Void, a game about time-travel from DigiPen Singapore. Oh and I made it.

Kroakie on 14/10/2011 at 17:42

UPDATE: WE WON!!! Lol wtf?!! Update in new post.

Ahem.

I thought I posted this before, but a search reveals otherwise. Anyway, last year I took a course at DigiPen Singapore, and during the Production phase, my team made the game (https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=23876) Void, which is now a student finalist at (http://www.gdcchina.com/events/igf_finalists.html) IGF China (!!!) It's a Source engine mod, so will require the Source SDK to run, which you can get if you own any Source engine game..

Anyway, go play it, then come back here and tell me how much you love it (or hate it, or that I should go fuck myself)

Jeshibu on 14/10/2011 at 19:11

Alright. I did. I do.

The past-bubbles are fun to use as well as technically impressive. I'm not sure about the glasses taking up the whole middle of the screen when in use, but the alternatives I came up with are worse (using a quarter of the screen in a corner or the whole thing).

The boulder got me.

I did feel like I was missing a backstory, with the treasures already there in the chest and the main character's name being prefixed in subtitles (like other characters were going to talk at some point), but I actually liked that too.

Fuckin' 5/6 pieces of art, though. Collectables always pull this shit on me. I may have another go to find it.

Kroakie on 15/10/2011 at 02:08

Regarding the story, the original design actually has a tragic, heartrending storyline that deals with loss, regrets and shattered dreams, but that ended up taking our attention away and our game mechanics suffered greatly. In the end, about 2 month before the deadline (the production phase was 5 months), we decided to scrap everything and reboot. With the limited time, we threw out the story and concentrated mostly on the mechanic and level design. There's still a backstory, but it's mostly in our design docs.

Glad to hear you like the bubbles. That was all me :)

demagogue on 15/10/2011 at 03:11

I think you made the right decision on that, cutting the story & distilling the mechanics & gameplay, since the gameplay has a natural tightness to it and builds on itself in a logical way. Has an Amnesia vibe to it. I like the artistic style a lot. Yes the bubbles are very cool, basically the heart of the whole mechanic.

I haven't finished it; does it have AI later on? (Or I guess I'll find out) That would be a mindbending addition, having AI doing their thing in the past that you can coattail on now, maybe even having a story going on in the past you see snippets of looking back... But I can understand if that's going too far.

Anyway I liked it. :)

Kroakie on 15/10/2011 at 03:24

We threw the AI and a bunch of other stuffs, out along with the story :(

Al_B on 15/10/2011 at 09:51

I like it - I felt like an art thief robbing an old museum for its paintings (found four - but I might have missed some). However, I seem to have hit a problem. I've reached void security and avoided the boulder but when I step into the white light the game crashes and throws me out. Is this something that you've seen before and if not is there some debugging information I can turn on to track down the problem?

Kroakie on 15/10/2011 at 16:52

Huh, that is weird. Don't think we've seen that before. BTW that is the end of the game, so all you're missing is the credits. You can try watching the credits from the main menu, and see if there's any problems there too. If there is, maybe some files in the credits is corrupted or something.

It's been over a year since I last worked on the game. You can enable developer's console from the menu, and press "~" to activate it. I doubt there's gonna be much info there though. Seems like you can run the game with the command line argument "-condebug" and it will log the output in console.log in the game directory, but we've never used that.

Quote Posted by Al_B

I like it - I felt like an art thief robbing an old museum for its paintings

[Spoiler]Lol that's exactly who you're supposed to be. The backstory (the one that remains mainly in our design docs) goes that you're a thief trying to rob the museum of the lorgnette glass and gloves you used in the game, not knowing its magical properties. Something went wrong and there was a rift in time and the whole world goes to shit and that's where the game begins.[/Spoiler]

Al_B on 16/10/2011 at 10:35

Quote Posted by Kroakie

You can try watching the credits from the main menu, and see if there's any problems there too.

Credits play fine so it's good to know I'm not missing anything (other than two paintings... :)). Good work and it must have been fun to develop.

gunsmoke on 16/10/2011 at 18:06

Sweet. As soon as I get back around a PC, I'll be all over this. Will it run on a MacBook Pro w/ a 2.2GHz i7? I don't game on laptops much.

Kroakie on 17/10/2011 at 12:13

Never tried it on a Mac before, but if it can run Source mods, there shouldn't be any problems