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