toddbluhm
Todd joined
I am the Producer at Demergo Studios. I love video games and I love making them even more. I have been interested in video games since I was young and I have been following in the inspiration of the old game makers who have really pioneered the industry. I was inspired to pursue video games after reading a magazine article that interviewed Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin on how they made games at Naughty Dog. Ever since then I have been a huge fan of both Jason and Andy as well as the legacy they left at Naughty Dog. As a direct result of their inspiration I and a few other friends have set out to bring back the old style garage game development studios with our new company Demergo Studios.
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Post by Dan, Programming Director at Demergo,
Hello family, friends, fans, and enemies! Due to the exaggerated rumors spreading like wildfire that we are dead, we felt that we needed to speak out. Okay, so that was exaggeration on my part, but I did want to write and apologize for our recent lack of communication! We've been busy working hard on Project Fixbox, but that is no excuse for not keeping all of you up-to-date.
Don't worry - we are not dead (okay, enemies - you can worry) and we will not be silent!
We have all been working hard, I am proud to announce that we are proud to announce that Project Fixbot has reached the next stage! We'll be officially announcing the game title and release date tomorrow, so check back here (well... not "here" as in this post... but "here" as in the website)!
Reposted from Fixbot Blog here
After a long hard day of work on Saturday, I know many of us at Demergo are ready to take a break, but with the looming deadline just about 9 weeks away, we don't have the luxury.
Over the course of this week there's a lot we accomplished.
For Art, a lot of the enemies in the game entered the illustration phase, and one of the enemies was nearly completed as far as animation goes. The base environmental tileset was completed so now our currently very ugly levels will start to look a little less ugly. I was reading a blog a while back about one way to motive artist to get art done, and that was simply to use really ugly programmer art (actually, programmer art is always really ugly) throughout the game and then give the game to the artist to play. After about a few seconds of play, the artists can't stand it anymore because of the ugliness and soon afterwards really nice art starts appearing in the game!
On the Design side of things, Zak is tired of remaking the same levels over and over in the editor again! The editor and how it works is changing somewhat frequently due to new features being added, so those new features on occasion break the old export format so the level has to be rebuilt. We just enjoy torturing Zak!
On the programming side of things, this has been quite a week! We did not add to many new features, in fact almost none, but this week was a polish the features we currently have and continue to optimize the performance of the engine. On Saturday we began to notice that when we would "jump" across really large levels, our player character would move so fast that the ipad1 could not keep up with the constant asynchronous loading and unloading of textures. While on small to medium size "jumps," the texture loading speed was fine, on really large jumps, the texture loading and unloading could not keep up and there was really no good way of increasing the texture loading speed, so we moved over to a 64x64 tile-based rending for the playerground. This weekend was really performance testing/fixing weekend! (I am sure there will be a big blog post about this by one of the programmers later on).
As far as QA testing, well, that was primarily all wrapped up in performance testing the various methods of rendering the playerground to get the best performance with the least amount of memory and visual artifacts.
And that concludes another crazy busy week here at Demergo and don't forget to check out some new pics we posted on our Facebook page.
Devbot Todd entering sleep mode...
Reposted from Fixbot Blog
As Saturday comes, here is a recap of what happened at Demergo and what got done.
On the art side of things, the main character Fixbot was rendered, and one of the enemies was rendered as well. A lot more concepting of environments occurred as well as some rendering of the environments.
On the design side of things, design finalization was taking place on level 7, level 6 got an alpha build in the level editor and level 8 design was started. A lot of fine-tuning and playtesting of player movement also occurred today.
On the programming side of things, multiplayer/co-op is now working using Apple's game center for matchmaking. We have bullets, player positions and rotation, as well as some level info being transmitted across the network with minimal latency issues, but the really major test will be when we have 10-15 enemies, plus bullets, plus multiple players all on the screen at once. Magnetic surfaces were finished, bounce surfaces are almost done, and conveyor belt surfaces were started. Bullets colliding with level surfaces was also completed. On the level editor side, creating object movement paths was started and will hopefully be finished by the end of the day.
For QA, this was a big day, because this was the first Saturday of major QA testing. Our production pipeline is setup so that a QA build is built on Friday night so that when Saturday morning comes, we can sit down and test out and polish the game, before moving on and adding new features throughout the rest of the week. Saturdays are QA and polish days. We did a lot of QA testing on player movement and bullets and we also did some QA on the different types of surfaces. A lot of polishing was done on those features as well.
Well thats it for our first Saturday update. As we continue to progress in production we might start including screenshots and early gameplay video in these Saturday updates.
Devbot Todd shutting down...
Reposted from Fixbot Blog: demergostudios.com/fixbot
Today we are very excited to announce our latest project, Fixbot. Project Fixbot has been under heavy development for the last month and we are really excited about showing off some of the cool stuff we have been working on.
Above: Artists work on concepting the main character, Fixbot.
The game is a 2D platform-shooter emphasizing multiplayer and puzzles, with a unique movement style. The game will be playable across all iOS devices running iOS 4.0 and later.
Project Fixbot started off as the idea - or as we like to call it, a “spark” - of a gravity platfomer. Something where the player can change his gravity source. As we continued to design we changed the gravity idea to magnetism, and the player became a robot fixing a space station. This got further expanded to the idea of “what if the player could only move by connecting to magnetic surfaces”. From there the spark was fleshed out and the game was solidified.
The release date for project will be April 21, 2012 (pending Apple approval). We will be posting regular updates on the project every Saturday so that you can follow its development. The artists will be posting additional concept art and production art, and the programmers will be posting about the various challenges they faced in developing an engine that solves the unique problems that are involved in making a game of this style. We look forward to getting to know our growing community fanbase while we make this awesome co-op 2D platformer.
Devbot Todd shutting down...
(Additional content and blog articles can be found on the Fixbot website)
Reposted from Fixbot Blog: demergostudios.com/fixbot
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