Back and kicking!

Hello to the greatest fans/people who stumbled upon our blog and are deciding whether to leave or not!

So let me start by saying: I have officially moved to Burlington, Vermont! Yep that's right, I am now a full time student at Chaplain College for Game Design! So far the experience is remarkable, from the scenery to my professors, everything here is amazing. And I have even more great news! Thanks to the fact that I only have class for 2 1/2 hours a day, I have more time for A Shapian's Tale! Ahhhh so many exclamation marks right? very exciting stuff guys, very exciting. Now lets move on to some more.....say serious matters, shall we?

Recently we have been discussing a better way for the team to document progress, and stay on te same page rather than trying to find out the scoop on skype. So we have decided that we need a website of some sort which will allow all of us to make notes of what we are doing, what we need to do, and what we have done. But here is where you come in! We want our fans(you odd bunch of people) to view milestones of progress so that you all can see that we are indeed working, and not sitting here preparing for the next world disaster....even though that isn't a bad idea. these milestones will basically be a compilation of all the notes, strenuous, concept etc. which we produce. We will indeed keep making posts on here, but we figure some of you would like to see the chefs make your food right before you eyes :D

As well as that main entree there will be some more appetizers for you all to test and taste! Right now from the looks of our situation, the next payable content could arrive between September and December. And we are hoping that it isn't the latter, but that may be the case. For this next release we are aiming to include some more key features, and slowly move away from the sandbox style you have experienced. Also, this next release should also hold the title of "Alpha" I would like to give you a list of what will be in this release, but then I would not have anything to talk about in my next Vlog entry now would I?

'Till next time this was your neighborhood friendly game designer,

-Connor

Multiplayer for multiple players

Hello dearest of fans and other people who are reading this!

Today I am here to tell you 3 great things that OverReact has accomplished. To start things off, I will present you with the latest concept art made by Connor Hart(me), it shows a very epic boss battle of some shapians and  a powerful fire mage. This image took about 8 hours to develop and it turned out great. It looks great as your desktop background too, so hurry up and save it as so :D

This concept is going to be a poster, and be set as a reward when we launch our kickstarter project. So to anyone who wants this hanging in their room, help us out on kickstarter(after we launch of course).

Now for the next great news! Me and Allen are having an interview with Indie(Function); for A Shapian's Tale! you can listen through their site, or just listen right below, we hope many of you listen in and hear the inside scoop of what we are up to with the game! :D



Lastly, we would like to present you with the greatest news we have, the news you have been waiting for for too long.....Today, A Shapian's Tale goes online! Yep i know what your thinking(i think), and we aren't joking this time! You can find this demo on the A Shapian's Tale page at the very bottom. The demo includes the following features:

• Block physics - three different blocks to choose from
• Drawing terrain - using the mouse with key combinations
• Drawing trampolines - same as drawing terrain(uses alt)
• Multiplayer! - yeah pretty obvious but its the best feature!

IMPORTANT: Be sure to read the controls in the command window!!

You can come chat with us on our IRC channel(since we don't have chatting yet) which is: #AST on the SlashNET sever

AST Tech Demo - Online

That about does it for today's post! make sure you vote in the new poll, and tell us what you think about the demo! With that i advise you not to overreact although it may be difficult not to

-Connor

Out of State

Hey it's Allen.

I am posting from a hotel in Kentucky on an iPod my friend Jacob Robinson has lent to me. I won't be able to work for the week. But the demo is fairly simple for us to handle we just need to work on getting a few different server client issues up to par. I've finished revisions to the game engine which greatly help us to not make sloppy game code leading to problems which ruined the march demo. Now I only need to work on a clean set of physics abstractions. After that, adding networking will a little graphical magic will sum up the new demo. We have clean networking in the old systems already and it's pretty fun.

Cya later guys!

Systems online

Hello all, I waited for the recent poll to close to make another post so here i go!

Recently we have gotten yet another team member! His name is Benjamin Bias, and so far he is not highly opinionated. His specializes in Networking, so you know what that means! We are finally getting over the dreadful networking hill in this project. Only after having him for a few days did he have our recent demo running online. It still had some issues, but he and the rest of the programming team are working on fixing those, to finally have something stable to show you guys! While the networking is being done, Allen has been revising the game engine, taking out unnecessary pieces of code, and simplifying others. Everything seems to be going smoothly, and we are well on our way to getting over this hill we all hate.

In other news, Allen has been doing some experiments with matrices, and has discovered very very powerful methods which we can use in many areas for not only AST, but for other projects we get involved in. However, I will wait for him to post sometime this coming week, in which he will go over some programming info in detail.

As for the poll you see to the right, we were surprised we didn't get more votes actually. We received 12 votes, 10 of which were likes, and 2 of which were dislikes. Pretty good numbers, and we are pleased. we would like to have gotten more likes, but hey we can't always get what we want. We will have another poll up once we make another release, which i am not sure when that will be. However! The next release will allow everyone to play together, online. So if there is anything to really be excited for, it is that you can play with your friends finally!

I think that is it for this post, we hope to have more info soon!

-Connor

P.S. Yes i did use two memes in one post :3

Post-Demo Developments

First time posting, try not to say anything stupid...

My name is Tyler Camp (aka GZ), and I'm the guy who developed the demo that was just recently released. Of course, it wasn't all my work, Allen, Mike (K), and I all contributed to the engine that is currently being used. But the important piece is the time frame in which the demo was developed:

Connor came to me about 3 days before his presentation stating that he was rushing to get his final pieces put together. I didn't know that the show was that Friday, but I offered to get a basic demo out for him.

Making the player class: 1 hour

Making the box class: 2 hours (with fiddling, I had to mess around with the physics mask to make it fit all of the sprites that were different sizes [Thanks Cameron])

Making the buttons: 1 hour

Adding strict line-drawing: 1 hour

Adding free-form line drawing: 1 hour

Adding views (and applying): 20 minutes

Swapping out player physics: 2 hours

Adding shadows: 30 minutes

Adding line/box clearing: 1 minute

If I went right through and made all of the underlying changes that I had ended up with, it would've taken me a total of about 5 hours of coding to make that demo. But, like with all games, I took my time adjusting the rotation and scaling rate of the buttons, the distance between line separations when in free-form, how much the shadows scaled based on the object's height, etc. Fortunately, even without a GUI to assist in creating the demo (we don't have a game editor, just a coding library), it took about as long as it probably would have if I was using Game Maker.

So, on to the actual point of this topic: What we're going to be doing now that this demo has been out.

Now that we have the physics and basic game project management mechanics completed, we have to focus on continuing with our GUI engine and creating a networking test bed for our online libraries. The GUI engine currently only has tabs, buttons, and text boxes, but it provides the basis of what we need to develop more components for an interface without too much of a hassle (and it also got me a 100 in my programming class, but who cares about that).

As for the networking testbed, we're developing it so that we can assure that any problems that arise will be a result of poor programming on the game development side, and not deriving from an inefficiency from the networking manager. Allen was put in charge of the networking piece of the engine when we had gotten to it, and unfortunately we all rushed to get a game out to test how well it did. We knew it worked, but we didn't know if it did what we wanted it to. Unfortunately, there was an IMMENSE amount of lag in that demo, and many of the game mechanics didn't work anyways. With the networking testbed we'll be able to focus on just the online piece of our engine and track the speed of each stage within our TCP message handling.

Fortunately, we'll be putting our GUI engine to work in that test bed since we've been getting tired of CLIs, so this should help us know whether or not my work will end up being usable.

So to sum it up, we'll be working on the GUI engine so that we can build a place to test how well we handle networking. One step at a time.

It has arrived!

Hello dearest of fans!

I am here to give you a little taste of what we have made starting from complete scratch! Now it may not seem like much to some of you, but please understand that this is only a small taste of the physics, and some graphical work.

Our biggest issue with the full game right now is getting the online to work, with that we can have something like this online, and keep adding to it. We hope that our issues with getting connections working are cleared soon, and we can let all of you see features upon features build the AST we have been trying encumber for so long.

This tech demo is a physics simulation, with a movable Shapian, push blocks, and terrain creation with the mouse. It is NOT online(as I stated before), and it takes place in what we call "Limbo". It is a never ending white room, which you could have endless sandbox fun!

You are able to see the square Leunamme Shapian, and 3 different types of push blocks(wooden crate, dirt clump, and stone). The Shapian is NOT animated, but when we release the alpha version of the game, you will see all player animations we have created thus far.

Make sure you read the text document labeled "CONTROLS" for the tech demos control layout, that will be all....

Enjoy! :3 <-- yes this is a link ;)

-Connor

Howdy!

Well hello there, it's Allen, and I promise I am not going to patronize you any more about how sorry we are about the slow progress we've been making.

The purpose of the post is just to let everyone know I am getting back to programming. I have been busy for a while and I still haven't quite finished an online class I am in. But the ol' days of C++ have been calling for me for quite a while and today I am going to begin easing myself back to work. I won't be right back in the middle of AST though, I have another project I am going to work on which might be related to the game a bit.

Anyway this marks my return to C++, anything could happen.
-Allen