Our Blog
Our Take on Game Design, Asset Creation, Programming, and Marketing
From Maya to Blender: Blender Modeling Basics & Usability Tips
This is a part of a series on Blender 3D- Part 1. Serious 3D Modeling business ahead, no weenies allowed. Making the jump from Maya to Blender can seem daunting at first, particularly given Blender's negative, but undeserved, reputation for being overly complex...
A Sound Designer’s Conundrum: How to Create Something from Nothing
I’d like to share a story with you: a story that found me at the bottom of my outdoor swimming pool in the middle of October. A story that would be my elaborate response if someone were to ask me something along the lines of “Why is sound design fun,” and, “What’s...
Good Heavens: Designing Demigods
Good Heavens: Demigod Design Each world in InnerSpace has its own miniature cosmic order, underpinned by a marvelous creature. Collectively known as Demigods, these take myriad forms. Some are beneficent, others hostile or destructive. In all cases, they play...
InnerSpace Kickstarter: Key Questions Answered
And with one click (preceded by hours of writing, weeks of planning, and months of development), the InnerSpace Kickstarter campaign went live. This has been an exhilarating, terrifying, and awesome process to be a part of. We've received plenty of great feedback over...
On Exploration…
We've described InnerSpace as an exploration flying game. While the latter half of that description is apparent, the definition of "exploration" is slightly more ambiguous. In order to give insight into what the experience of InnerSpace will be, we wanted to take a...
The Science Behind InnerSpace
Editor's Note: The following post is written by a friend of ours, Justin Sipes. Justin's currently pursuing a degree in chemistry from the University of Texas at Dallas. For every fictitious universe there are natural laws that must be applied or relaxed in order to...
Finding the Essence of Your Game – Music Design for InnerSpace’s Title Theme
Well, hello! My name is Chris Miller, first-time PolyKnight Games blog contributor, but also your sound designer and music composer on InnerSpace. If you’re reading this post, you may have some interest in sound design/music for games. If not, give me 10 minutes of...
Player-Vessel: Designing the Plane
In our earlier discussion of the world design of Innerspace, I noted that our game consists primarily of interaction between the player and his or her environment. Because the game focuses mechanically and thematically on exploration, we have to consider multiple...
Problems Programming In An Inverted World: Directionality
Warning: Programmer art ahead. Does not reflect the artistic quality of this studio. At all. Here at PolyKnight Games, we're making InnerSpace, which takes place in inverted planetoids. This is really cool, but it brings up a lot of technical issues. There are...
From Maya To Blender: The Road Less Traveled
This is the first post in a two part series: Part 2 O'Neill: Well, we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it. Bra'tac: No. The bridge is too well guarded. (Dialogue from Stargate SG-1 "Bloodlines" episode) Since I was about 13 years old, I've used...
Low Poly: Confined Infinity
It used to have a negative connotation. If something was low poly, people often overlooked what might be good about a game. I think this misconception originates from the idea that low poly was once synonymous with bad graphics, a game meant for a low-end machine, or...
Game-world Cohesion: Crafting a Narrative Aesthetic
"Narrative Aesthetic?" InnerSpace is a game of exploration and discovery, where the object is neither fame nor fortune, but rather the unveiling of another world’s history and the cosmic forces that drive it. With priority given to honing our mechanics and...
InnerSpace Screenshot Saturday #1
This week, we finished up our shaders (water, metal, and stone), did some work on our level of detail, blocked out and started on our new plane, and finished some models for civilizations that will be found throughout the game. We've started pushing hard again after a...
Designing Backwards, Staying Coherent.
Warning: Programmer art ahead. Bar the orange backgrounds, made by Eric Grossman. What we're talking about I swear it isn't as scary as it sounds There are two core words I'll be throwing around throughout this post: Concept and Mantra. Concepts are ideas; they're...
World-Building: Shaders and Aesthetics
In this post I'll go over some some shader basics, talk a bit about choosing an aesthetic for InnerSpace, and give a breakdown of our shader. I'm excited to show some of what we've been working on and I hope you like it as much as we do. Just one quick note: All...
Creating a New Type of (Flying) Game
Warning: Programmer Art Ahead. When designing our upcoming game, InnerSpace, we quickly hit a question we run by all our game ideas: "What makes this a unique experience?" I'll approach this question in a broader sense, but mostly in the context of our project. This...