Solitude at the Wales Games Development Show 2014

It’s been a week since we exhibited our Solitude tech demo, which has given us a bit of time to unwind after 5 weeks of solid crunch. In that time we went from pretty much nothing, to a 2 player cooperative scenario that not only played well, but was also quite polished. Still, we had no idea what to expect until we got there.

Solitude Booth at Wales Games Development Show 2014

We managed to get the our booth set up in pretty good time but then ran into a few networking issues. Since our tech demo is multiplayer and we know from previous experience that the provided wifi and Internet at these venues cannot be trusted, we opted to bring our own networking gear. After testing pretty much everything at home before we arrived, one of the network cables still resulted in being faulty, which meant one of the connections had to rely on own mini wifi network. This worked fine for the most part, but we suffered from minor latencies in the afternoon for some reason. That was the first issue we ran into, the second was that after we got the network up and running, the Commander’s machine (left) was refusing to connect to the server. After assuming that firewalls were to blame and disabling them everywhere, it wasn’t until a fresh pair of eyes looked over the client config and spotted an issue with the second octet of the IP address, which had been entered incorrectly and completely blind-sighted from then on. Whoops! After this was corrected, we had both machines connected to the server and ready to play one minute after the doors opened.

From here on out, things just got better and better. We could not believe how much fun people were having. One of the key gameplay requirements is communication, so we had a voice chat system running with headsets for people to communicate in-game. Players were getting really into it and being very vocal about it, and this was drawing in an even bigger crowd. Apologies should go out to the talkers on stage. When the room was quiet for talkers, occasionally there’d be a “GO LEFT! NO, YOUR OTHER LEFT!” emanating from our booth. Whoops. For the entire day we pretty much had people playing the tech demo with a crowd spectating behind, we even got the Wales Interactive directors into the driving seats.

Wales Interactive plays Solitude

Even though the booth was really busy most of the day, we managed to get out and about a couple times to check out what the rest of the show had to offer. This would not have been possible if we didn’t have our additional helpers, thank you Chris, Andy & Ben! A few of our personal favourites were Infinity Runner by Wales Interactive, really polished game with good use of the Oculus Rift and, surprisingly enough, does not come with the nauseating side-effect that most VR games seem to induce! Friendship Club by Force of Habit, a great little top down battle arena game that supports up to 4 players via local multiplayer. And Sim Raiders by the single developer (the entire game, down to the music and art), Matt Stockham, a fully procedurally generated RPG dungeon crawler that’s different every time you play.

All in all, the show was absolutely brilliant for us. Solitude got way more attention and positive feedback than we could have ever hoped for. We were definitely one of the more active booths at the show so it’s incredibly encouraging. A big thank you to everyone who came to the show and made the day awesome, both exhibitors and visitors alike. An even bigger thanks to everyone who came over and tried out the Solitude tech demo, we had a lot of fun and a lot of laughs throughout the day. If you didn’t get a chance to come over to our booth or didn’t attend WGDS2014 but are still interested in the tech demo, we’ll be releasing a video based on the tech demo gameplay soon to both this site and the Solitude site.

Wales Games Development Show 2014

Hey everyone!

Unfortunately there’s no development post this week as we’ve not been able to spare the time. However, here’s a brief update on what we’ve been up to and what our plans are for the near future.

Last week we were in Swansea doing a talk about how we got into independent game development, as well as our trials and tribulations, for the game dev graduates over there. We think it went down pretty well and got chatting to quite a few people afterwards. David Alden from Rockstar North (Swansea Met. alumni) also gave a really inciteful talk on how he got into the AAA game development industry. All in all, it was a great evening and thanks to everyone who attended.

We’re in Cardiff this coming week, on the 26th June, for the game dev social / TIGA event. Both of us will be doing a small talk there on what we’ve been up to recently. Up until now, we’ve been pretty quiet about it, but if all goes according to plan, we’ll be talking about our latest game.

Wales Games Development Show 2014 LogoThis is the reason why we’ve not had any time to work on development posts. We are exhibiting at the Wales Games Development Show (as usual) and we’ve been pushing ourselves hard to get a tech demo ready for it. We had some big ambitions, but the results are already looking really good and we’re very excited! So, if you’re interested in what we’ve been up to, you should definitely come along and say hi!

Tickets for WGDS2014 are around £6 and are available here.

Hope to see you soon!

IGC Conference for Game Devs 2014

This last week was GDC for a lot of the games community. Not being able to go this year we joined the rest who were eager to talk games and listen to the announcements. Not only that but we noticed the Indie Games Collective in London were hosting a Conference for Games Developers so we instantly signed ourselves up for two free tickets. It was well worth it.

IGC-logo-300x193

We travelled up to London on Thursday night so we wouldn’t have to travel early on the first day plus we heard rumours of a small get-together at the Loading Bar, a game themed bar in Soho (sadly moved to another location now). With a good few drinks and a game of Cards Against Humanity we closed the night off having a great time.

The venue at London South Bank University was pretty accessible and the first day of talks were enjoyable. We especially liked the chunk that involved Louise James from Generic Evil Business (Holy crap, how good is Twitter?), Andy Esser from Zero Dependency (Carving Your Own Path – Making Tools, Not Games) and James Parker from Opposable Games (Dual-screen vs Second-screen).

Danny Goodayle from Just a Pixel gave his first first talk about Light then tweeted about setting up a weekly indie Google Hangout. We signed up to take part in that so we’ll see if anything evolves out from there.

The evening event was a good chance to talk in a more casual environment (more drinks!) and we both had fun chatting the night away. Sadly, we had to leave after lunch on the second day but all the talks were great too.

The conference was recorded and the videos should be uploaded over the coming week or two. Even though there was nothing ground breaking we had a lot of fun and we’ll definitely try to attend any more events that are organised in the future by the great people that make up the IGC. Special thanks to Byron Atkinson-Jones and Natalie Griffith for getting the event rolling.

Interfacing with UI #4 – Coherent UI

February 5th, 2016

This is part of a series of posts revolving around user interface design and development, the introduction and links to the other posts can be found here. Last I wrote about user interfaces I discussed the new Unity UI system and I wrote about our process of porting from Daikon Forge to it. That was a year and a half ago and a lot has changed since then. To keep things interesting we decided to move from Unity UI (yet another move?!) to Coherent UI and I’ll explain why we did it. Why Move… Again?!... (read more)

@SolitudeGame: Status update: Fuel reserves low. Asteroid mining facility detected on sensors. No response to our communications. On approach station appears to be abandoned and running on emergency power only. Away mission approved. Mission objective: Search and salvage - fuel is a priority.

23/03/2022 @ 11:00am UTC

@RogueVec: And so it begins! #RebootDevelop

19/04/2018 @ 8:05am UTC

@RogueVec: We'll be at @RebootDevelop this year. We can't wait! If you want to hang out just give us a shout! #RebootDevelop2018 #GameDev

16/04/2018 @ 12:06pm UTC

@SolitudeGame: Fullscreen terminals allow you to hook into your ship's guns for fine control! Moddable gun modules, terminals and UI! https://t.co/B5N01jrA70 #GameDev

8/12/2017 @ 4:58pm UTC

@CWolf: Woo! And, now we have a cross-compiled (nix --> win64) @SolitudeGame server in our build and deploy pipeline #RV #GameDev

28/11/2017 @ 3:39pm UTC