The sound team at Serial Lab have provided some great tracks for The Legacy of Barubash. Lately we’ve been working with Gina Zdanowicz and her team to come up with a suitable theme for Tafne. Tafne is married to Kaleb (the main protagonist) and will be a central character to the story. We needed several variations to her theme music and Gina suggested that we use a live recording of a harpist and soprano for the pieces. Gina has kindly provided us with a write up regarding the recording session with harpist Erin Hill:
Just thought I’d share a quick post today. I’m currently mapping out the village of Denham.
The editor isn’t 100% wysiwyg but since I’m pretty much doing most of the map design, I just deal with the quirks.
Also recently, the Penny Arcade Report sat down with us here at Kactus Games as well as Code Zombie to see what devs thought of the OUYA developer’s kit.
I woke up late Wednesday morning on the 2nd of January to have a cardboard box thrust into my arms while I was still groggy. Somehow, I managed to blearily focus on the shipping label. “Shipper/Exporter – OUYA” OK, now I was wide awake. Damn that was quick. I’d gotten a notification that the OUYA had shipped on the 28th of December 2012, and I’m used to abysmal shipping times. I have never received an international package within 4 days of it being sent. Fantastic. I grabbed a phone and told Kam he *had* to have a video keepsake of him opening it.
The unboxing didn’t exactly go to plan, so we ended up getting 2 minutes of Kam flailing about and the sound balance being completely out. (Apologies for the phone noise early in the video, however you could consider it as being a preview of our level up sound effect.)
Soon after that excercise in silliness, Kam ran off to his office room to tinker with the OUYA and to see what it could do. I’m not particularly technical so I’ll leave it up to Kam to write up a tech post of his own.
He must have done something as later that night he had the current alpha version of Barubash up and running.
Currently Kam is busy with benchmarking and optimising performance for the OUYA.
I’ll leave you with a photo of the OUYA dev kit and controller, with an XBOX 360 controller and PS3 controller for size comparison. (Click to enlarge the image.)
There’s always a lot of ongoing work for The Legacy of Barubash happening. This week we’ve been focusing on removing as many graphical glitches as possible. Also we’ve started using higher res sprites for the enemies.
The before shot is first, after is bottommost. (Screenshots taken from different devices, the first image is from a HTC One X, bottom is a Google Nexus 7. Also there are different light filters applied in game which accounts for the colour differences. Finally, the UI was hidden on the phone screen shot.)
Before: (click to enlarge)
After:
There’s still heaps on the to-do list. We’re hoping to get the UI fixed up soon and I’m currently writing up dialogue trees for quests and stories. Kam is doing whatever magic programmer’s do and squeezing out increased frame rates.
We’re also eagerly awaiting our kickstarter OUYA dev kit. The official word is that they will start shipping on the 28th of December! We’re excited, even though we’ll have to wait an extra few weeks for the unit to ship to Australia. Curse you geography!
Hi, I’m Jono aka Jon_Dog and I’m the art assistant, I also administrate the forums and IRC channel at Kactus Games.
I decided to take on the trailer for preparation before the Let’s Make Games 2012 EOY party, all I needed was the logos, gameplay footage and a basic script. In this post I will run through the process of making the trailer with alpha footage of Barubash. Continue reading →
It’s been a hectic few months here at Kactus Games, so we definitely owe you all a progress report. An updated alpha version of The Legacy of Barubash is now available to our donors and testers, and installation instructions have been sent out via email.
On a sadder note, Simon, our long time music/sfx/linguist/all-round creative contributor is stepping back his duties at Kactus Games due to personal circumstances. We’ll miss Simon’s quirky sense of humour and the tornado of creativity that seems to follow him around everywhere. We can’t express enough thanks for the mountains of work he’s done. Continue reading →
I was invited to do a brief talk for the http://letsmakegames.org/ Showcase held last Saturday.
I was asked by a few people to make my slides and talk available online. I don’t know if Let’s Make games will upload their video so for now you can download the slides below or if you prefer to view it along with my notes (not a direct transcript), simply click into the article.
I thought I’d share some in progress map-making screenshots. We’ve got an in-house map editor and it works a lot like a using a set of stamps or cardboard cut outs.
First up, we choose a map size. I’m making a test map for our alpha testers, so a smallish map will do.
