Take control of a massive neon battleship in this 1- to 4-player couch co-op action game. Deep space is a dangerous place, but you don't have to face it alone!
It’s been a while since we’ve posted any screens. Here are a couple showing some of the planets you’ll discover, populated by happy little animal friends who can upgrade your ship unless you destroy them with lasers (accidentally of course).
And here, the planet of the birdfolk has been occupied by evil drill-foot tanks, oh dear! Also yes they all have the ability to walk on gas planets somehow; it’s the future.
In other news, TowerFall for OUYA is terrific. That, along with the brilliant multiplayer minigames in Nintendo Land, have kept us shouting heartily at each other lately. Long live local multiplayer.
Thanks to IndieCade, we are super excited to be able to announce that we will be exhibiting Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime at E3 from June 11–13. You will be able to find us at Booth #3035 in the South Hall along with over 35 other great games. Full list below.
Ahh, where to begin? We’ve been back from GDC for a month, and I wanted to post something while it’s still medium-fresh, but there’s just so much. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booths to play Lovers and chat, and high fives to our pals at the hostel (a.k.a. secret Canadian indie headquarters) who traded playtests and beers and advised us about parties and Beauty and the Beast singalong screenings. What a week.
We had two booths on the show floor, one in the IGF pavilion, and one at Unity‘s booth. Our plan was for two of us to man the booths while a rotating third would take in some talks, but we had forgotten how humans need to intake food and output waste so we ended up just covering for each other the whole time. We’ll need to do a GDC Vault day to watch everything we missed. We did get to see a couple of indie summit talks before the show floor opened though, and the FTL and Kentucky Route Zero postmortems were great. Fascinating to see how much FTL had changed from the prototype, and also how many placeholder graphics just never got replaced before launch and are still in there–I love that stuff.
Asteroid Base will be at GDC from March 25th – March 29th.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime will be playable at our booth in the IGF Pavilion in the South Hall during the Expo’s hours.
Update: We are proud to announce that we will additionally be exhibiting Lovers at Unity’s booth right in front of the main entrance to the Expo.
Wed: 10am – 6pm
Thurs: 10am – 6pm
Fri: 10am – 3pm
Press Update: We are setting aside the hours of 2pm – 4pm on Wednesday, Thursday and 2pm – 3pm on Friday where the whole team will be available to talk to at the IGF Pavilion booth. All other times during the expo we will try to have one of us available.
Drop by the booth or make an appointment to talk by contacting us at info@asteroidbase.com
Today we were surprised and delighted to find out that Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime was nominated as finalists for 2013 IGF Main Competition. This really means a lot to us as Matt and I both come from an animation/illustration background and it is great to be recognized along with these other great looking games.
A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at Toronto SkillSwap on our process for making and animating the 2.5-D characters in Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and I thought I’d post some of the things I discussed. I’ve always been interested in the mushy space between 2-D and 3-D (when I worked in animation I got to make this secretly-3-D watercolour bank commercial, and had a hand in the early dev of the 2.5-D kids show Justin Time) and for me, finally being able to throw code into the animation mix has been one of the most interesting parts of game dev. (And just a note–“2.5-D” can be used to mean all sorts of things, but here I’m taking it to mean using a 3-D pipeline to create a mainly 2-D game.)
We’re using Unity to build Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, so everything is made of polygons–though most objects are just transparent textures mapped onto simple planes that face the camera. There are no lights, we just crank the ambient light all the way up. We’re handling assets in a few different ways, evolving our process as we get more comfortable with the engine.
THE PLAYER CHARACTERS
The main characters are a bit of a time capsule from our early prototype, before we learned animation scripting in Unity. The characters are first animated in 2-D using After Effects, and then the animation frames get rendered to a sprite atlas texture (a big grid of all the animation frames). In Unity, each character is made of a single plane, to which we assign the sprite atlas texture. The plane only displays a zoomed-in piece of the texture though, and we can show different frames of animation by changing which zoomed-in bit of the sprite atlas texture is displayed.
This weekend we are pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime at Gamercamp. We will be unveiling the Arcade Edition of the game which we feels represents a distillation of the frantic action and pacing into a shorter and sweeter play through.
You can come and play it at the games showcase on: Saturday 10am – 1pm
Sunday 1pm – 4pm
We would like to extend our thanks to Bento Miso and Digifest for giving us the opportunity to display our current build at Digifest this year. We had a great time meeting everyone who got to play the game.
Big ups to Robby Duguay for being able to explain the game better than I could.
