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Our Take on Game Design, Asset Creation, Programming, and Marketing
Level Design: Designing for Flow
As our frequent readers know, one stylistic cornerstone of InnerSpace is the image of a strange, foreign tower jutting out from rock formations, bending over the curve of a hollowed-out planet. These aren’t merely exterior decoration, though, as the player can enter...
Indie Game Marketing: The Importance of a Content Calendar
I think most indie game developers will agree that marketing is important. However, finding the time to dedicate to it is another topic, entirely. Between meetings, brainstorming with teammates in Slack, and working on the actual product, the time for anything outside...
InnerSpace 8/28 Screenshot Saturday Progress Update: Jammin’
Ludum Dare Last week, we halted InnerSpace development for a few days to compete in the Ludum Dare game jam. Due to the restraints of a jam's time limit, in this case 72 hours, we often challenge ourselves to learn something new and/or tackle something we hadn't...
InnerSpace 8/1 Screenshot Saturday Update: Death of a Plane, Birth of a Planet
Sad news, today. After nearly two weeks of bringing smiles to the PolyKnight team's faces, posing majestically atop the video screen at our SGC booth and...resting in the back of Tyler’s car, the...
Basic Spine Rigging in Blender
The purpose of this blog was for me to learn something, then pass on the knowledge to others. Before this, I already knew the basic philosophy behind rigging a character spine in Maya, but I had never done it in Blender and, unfortunately, many of the tools don't...
Sound Designin’ for a Stylized World
The InnerSpace Style My first experience of understanding what I didn’t want InnerSpace to sound like was when I was working on audio for the alpha build. I had already created three music tracks for the game and an aesthetic was set. The in-game music, for the most...
InnerSpace 7/4 Screenshot Saturday Update: Entering the Ice Desert
Ice Desert Over the past few weeks, we've started building one of the secondary bubbles. It's within these separate areas that the demigods of InnerSpace reside, which will present challenges the player will not have encountered before. Here is some early concept art...
Using Attributes in State Machines (C# for Unity3D)
Warning: Intense programming ahead Reasoning I recently ran into a problem with my state machines: their behaviors were distributed to multiple classes or multiple "Update" or "Enter" methods. This is okay when each state has truly unique behaviors, but many of my...
Building Blocks: The Virtues (and Pitfalls) of Indie Constraints and Modular Design
We’ve come to the point where InnerSpace is starting to look like something, so naturally it’s time for a little retrospective discussion of our somewhat formative production-level steps in engine. Winding back to January, we had just come to grips with the success of...
InnerSpace 5/22 Screenshot Saturday Update: Birds & Relics
The InnerSpace Game Jam Last week, we hit a major milestone. In order to reach it on time, we gathered all of our rigs and descended on our accommodating director's home to run the "InnerSpace Game Jam," lovingly named after our favorite 48-hour dev sessions. The...
InnerSpace Progress Update: 5/9 Screenshot Saturday
We’ve been really, really, really hard at work, and I have to tell you, there’s nothing like that first moment during development that the game starts feeling like, well, a game. There’s a joke among developers that says games are virtually unplayable for about 80% of...
InnerSpace Kickstarter Postmortem
Last week was the 6-month anniversary of the launch of our successful InnerSpace campaign on Kickstarter. What started on that exciting October morning was about 45 days of excitement, stress, distress, and eventually, jubilation. However, it wasn’t just a few weeks...
Level Design: Building a Scenario
Building a Scenario In this post, I’ll go through the steps I take to make a scenario, or level, for InnerSpace. However, two things before we get started: 1) There may be what some consider spoilers in this post and, 2) We’re in early development, so there are still...
InnerSpace Progress Update: 3/14 Screenshot Saturday Update
It's been a very cold and wet month here in Dallas, since the last progress update. However, the snow and ice days have afforded even more time than normal to work on the game. Jeff: "Have y'all seen the blizzard outside?" Akil: "Wuts 'outside?'" The Archaeologist's...
First Glimpses: The Archaeologist
As we hammer away, getting the core production-quality pieces of InnerSpace in place, our concepts and theories have started to coalesce into something alive and working. That alone has been exciting but, as an artist, I take special joy in seeing our 3d artists turn...
InnerSpace: 2/14 Screenshot Saturday Update
Happy Valentine's Day. And for those who don't celebrate, happy Anna Howard Shaw Day. It's been nice to get back into the regular swing of development. On the design side, we've been working on white boxing new areas and prototyping potential challenges and world...
Level Design: Challenges in InnerSpace
Open World/Player’s Choice Have you ever played Skyrim? Grand Theft Auto? What about Borderlands? All three of these games are considered open world games, all of which take into count player’s choice. What do I mean by player’s choice? Sure, in most games, the player...
World Reveal: The Primeval Garden
Excerpt from an anonymous journal, found among the ruins: As we overcame the initial difficulties of our journey, a lull fell over the crew. For the time being, I had played my part, ceding to the engineers who would ensure our safety on the next leg of the...