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.

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?

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

Control Multiple Characters By Yourself in Time Rifters article on TwoDashStash

#4 on Greenlight & SteamOS News

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

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.

#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.

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

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

Farewell 2013, Hello 2014!

Hard to believe that in just a few hours we will be starting 2014. 2013 has been a great for us, especially with the exciting launch of our Steam Greenlight campaign.

We have been on Greenlight for a week and so far the campaign is going really well. The gif below shows you the progress of the cumulative Yes votes Time Rifters has received over the past week, and as you can see we have been tracking along the top games on Greenlight.

Thank you to everyone for your support so far. The latest screenshot of our campaign shows we have received over 6,700 yes votes which puts us 77% of the way into the top 100 on Greenlight. The next 5,000 votes are going to be the hardest to get, but we are really looking forward to being able to post that we have broken through the top 50.

Happy New Year eveyone, see you in 2014!

Time Rifters in the Media!

Time Rifters has been receiving some great mentions in the past couple of days.

We are featured on Kotaku in the article Colorful Indie Shooter Lets You Play with Yourself.

We were discussed on Sunday nights The Bobby Blackwolf Show (podcast should be posted in a few days).

Cymatic Bruce, played Time Rifters on his Sunday Stream. Video should be posted on his YouTube Channel soon.

Doug (Proton) was also interviewed and quoted in the Verge article All jacked in and nothing to play: Chasing the perfect VR game.

Time Rifters 0.5 Demo & Greenlight Launched

Happy Holidays!

Time Rifters Demo 0.5 and Greenlight campaign are officially launched!

Try out the Demo & Vote for us on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=193620967

Changelog:

- Added weapon shop

- Added lightning gun

- Each weapon has 5 upgrades

- Created 4 new levels

- Balanced 2 existing levels

- Save player progress

- Added award badges progress widget

- Added gold & silver loot from destroyed enemies

- New movement method (no yaw drift or mag correction anymore)

- Added non-Rift support (Standard monitor)

Steam Greenlight & Demo Announcement

Really excited to announce that we will be launching our Time Rifters Steam Greenlight campaign on December 25. The new Time Rifters demo (version 0.5) will be released as part of the launch.

This means that all you current Rifters (especially those with Rifts waiting for them under the tree) and even non-Rifters will have a new demo to play on Christmas day!

Floating Gold & Super Jump

Although our focus has been on polishing, tweaking and bug fixes, we did take some time this week to add a few new features into the game.

Each character now has a glow around them, which should make it easier to spot your past lives in the levels, especially on some of the new darker maps.

The gold/silver now floats in the spot where the enemy was destroyed instead of falling to the ground. This produced a really cool stereoscopic effect, but also introduced a new challenge: how do you collect the gold/silver when an enemy dies in a higher up place? Our solution: give the player the ability to super jump.

Where It All Starts

Since the start menu is the very first thing the player sees we wanted it to be memorable and functional (especially in the Rift). Our initial thoughts were to have the player spawn in a walkable area featuring a 3D Time Rifters logo, the game credits and 2 doors that would lead you to separate options and level selection rooms.

One major improvement that was made to the original design is that the options and level select are no longer in separate rooms,  instead we have created interactive platforms where parts of the floor are buttons that when stepped on activate holographic walls.

I didn't think we would top the Caves level so quickly, but this is definitely our newest favorite area.

Tunnel Vision

We wanted to have at least one level where the world moves around the player (think of the original Half Life tram ride). This brought up the question, is it possible to make that experience comfortable in VR?

In theory it's the acceleration that causes some simulator sickness, not velocity. So if the platform is always moving at a constant speed in the same direction, then perhaps your brain will accept it.

Our first test started with just a platform that moves forward through a large tunnel. Then we added pillars to anchor the player's virtual body to the platform (preventing your entire FOV from being consumed by moving walls). Tinted glass panels were added to push the tunnel walls into the background. Finally, particles were added to provide additional visual cues for the movement.

This level is still an experiment in progress, but at least for now it seems like it is possible to have a moving level while maintaining a comfortable experience.

Designing a New Enemy

We wanted some bigger enemies and saw two directions we could go in:

1. Large enemies with a lot of health (like the boss sphere thing)
2. Large enemies composed of lots of smaller enemies

We decided to try out option 2 for a few reasons:

• More explosions are more satisfying
• The entire body being destroyed acts as a natural progress indicator
• Different types of blocks can be used to make some parts easier/harder to destroy

Before starting we came up with a list of questions, here's a few:

• Will it look as cool in-game as it does in our imaginations?
• How many blocks are needed in order to make the object identifiable?
• Can we still use the same pool manager to optimize spawning of these larger creatures?
• Would we be able to animate these enemies to bring a bit more life to them?

We decided our first experiment would be a dragonfly. We came up with some 2D concept block configurations, then came the fun part of turning the pixel art into an actual 3D enemy.

So far the experiment has been successful which means you will hopefully see some cool enemies in the full game.

Time Rifters VR Jam Demo on Oculus Share

Happy to announce that the Time Rifters VR Jam Demo is now available on Oculus Share. https://share.oculusvr.com/app/time-rifters

Acid & Lightning

We've had lots of positive feedback on the weapon upgrades, and decided to keep pushing the upgrades further/crazier. Here is a sneak peak of two new ones that have been added to Time Rifters.

One shot of acid and the chemical reaction begins. The bubbles caused by the Acid Bullet upgrade, which can be purchased for the Flak Cannon and Pistol, will slowly remove health from affected enemies over time.

It's extremely satisfying watching enemies explode from bursts of lightning. The new Lightning Gun discharges an electric spark causing a chain reaction with surrounding enemies.

This is just a glimpse at some of the new features we are adding into Time Rifters. What upgrades/weapons would you like to see?

Time Rifters 0.4.0 - Optimization

Try it out now: http://www.protonstudio.com/p/time-rifters.html

Check out this video where we discuss a few of the changes for Time Rifters 0.4.0:

Changelog:
- Tripled the frame rate on some computers
- Removed dynamic lighting & shadows (adjusted art to fit)
- Added MSAA & downsampling (crisp anti-aliasing)
- Added analytics to help gauge difficulty
- Changed from deferred to forward rendering
- Adjusted HUD transparency and colors (more transparent)
- You can always progress to the 2nd level
- Hold start or F1 to reset entire game
- Optimized CPU usage of music visualizer
- Made visualizer have more accurate representation of the music
- Hide/show geometry at the correct times (small optimization)
- Remove all gold that was not picked up at the end of a round
- Texture resolution reduction via memory profiling

VR Jam Week 2

What an awesome week it has been!

It started off with the first demo release of Time Rifters, which has received a very postive response.

A bunch of the feedback that we have collected so far will be incorporated into Time Rifters 0.2, which we are hoping to release on Monday. The best part about 0.2 is the awesome brand new level.

The week ended with us needing to submit a short video of our game's progress to IndieCade/Oculus in order to complete milestone 2 of the VR Jam. Our goal was to create a 30 second teaser trailer, however the video doubled in size, as estimations usually do.

Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and/or Google+ as there are lots of great things in the very near future: Time Rifters and beyond, plus we are considering doing a post mortem of our VR Jam experience.

In the meantime, sit back, relax and enjoy the Time Rifters Teaser Trailer:

[Demo] Time Rifters (Single Player Co-Op FPS)

Ever wanted to play a multi-player game where you control all of your team mates? Now you can!

Time Rifters is a single player co-op game where 'time rifts' allow you to be your own team mates. Unlock upgrades and customize each of your time clones. Strategically plan your attack with yourself in the past & future.

Our game for the Oculus/IndieCade VRJam is progressing well, but we would love to know what you think. Feel free to check out the demo and leave any feedback/comments on our facebook, sub-reddit or twitter.

Check out the Time Rifters Download section for the latest build.