We had a blast at Pax East this year showing off Guns of Icarus Alliance ahead of the PS4 launch on May 1st! But for long time fans and new crew alike, we had an exciting twist. At every seat in our booth, we sat PC next to PS4 in the same match, on the same ships. Our setup was so seamless that many of our lovely convention guests didn’t even realize it till we pointed out the controllers and keyboards in their friend’s hands! Voice chat will also be working cross-platform between Steam and PS4, but with people sitting next to each other, people opted for real life voice chat 😀 There’s a saying in game development, that the best features feel so natural players won’t even notice them.
While last Alliance prototype update was focused on improving balance, performance, and enemy behavior based on your feedback, this update is more focused on contents. We’ve been working on a number of things, and we’re excited to finally share some of them with you! We have quite a few things for you to play around with and test, and you’ll also see a work in progress first version of the world map and progression. As you’ll see, it’s not fully functional yet, but it’s for you to get a first glimpse of the direction we’re taking.
We’ll be hosting another group test session this Saturday, 12.19.15, at 1pm EST, and we’ll send another survey your way after the test session to collect feedback. In the meantime, if you have questions or issues with the update, you can also email us at feedback@musegames.com.
This is it folks! The moment you’ve been waiting for is coming. After two years of hard work, we’re ready to unveil Guns of Icarus: Alliance, the PvE version of Guns of Icarus to our Kickstarter backers for early prototype testing. Not a backer? Don’t worry! You can pre-order and get access in the second round of testing on the Humble store:
As our lease is set to expire in a few short months, and as I am starting to scout for a new home for us, I thought it might be interesting or even entertaining to muse and reminisce on the history of our migration through New York City as an indie dev team. Continue reading “A Migration History”
It’s been a full week since we got back from PAX, and I finally feel caught up to the point where I can start recounting that wonderful, chaotic, amazing, and exhausting experiencing. So here it goes!
A lot of people ask us about our thoughts on Unity as an environment, and I thought I’d share a bit of one system I’ve been working on recently.
Typically, we have only good things to say about Unity – however, our common complaints relate to the UI system(s). The 2.0 immediate mode OnGUI is quite configurable, but it gobbles performance – and isn’t artist friendly. It can be very powerful, but layouts are complicated and unintuitive – and did I mention it eats performance? While we use it heavily for editor GUI development, we consider it unusable in a game runtime environment.
Unity 1.0 GUITexture and GUIText on the other hand are simple to layout and use, and performant, but not nearly feature complete. I’ve worked with sprite based solutions as well, but hate the frequent pixel imperfect rendering and aliasing issues – along with the inability to display Unity’s super-cool dynamic fonts – essential for the display of asian character sets. Sidenote to devs at Unity – Feature requests here: Please expose the UVs of dynamic fonts for consumption by alternate UI display libraries.
What we really needed, was the simplicity of 1.0 GUI layouts – with the power of Unity GUI 2.0.
Enter my most recent custom GUI layout solution, built entirely on top of 1.0 GUITexture and GUIText. This system could easily support alternative rendering methods, such as a sprite system, however, I’ve chosen to use 1.0 GUI. Without further ado:
“PS4, PC, PS4, PC, PS4!” -Cameron “Kirk” Bajus
