C# both for Brand in XNA and in Unity, which means a lot of the code can be directly copy pasted from the old project’s files. Most of the drawing and physics code is gone since the Unity engine takes care of it, and we’ve been able to add a lot of nice lighting and shader effects that greatly improve the visual quality of the game. The ease of development of the Unity engine also allows us to quickly tweak and add features to Brand, like the ragdolls you can see in the video from the first Brand : Fit for a King post.

Here is a quick comparison screenshot, the visuals of Brand : Fit for a King (bottom) are not final, but this still shows some of the improvements we’ve made.

Brand: Fit for a King is an upgraded standalone version of Brand (think of it as Brand 1.5). A free version of this game will be given to our RocketHub contributors and those who bought Brand on Desura.

Pierre-Tuan Vallée
Programmer

The First Person View, HUD

Etienne Vanier — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:55:03 +0000

It was clear that making a first person cockpit view for GoD Factory was mandatory. Purely for the immersive feeling, this mode of view lets the player really feel inside the ship. Although we’ve only made a drawn mock-up, we want to have a different cockpit for each species so you can get a feel for that species.

(This image is only a representation of the final product, some information is repeated as a placeholder.)

Originally, the dashboard lights were only orange. However, the health and energy bars were hard to see and had color added to them.

Just a big fat juicy thank you to our supporters

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:19:26 +0000

Nine Dots would not be possible without the support we receive. We were still quite new when we received help on RocketHub to make this project a reality. We are still going on today thanks to them. This is one of the reasons why we decided to remake Brand and to make sure we can give them something even better as a sign of appreciation.

Recently we’ve received a tremendous amount of support as well. During PAX, as we’ve said before, the reception to our game was way above our expectations. Our Greenlight submission is currently at 47% from reaching the Top 100. There’s a long way to go still, but so far we’ve had thousands of people vouching for our game and that’s really encouraging. Also, following the Penny Arcade Report article about working conditions, we’ve received many more emails and each of them were very encouraging. We also read the comments! On Greenlight, on the Total Biscuit video and on the Penny Arcade Report, there were so many positive comments that it almost didn’t feel like this was the internet! There are many more instances in which people have been manifesting that they believe in us and that they want us to succeed.

You have no idea how much we appreciate these. Every like on our facebook page, every vote on greenlight, every positive comment on our blog, on articles, on youtube videos, on twitter, etc, all of these have a huge impact on the team’s moral. It makes us better. It gives us the resilience to go on.

So for now, rather than to post something about the game, I wanted to post something about you. Thank you everyone.

- Guillaume

Also, because we are in Québec and we have lots of supporters whose first language in french, for once we’re going to do a translation!

Also, useless trivia: the biggest group hug ever was done by a group of 10554 people. Unsurprisingly, that happened in Canada, because we’re so nice
___________________________________________________________

Nine Dots n’existerait pas si ce n’était de tout le soutient que l’on reçoit. On était encore tout nouveau quand les contributions sur RocketHub nous ont permis de faire de ce projet une réalité. Si on roule encore aujourd’hui, c’est grâce à vous. C’est l’une des raisons pourquoi on a décidé de refaire Brand et de s’assurer de vous donner quelque chose à la hauteur de notre appréciation.

Dernièrement, nous avons reçu énormément d’encouragements également. Pendant PAX, comme nous en avons fait mention déjà, la réception de notre jeu était positive au delà de toutes nos attentes. Notre projet sur Greenlight est présentement à 47% de faire partie du Top 100. Il y a encore beaucoup de chemin à faire, mais n’empêche que des milliers et des milliers de joueurs ont manifestés leur intérêt pour GoD Factory: Wingmen. Aussi, faisant suite à l’article sur Penny Arcade Report, nous avons reçu un grand nombre de emails de gens qui nous encouragent dans notre mission. Sachez que nous lisons aussi les commentaires! Sur Greenlight, dans le video de Total Biscuit, ou dans les articles sur les sites internet, il y a tellement de commentaires positifs qu’on pourrait oublier qu’on est sur internet! Il y a beaucoup d’autres exemples de les gens qui nous ont montré qu’ils croient en nous.

Vous n’avez pas idée d’à quel point on apprécie tout ça. Chaque “like” sur notre page Facebook, chaque vote sur Greenlight, chaque commentaire positif sur notre blog, dans les articles, sur les vidéos youtube, sur twitter, etc, tout cela a un énorme impact sur le moral de l’équipe. Vous nous donnez la force de ne pas laisser tomber.

Alors pour aujourd’hui, plutôt que de parler de notre jeu, j’avais envie de parler de vous. Merci beaucoup à tous.

- Guillaume

Info inutile: le plus gros calin de groupe a été fait par 10554 personnes. On ne s’étonne pas que ce soit arrivé au Canada, parce qu’on est tellement gentils