Iapetus Games

DreamBuildPlay and Beyond!

The DreamBuildPlay2011 submission deadline arrived a few days ago, and we’ve all taken a well-deserved break.  The final weeks saw us through the expected crunch period, where we were spending many hours a day ensuring SoL was of an acceptable quality.  We’re quite pleased with the result, which is showcased in the game trailer:

Our actual submission to DBP can be found here.

We hope to have SoL qualify as a finalist, as this would make us rather happy and proud.  Being a finalist would mean the game ranked in the top 20 out of the almost-300 games submitted in the competition.  However, these results won’t be revealed until late August.

The total development time, including design and prototyping, was just under 14 weeks; we started shortly after the competition began.  We created everything in the game — no resources were developed externally (the only exception being some royalty-free sound effects, but even those were remixed and edited heavily).  The soundtrack took roughly five days to produce, and I think it came out quite nicely.  If you’re a fan of the aural arts, you can listen to it here:

With DBP out of the way, we’re preparing for the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) release, which will add a few gameplay features and extra polish to the game.  We’re also hoping to distribute this on Steam for a PC release.  I’ve also been learning iOS/Cocos2d for a potential iPhone/iPad port, which has proven to both exciting and challenging — there will definitely be more updates about this as it develops.

The Home Stretch

There’s only a few precious weeks remaining until the final submission date, and we’ve all become just a little giddy and excited.  This is our first IP; our first step into the gaming industry.  This is our means of saying, “We actually developed and published something… and it’s pretty damn good”.  We want to show other fledgling developers that even a relatively unknown group of developers with relatively no industry experience can create a relatively awesome game.

We’ve had a few design changes to accommodate the fact that my scope was aiming just a bit too high.  Or maybe much too high.  But don’t worry, this just means making a sequel will be a lot easier, as there’s plenty of documentation to warrant one.  One other change we made was to the name; Project Procyon didn’t quite sound like the name of a game, and also, we believe, may have possibly been taken already (regardless, we didn’t want to have a name that could be associated with other media).  The game is now titled SoL: Sanctum of Liberation, which aptly describes the sci-fi aspect of the game (the name of our sun), and the objective of the hero (to free Earth).

In regards to development itself, we’ve created two of the most fundamental things that every gamer wants: huge, glorious explosions, and the enemies to make them.  The enemy AI is much more intelligent than those found in most games of this genre: the smart ones will actually aim at you before firing, the cowardly ones will dodge when you try to get to point-blank range; and the insane ones will kamikaze their ships into yours.  They will not simply go from one side of the screen to the other blindly (unless they’re the dumb ones, but they failed flight school).

But enough talk.  Here’s what happens when you fire hot, super-powered laser death at Earth’s enemies:



The game will hopefully be available on the Xbox Indie Marketplace within two months for no more than 240 MS points ($3).  The reception will dictate whether or not a PC port is made.

A Retrospective Recap

While most of the game’s engine has already been built, we still have to construct the actual levels and various little design elements themselves.  For some small developers, this part is the difficult step — actually getting the game feeling like a real game.  However, since I’ve gone through the strenuous task of writing a long game design document which details every aspect of gameplay, implementation will be relatively straightforward.  The task is now to ensure that all of these aspects are created before the submission date.

It’s a bit strange when I think about this fact: the original Grand Theft Auto had a GDD that was a paltry 12 pages long, yet the game is probably more complex than Project Procyon SoL: Sanctum of Liberation (or at most, about the same).  I’m starting to think I may be a tad too verbose; brevity is apparently not my forte.

The following screenshot illustrates the engine we created in all its glory, using several of its assets: one of the game models, a star, a planet, a starfield, and a nebula:

The above screenshot would demonstrate how a typical cinematic cutscene would make use of the engine.  While there’s only a handful of scene types needed for the game, it can easily be expanded in the future to support virtually anything, or even used for a completely different game.  In fact, because there’s no good 3D engines in XNA, we’ve considered even selling it.  But that’s far beyond our current goals and for another day.

The great thing about the engine is that we can manipulate it however we want, as everything but the ship models are procedurally generated.  Typically, however, the generated content will be saved as a data file rather than procedurally generated on runtime, as the Xbox360’s CPU is too weak to handle that level of load.

SoL: Sanctum of Liberation

Project Procyon SoL: Sanctum of Liberation, our flagship game, is being created for Microsoft’s DreamBuildPlay 2011 competition.  From the time of this update, we have worked on it for about eight weeks, with five weeks remaining until the competition ends.  The game will be distributed on the Xbox 360’s Indie Marketplace, but we hope to create a PC port shortly after.

Many entries will be about the various aspects of game development, and the plight of the independent game developer; the hardships, the rewards, and the fine women.  Wait, no, that last bit isn’t true.

Stay tuned…