Hello vast Indie DB universe! I, Stephen the Programmer, have some great news to announce... We are officially debuting our hot new indie title, The Land of Eyas! (And on Indie DB no doubt.)
It has been quite a few years for our amazingly talented team of artists and developers. We have created tons of content, ranging from unique physics simulation to gorgeous artwork, as well as a way cool (bitchin’ some would say) orchestrated soundtrack.[1] The result: A spectacular smorgasbord of platform kick-assery that pays such tremendous homage to the indie game scene that it might even leave Tommy Refenes blushing. Okay, maybe I went too far there… >__<
But if you haven’t seen our official trailer yet, then you should check it out!
One of our artists, Matthew Kiehl, is responsible for a lot of the game’s most intriguing and puzzling stages that you see in the trailer there. (There are also some screen captures of his handy work below.) Matthew usually tries to find a happy medium somewhere in between insane labyrinths and utterly impossible machines of death for his stages, often designing in two minutes what would take an average person twenty minutes to solve. However, once his Inception-styled way of designing stages is complete, the work is far from over. He then uses his Micron 03 0.35 mm ink pen and an artist pad to hand draw all the artwork that is populated into each stage, from extraordinarily complex trees to the uniquely stylized earth beneath. Some of this work is so detailed that it requires weeks just to complete a single piece. You can watch the creation of some of his work in several speed videos that he posts on his website.[2]
As for Stephen the Programmer, I have been responsible for building the game engine entirely from scratch in C++ and I have spent a tremendous amount of time perfecting what we all refer to as the “Horizon of Gravitational Change” -this liquidy region located in the middle of each map that forces the gravity of objects that it touches to instantaneously change direction. (See the image below.) The concept that I ultimately used came from a 2007 SIGGRAPH presentation that was posted on a World of Goo fansite by website member MOM4Evr.[3][4] However, as I began using that algorithm I found that it did not behave consistently on different machines as a result of time step differences that exists on every platform. I found out that I was able to adjust for these differences using exponentiation.[5]
I have huge aspirations to post in great detail many of the fascinating challenges that I have dealt with for this game, such as dynamic cast shadow rendering, the use of stencil buffers, particle systems, environmental audio, advanced collision detection with parametric equations, environment setup for soundtrack creation, and more. On our official website I have already written extensively about the problems that I encountered while utilizing parallactic layers...[6] So if you are interested in having me discuss a lot of these things in my articles, then leave a comment for me below! Also, feel free to shoot me a message if you have any other questions as well!
If you think that you might want to play this game, then help support The Land of Eyas by becoming a backer on Kickstarter:
Also, make sure that you support this project by getting it “greenlit” on Steam’s Greenlight (it costs nothing if you already have an account):
Stephen the Programmer out!
Citation Footnotes:
- The Soundtrack from The Land of Eyas: Soundcloud.com
- Speed videos of Matthew Kiehl Drawing: Mdkiehl.wordpress.com
- Original Wolf of Goo fansite posting: Goofans.com
- 2007 SIGGRAPH presentation: Cs.ubc.ca
- Stephen’s updated water algorithm: Goofans.com
- Parallactic layers post from the official ‘The Land of Eyas’ website: Thelandofeyas.com
External Links:
- The Land of Eyas Greenlight Page: Steamcommunity.com
- The Land of Eyas Kickstarter Page: Kickstarter.com
- Official website: Thelandofeyas.com
- Tumblr account: Thelandofeyas.tumblr.com
- The Soundtrack from the Land of Eyas: Soundcloud.com
