Global Game Jam

It's been a busy weekend for the Wander team! Quite a few of us were at the Global Game Jam and spent the weekend making games involving the theme, the sound of a heartbeat. We're pretty excited to be back to working on Wander though.

The sound team have been hard at work recording character and atmospheric sounds. We're looking forward to rendering them beautifully in the world, but that is currently a bit confusing as neither FMOD or WWise support headphone 3D sound (HRTF). Currently it looks like we will have to work out how to integrate OpenAL-soft into Unity. If anyone knows anything about this, or the use of HRTF/Ambisonics in Unity please get in contact.

David and the rest of the game design team have been busy over the last week designing the tasks (quests and puzzles) for the tropical planet. We're really excited to test a few of these over the next two weeks coming up to the next internal release.

The big news of the last few weeks is all the progress on environmental art. Garth has produced some great looking terrain using L3DT, extensive hand sculpting and some custom shaders. We will be putting up some work-in-progress images to give some background to the terrain creation process.

New Screenshot - Griffin

It's been rather an challenging few days for getting anything done for me as I've been moving house. Luckily the rest of the team have been hard at work and we have a new screenshot. Flight mechanics are still being worked on so we might not actually have the griffin being properly playable until our second alpha release or the first beta. I'm very happy with the volumetric clouds. They move nicely and you can fly through them!

I had some challenging debugging with unity over the last few days:

 The file 'sharedassets0.assets' is corrupted! Remove it and launch unity again!
[Position out of bounds! 354928768 > 354928764]

This was causing the controls to not work in the game, but was only affecting the built version. In the editor, play mode was fine. After some searching I found that this occurs when you have two scripts of the same name but different types, i.e one js script and one boo script both called Controller. Not the most useful error message.

Logo!

It's pretty awesome that new exciting things seem to be happening everyday on Wander. Today's major excitement is our new logo though.

Wander - Launching at PAX AUS in July

First post on the new blog and in the new year. It's going to be an exciting year for Wander, and the first week has been great.

Wander is a non-competitive, non-combat, collaborative multiplayer game. (MMO) In Wander player explore planets, finding out how the storms and the items in the world came to be, while solving puzzles. Players start of as an animated tree (Ent) and can later morph into other forms such as a dragon, griffin, elf and an amphibious creature.

Wander is launching in July at PAX Australia.  We will be posting new screen shots or videos  around the 15th of every month, and hopefully posting technical blogs in between. Here is one we posted on twitter earlier to get it started:

The whole team is keen to blog so we're hoping to have posts about environmental art, level design, coding, animation, sound design and music.

Anyone interested in being involved in the alpha or beta for Wander should fill in the form: form if you want more info contact testers@wanderthegame.com 

twitter: @wandergame
or facebook facebook.com/wandergame