Magazine Article

Hello Readers!

We at The Kings are proud to announce our newest game, Realm of Spirits. This side-scroller puzzle game will be available on all IOS and tablet devices in the near future.
My name is Jason Poirier, the lead designer and modeller of the team. I am currently attending the Game Development program at Durham College in Oshawa Ontario. I mainly work with Maya, Unity, Photoshop (and other adobe products), UDK, xNormals and the Quixel package (nDO and dDo). I'm hoping that my efforts put into this game can get me ahead in becoming a great 3D modeller.


During this project, I took on the role of character design, concept art, modeller, partial texturer, level design and animations. I worked with Autodesk Maya, Unity and Photoshop. Since, i'm not a strong at C# or Javascript, I had passed off the coding to my other group member who did an excellent job setting up our game to run as best as possible. Jesse Colangelo and Shawn Karacsonyi were our programmers who got the game working with a GUI system and the character animations attached and bonded to the controller (and later modified to work on an IOS device). Kalvin was our main texture artist who helped build the aquaduct level.


One thing that our group decided on, was the fact that our character had to change colours to solve some of the puzzle situations. We had gotten the idea from a bullet storm game called Outland (out on the ps3). When I designed the game, the character was to be unique to the style of game. I designed a spirit character that was transformed into something that he never wanted to be; complicated. So his main goal is to become simple again and following the mysterious wisp from the beginning will hopefully lead him to becoming simple once more. Now, since he is a spirit, we figure he can go through certain walls; but since he is in ancient ruins, we imagined that he can only go through certain colour coded ones. With this feature, we believe we can make more and more complex puzzles. Throw in moving platforms and we can create interesting and harder puzzles to accomplish.


One of the small problems we faced was the time we had to finish the project. We had a whole bunch of other projects that had similar importance to this one, and those others were due way before this one was. So given the chance, we figured we'd finish the others first so we could have time to work on this project with our full attention. This is why the beginning of the project was very slow in terms of progress. But now that we finished the rest, this was easy to accomplish and i'm proud of the end result of our game.


So one thing i hope people can take away from this is, keep on creating. No matter how it turns out, whatever you create can always lead to bigger and better things. Also, keep on experimenting. You may learn and discover new things from personal experience, TV shows, other video games or movies.


I hope everyone enjoys our new indie game, Realm of Spirits, being released on IOS devices and PC on April 25^th.


Cheers,
Jayp0r91

Saturday April 19th 2014 - Props and Progress Blog 3

Hey everyone,

So our group had to figure out some small details with the game that would put us back on schedule.
We had fallen slightly behind in terms of what we wanted and what we can have done before the due date.
We decided to make the final boss fight a lot easier in terms of using traps to kill your character instead of particles.

This might make the player think on how to kill the boss without having to fight him directly.

I also spend the majority of today creating objects and trying to figure out how to create new backgrounds.

Here are all the props we have in the game so far:

With all of these, we will construct the three different kinds of levels our game requires: the outside area, the forest and finally inside the temple (which in the demo was the first level of the game).
With the new moving platform system, i will be changing up some of the puzzles in the last level to make it appropriate in terms of difficulty.

Anyways i'll keep you all updated.
Cheers,

Jayp0r91

Thursday April 17th , 2014 - Indie Game Details Blog 2

Hello Readers!

So progress of our game has been very slow recently.
I had gotten some more models done but they are slow to texture. Got spike traps, aquaduct system (with plain water), boulders, ferns and a palm tree done. These will go towards the outside level for our game. Since the outside is still the starting area, there will be easy puzzles created to get into the habit of the game. It will also introduce the new moveable platforms.

Here is what we had in the beginning, before the new teams.

Tutorial

First Level (will be last)

Main Menu

I'm happy to say that i'm pretty confident that this project will go pretty well. We just need to finish the last models, build the levels and get the enemies going. The final boss battle has been figured out, so we'll have to set up the arena for that. Any animations I need to fix can also be done too.

Anyways, that's it for now. I'll keep updated very soon.

Cheers,
Jayp0r91

Tuesday April 8th, 2014

Development Journal - Blog 1

This is going to be really short. Jesse and I had been working on the Realm of Spirits game for our Unity Project. I developed quite a few models that we can use across all the levels, the positions of which can be turned into intricate and unique puzzle designs.
Jesse who had been tinkering with the programming aspects got the game working with all the base requirements, but we ran out of time to fix anything else.

Now, we have acquired the help of Kalvin and Shawn. Both of which had previous complications with their game.
Both our groups merged and we have decided to continue work on the Realm of Spirits game.
We had fixed up our Trello board and organized what we wanted to see in the future of our game.
5 Levels including a final boss battle. Adding enemies to the mix, and moving platforms. We will also add a lot more visuals to the levels to create that mystical feeling I initially wanted to incorporate.
I believe that we can accomplish all the new features we want to add to the game.

This week has been busy, due to some...complications with group members in another course. No work has been done on the unity project so far, but that will change soon.

That's it for now. Next time I will include pictures of the Level Designs and character.

Cheers,

Jason Poirier (JayP0r91)