New website

We now have an official website for the game that you can find here:

http://www.sublimation-thegame.com

Where the final version of the game is presented.

This blog wont be updated anymore, instead we will post in the development section of the website.

/Eric

Shiny lights

Big code update to the game just committed; a small part of that being that things EXPLODE now! :D


It's all very exciting.


/ Jonathan

Cutest enemies ever

These are the enemies for the game on Microsoft Surface table. As the game is planned to be played in public places by ordinary people, the graphics are designed in a neutral way, unlike most computer games with strong masculine styles.

These are not final designs; they are just drafts for the initial prototype. More modifications are needed to make all the graphics in a harmonious style.

Enermies from the strongest to the weakest:

First video demonstration

We did a first demonstration video of the game today during a playtest session on Microsoft Surface.
The game is still at it's early development stage and is not playable yet since there is no ennemies. But we can already show some physical interaction by rotating the towers, adding physical object to change to virtual world and using a pastic square as HUD.

Character & Story inspirations

First play-test session

Coding has begun and the framework is running both as a Windows and surface game. Nevertheless the design team had it's first play-test as a complete group to bring everyone involved with the project to the same page. We expect many more of these sessions in the following weeks; I really think they are one of the most effective ways of coordinating design ideas between team members.

/ Jonathan

Mastering Surface SDK

To develop on our project we of course use Microsoft technologies since the game will be on the Microsoft Surface Table. So we do C# with the XNA and Surface framework in visual studio.

There are two ways to work with the Surface SDK, WPF and XNA.

WPF which would be similar to do a windows application, is quite easy to design and implement. You can drag components like buttons or scroll bars with a nice visual interface and then add functions to events liked to these components (buttons pressed, bar scrolled...). This way is quite easy to design and develop but have limitations as well.

XNA which is a framework originally designed to let developers create easily game for the XBOX. Is a bit more difficult to implement but gives you more possibilities. For example just to implement a button with XNA you need to do everything from the design, program the possible evens and action when in WPF its almost as easy as dragging it on the interface, on the other hand XNA will let you have any kind of button while in WPF you are limited to the standard design.

Since we are making a video game we choose XNA without much hesitation because the framework is much more adapted to the kind of applications, WPF would be a better choice to design quickly an interface for a more practical application like ordering tickets in a train station. Then most of the future posts will be about the XNA framework on Surface and not WPF.

The SDK is provided with quite good examples in both XNA and WPF that cover most of the interactions one would like to implement with Surface, like dragging, scaling, flickering...

The code source is available for all these examples and they are generally sufficient to see how to do everything which is specific to Surface. Then the rest is just XNA and a lot of documentation and examples are available online about XNA.

In addition a very good tool to develop on Surface is the Surface simulator. It can handle multiple mousses to simulate multiple fingers, can simulate finger, objects of any size and tags. It is possible as well to simulate the fact that you hold a finger or a tag on the table just by pushing two buttons and then you can simulate any number of (immobile) contacts.

The simulator is well integrated with Visual Studio and just if the simulator is running just by launching the debug of your program, it will by automatically open in Surface (with still all the debug functions available on Visual Studio.

There is only one problem with the simulator but it can get quite an issue. It’s that even though the resolution of Surface is quite low (1024x768) the simulator will need at least a resolution of 1280x960 to operate. And it not only that it won’t fit totally in a smaller screen, it means that it won’t launch if the screen don’t have the right resolution and will close automatically if it detects that you don’t have the proper resolution anymore... Then if like us you want to develop for Surface on a laptop, since most of them have resolution of 1280x800 an external screen is needed anytime you want to develop.

Presentation of Surface Sublimation

We created this blog to follow the development the game Surface Sublimation that our group in currently creating from the multitouch table Microsoft Surface. This project is part of the Interaction Design Project course that we take at Chalmers (Gothenburg, Sweden) from the Interaction Design master.

The members of our team are :

Eric Hauchecorne - Coordinator and programmer

Jonathan Osborne - Game designer and programmer

Onur Kurt - Programmer

Sicheng Chen - Graphic designer and graphic programmer

Zonghao Cai - Graphic designer

The game will be a kind of tower defense, where the main gameplay originality will be that the player will have to rotate towers frequently to adjust the weapons and other abilities direction.

More will come latter about the gameplay, the graphics style and the development evolution.