Beam us up, Scotty!!!! Albedo's ready to conquer the universe! (I hope)
Game Connection 2013, Paris. In early December, Ivan flew to France with the alpha version of Albedo installed on his laptop. He showed the game to a lot of people, and discovered that yes; Albedo was a good name, befitting the personality of the game.
Interest in the game was really strong.
Anyway, our interest was to keep our ‘indie’ nature as much as possible but at the same time, we wanted to find someone helping us to fulfil a very important role for the game: publishing.
As we don’t live in Wonderland, where easy-ways-to-do-things are possible, we knew absolutely that we needed someone to work on this with us.
At Game Connection, you have a meeting-app helping you organize a sort of speed-dating setup between developers/buyers/publishers/journalists and so on. Often, you can’t decide the schedule of your meetings. Well, the very first meeting for Ivan was with Merge Games!
Ivan met Luke and Joanne Keighran at the 9:00 a.m. of the first day of Game Connection. Showed them Albedo; they said WOW. Ivan, Joanne and Luke previously met, in the European Game Connection the previous year. The meeting was, once again, the first one of the agenda! It’s destiny…
Business is business; but not completely. It is very important when you work with someone to develop a business; to trust your partner completely. But, before you complete your business, you can’t know for certain if something bad will happen. So, we follow our instincts a lot, the money comes after, what’s important are the Good Vibrations!
Well. We picked up very good vibrations with Luke and Joanne! They evaluate the project (thanks Mr. James de Silva!!!) and found it interesting; we cut straight to the point and made a publishing agreement. They visited us in Bologna after some weeks, they tasted some very good tortellini (wonderful kind of pasta of Bologna) and wonderful Scottish whisky!
Merge Games is an independent publisher, spending a lot of time, attention and resources on every game. So, I can tell you, we really worked together well on the game, deciding a lot of things together.
So, the Albedo team was done!
It was springtime.... birds were singing on the trees… flowers growing in the fields… and me in my neon-lit-office developing ALBEDO! So romantic!
I was working 24.5 hours per day to complete the game. A game not for casual gamers, as enigmas are not easy, the game structure itself is not so easy. Yes, it’s quite linear, but I’ve put a lot of different genres in my game. There’s a lot of improvisation. As I said previously, the beautiful thing about being a one-man-dev-team is that you can plan things, and decide what to do very quickly. It is a very creative way to work.
To be as quick as possible, while deciding things and implement them in the game, I created, in ALBEDO, a scripting language; something like SCUMM (someone out there remembers Monkey Island, right? :) )
Something like this:
So, I was able, for example, to get drunk, have crazy ideas, and implement it immediately!
Umm… honestly, I don’t get drunk often. I’m a geeky good fellow!
As I wanted to give Albedo a particular visual style, with a lot of colours, grunge and warm lights (Albedo actually means something like, reflection value of light off materials… coal is around 0, snow is nearly 1 on the albedo scale) I started work on a lot on shaders.
Question: WTF are shaders?!
Answer: Shaders, in poorly worded, are scripts, now written in a simple language (as HLSL of Direct X, GLSL of OPENGL, or the Unity one -Shaderlab and CG- which is a mix between DirectX one and OPENGL one) which explains to the graphical hardware, what to do; for example, post processing every pixel of the rendered image on screen. Very useful to create beautiful effects for textures, lighting and so on, pixel by pixel. Or, post processing the whole picture; for example, adding static like on an old TV (you’ll be able to see this shader in the credits of the game).
Ermmm… Anyway, I bought some shaders from the asset store! (the best ones in my opinion)
All the ugly ones are done by me! :P
NO! just KIDDING ! I wrote most of the best shaders!
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I worked a lot on the GUI, trying to create something special. Again; not for casual user. I tried to create specific enigmas, where you must think to face a ‘normal’ enigma’s logic, but it isn’t. So you have to modify your perception of the enigma, your point of view, because just maybe, the solution is not only pure logic!
Will this be the correct direction? Or are all of you players going to send me to hell, filling comments with bad words because the game is difficult?
I think that You (and I, as I am a Steam user as well) will enjoy a challenge, well-mixed (I hope) in with the original game mechanics. I hope you will like the colourful darkness I tried to create, to give you an unforgettable experience.
[But ---> Important! I inserted options for EASY-MEDIUM-HARD mode… there are a lot of hints and tips, if you want them!]
For this, with Ivan and Luke we decided to go in Early Access, with 12 levels (of 20 planned for the final version). We want to hear from you, we need your advice, to make the game perfect for you and to make the game perfectly clear. So, help me to develop Albedo. I’m working hard on the next levels, so I’ll be listening.
OK. Here we are!
Tomorrow is Day One. In a few hours, Albedo: Eyes from Outer Space will be available on Early Access. I think that I’ll work a lot tonight… I’m so excited; it’ll be very hard to sleep!
I’m ready!
Scotty, One for beaming up to Steam!!!!