TIG Source - AGBIC Contest Deadline Met!

It was a rather uneventful final push for the three of us to complete Astrofra's entry in the TIG Source AGBIC compo.

Of course, I take that as a good sign. GameStart was pretty stable and the multi-selection proved very useful on many occasions, just as the code completion does all the time! I should warn you now that this is more a Dallas episode than a proper post-mortem.

The following is a recap of the production of the game we, François Gutherz (Astrofra), Ryan Hagen and myself submitted to the current TIG Source AGBIC compo.

To recap what happened, the prototype was started about a month ago by François (Astrofra) who created the base assets and made a working prototype of the first level. The following video shows exactly where the game was one week ago (see more on that here):

Don't let the video fool you, pretty much everything was laid down already. But a lot of content was missing and major tweaking had to be done. I offered to help François on the character controls and setting up the level gameplay so he could concentrate on the lighting and assets. Ryan was already involved in the project and his animations were about to come and replace the generic mocap for the better.

We spent the whole Sunday afternoon and a good part of the evening bringing the game to this point:

I had to rewrite the character controller to remove a few hacks ;) and spend a little time investigating a few workflow issues on the editor. Fra started putting together the background for all of the 7 levels of the final project.

We took Wednesday and Tuesday evenings to complete the prototype. It took about 10 hours on these two days to bring the game very close to its compo final state, this time with Ryan's awesome animations!

Building the level gameplay was a breeze. I can say that experiencing the progress made on the editor first-hand is pretty cool. Copy-pasting multiple items while editing several levels at once is really useful. Still... it's not there yet, there's a lot more it can do and I want it to make easier to do. Not to worry, it's all on the development tracking site now ;).

Finally, we quickly polished the game on Friday evening before running back to real life matters. So, if you are discovering all this and want to try this baby out, head over to the TIG thread to download it. You will need a fairly powerful card to run it in all its glory (I'm working on a sub-100€ Radeon HD 5750). The engine.cfg file can be used to reduce the GPU load at the cost of a decreased graphic quality.

If you'd rather watch it than play it, no worries, I've uploaded a longplay just for you:

We hope you enjoy playing it or watching it as much as we had fun doing it!