Thursday 30 January 2014

Inspirations & Nostalgia

We've received some requests to include more enemies that aren't blocks in the game. Here are a couple of non-block mechanics that have been implemented in some new levels we've been working on.

The original cave level (Episode 1, Arena 3) was one of our favorite arenas, at least up until now. Once again your characters are exploring the caves but this time they will encounter a giant worm-like creature inspired by the 90's movie Tremors.


Sticking with the nostalgic, we have also introduced a door mechanic similar to one that would be found in the NES game Contra.


Tuesday 21 January 2014

Time Rifters Greenlit! And Let's Re-Play?

Really excited to announce that Time Rifters was Greenlit today, thanks for all the support!


Let's Re-Play?

We have recently come up with the idea of turning a Let's Play into in-game asynchronous multi-player, giving you the ability to play the game with replays of other people (friends, YouTubers, podcasters, etc). We have just started exploring this idea, but based on our current vision it would work like this:

Recording Let's Plays:
  • JesseCox (for example) would walk to the 'Record Let's Play' area on the title screen
  • He would choose Episode 1
  • He would play through the entire episode only using the first 2 time clones, his voice would be recorded.
  • After his play through, he could choose to upload it to the Steam Workshop/Marketplace and either give away or sell his Let's Play (so he could give away episode 1 for free and then charge for episode 2 & 3). All the profits from let's play sales would go to the recorder.

Playback Let's Plays:
  • You walk into the 'Let's Play' area on the title screen, look through a list of available Let's Plays and choose 'JesseCox Fan Friday - Episode 1'
  • You now start playing as the 3rd player, the 1st player controlled and voiced by JesseCox starts walking around and talking (positional voice audio of course). The 2nd and 4th time clones are idle.
  • At the end of the first round, you start controlling the 4th clone, the 3rd clone is the replay you just did, the 2nd clone is now active as JesseCox (with voice), the 1st clone is also JesseCox (without voice).
  • After you finish the episode, it shows how well you did together (percent complete).
Hopefully we explained it well, we've just been exploring this concept over the past few days. What do you think?

Saturday 18 January 2014

TrackIR & Greenlight Update

All of the pieces of our TrackIR finally arrived and we have been able to test it in Time Rifters. We plan on posting a video with our experience so look for that in the near future.

Greenlight is still going great, we have received close to 16,000 yes votes and are sitting at #7.

It is great to see all the Time Rifters play through videos that are being uploaded to YouTube including videos by JSmithOTI, TheSocomMr, The Indie Game Promoter, JaR Dev and MrJTDekker.

Lastly, here are a couple more places you can read up on Time Rifters:

Destructoid's article Play with yourself in first person shooter Time Rifters
http://www.destructoid.com/play-with-yourself-in-first-person-shooter-time-rifters-269077.phtml

Control Multiple Characters By Yourself in Time Rifters article on TwoDashStash
http://twodashstash.com/2014/01/control-multiple-characters-time-rifters/



Friday 10 January 2014

#4 on Greenlight & SteamOS News

Time Rifters is now ranked #4 on Greenlight with almost 13,000 Yes votes!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=193620967

SteamOS is now installed and Time Rifters is up and running on our homemade Steam Box. We just released a new Linux build (0.5.1) which fixed a gamepad compatibility problem.


Wednesday 8 January 2014

#60 on Greenlight!

The Time Rifters Greenlight campaign is going great, we are currently 60 out of 1,499 games!


We have also received a lot of great mentions lately. We had a great time chatting about Time Rifters, game development and VR with Reverend Kyle on his RevVR Podcast.

http://www.reverendkyle.com/media/com_podcastmanager/revvr_podcast_36.mp3

Time Rifters was voted #6 in Cymatic Bruce's Top 20 Oculus Rift VR Experiences of 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmnjvCR-lS4

Lastly thanks for all the great game play videos on YouTube, we've been enjoying watching them all.