Announcing Our New Project news - Grand Heist

Welcome

Hello all, just thought I’d like to quote a forum post I made a while back regarding this new game, and the differences in development plans between this and the failed Grand Heist, this isn’t a post-mortem, we didn’t achieve enough on Grand Heist to warrant one - but it should offer some insight into the difficulties we put on ourselves during development.

The game is extensively different from Grand Heist for three reasons; primarily, and obviously, it's a single player experience. That in of itself disregards some of the issues we had with Grand Heist; we had a lot of trouble creating a server, and finding someone to host those servers, in fact a lot of time was used up on such a feature; rather than the actual development of the game. It also means we won't be forcing ourselves to take up extreme deadlines (although we do set ourselves such deadlines anyway).

Secondly, the team itself has evolved; we learnt an extreme amount about managing a team, about game development in general and about game design from Grand Heist. We also made an extensive list of mistakes in leading that team. For one, we let the team grow to an unmanageable size due to the aforementioned need to meet a deadline. The team working on Fissure is much smaller, more focused, and therefore much easier to manage; and the members of it are able to work extremely quickly and efficiently. Already we have extensive documentation for the game - moreso than on Grand Heist - and the framework for the game [the primary camera, movement and reality systems] prototyped. This is due to our previous experiences and struggles as a team.

Finally, and most importantly, it's a more innovative, and interesting idea than Grand Heist had become. We hope this will encourage more of the right type of people [alongside our previous experience] to join us when we need outside support; and stop us from getting bogged down in management. In the end, the reason Grand Heist failed was because we kept changing our mind about the core design; something that will not happen with this project. Unlike Grand Heist, we created 4 or 5 prototypes, extensive documentation included, and ran them through a number of sources to get feedback; eventually deciding this was the best option to go with. Everyone on the team is extremely pleased with the games design and style; it seems highly unlikely we would radically start from scratch as we did previously, because the designs potential is so much greater.”

Fissure is the game that has risen from the now deceased Grand Heist project; an artistic game that take elements of current game design and implements them in a way that’s familiar and yet unique. The game allows the player to travel between unique worlds and levels in their quest to unlock the core of the Fissure.

The design for Fissure isn’t completely set in stone, though the majority of features have already been planned out and prototyped; our current feature list is as follows:

• Strong linear story-driven gameplay.
• Unique artistic atheistic with strong emphasis on atmosphere.
• Innovative and dynamic “flow” system, allowing players to manipulate the environment.
• Fully non-combatant gameplay - forcing payers to consider pacifist methods of gameplay.
• Constantly changing and unique environments ensures the world never becomes stagnant.
  New puzzle mechanics and layers on top of those mechanics constantly given to the player to ensure experimentation and interesting gameplay styles.

Media

We hope to release Fissure in Q4 2011 based on our current development schedule; although please note this is a rough estimate and will be constantly changed in upcoming news posts.