Hello everyone!   OPifex Entertainment is a group of friends who are dedicated game development hobbyists.  We’ve recently banded together to form OPifex, and right now there are four of us: three programmers, one team leader, one artist, four game designers, and one writer.  You do the math 😉

We’ve decided to take up this challenge to push ourselves to create a game using the new engine we’ve been developing.  We’re going to focus on a small, simple game we’ve dubbed “Splat!”.  The idea was to focus on one core mechanic in order to keep the game simple.  Color blending was chosen, as few games effectively utilitize color as a game mechanic rather than just an art style.    I won’t go into too much detail about the rest of the game just yet… but to give ya’ll a little teaser, here’s our first concept art!

As we near our first milestone, OPifex Entertainment is almost ready to roll out our engine and begin building our game.  The concept and game design have been finalized, so all that’s left is to put the pieces together!

It’s a good thing our game Splat! is going to be relatively simple.  This allowed us to use the first half of the month to work on the Rough Edges engine, which is named after our next, much larger project.  The engine is built using SlimDX, which gives us easy access to the powers of D3D 10 and D3D 11.  While we take the slightest performance hit for using C#, we more than make up for it in development time.

Since most of the work is done by the engine, we’re going to use LUA to script the game into place.  Through the use of the engine’s powerful API, sculpting a game has never been more fun, or easy!  We highly recommend using the highest level tools available to you and your team’s skillset.  Development is fast, and more likely to be completed.  Using C# and SlimDX is our way of cutting out the headaches of most programming tasks while still holding complete power over our creations.

We’ve started some animations and other art assets, so here’s another teaser. This is blob man!

Blob Man Running from Garrett Hoofman on Vimeo.

We hope Splat! will be an exciting color mixing game that everyone can enjoy.  Keep a lookout for more frequent posts as the OPifex team starts the final sprint in the last few weeks of October. We wish you the best of luck, because remember, we’re all in this together

ran into some major snares this past week.  Our animation system was all sorts of wonky… and unfortunately too many hours were spent trying to fix it.  However, as we’ve committed ourselves to the Ludum Dare October Challenge, we’re going to take another step “back” in order to speed up development time.  Our top developers are experienced with the XNA platform, so we decided to use XNA 4.0 in order to side-step our model and animation loading issues.   While we are not proud of this, our code monkeys already have an XNA engine up and running, including 3D sound, animation, and custom shaders.  So, all things considered, yay for XNA!

We’ve made some progress on our art assets as well.  We have two musical scores written, one for in-game and one for the menu.  We have our blob-man model fully animated, and (using previous game code) randomly generated planets for our blob man to run around on.  Finally, we’ve got this awesome logo for Splat!

As Halloween ticks ever closer, we wish everyone the best of luck!  The OPifex team is certainly going to need it this week

Team OPifex has been busy, but life has this nasty way of messing with the plan haha! We don’t have much to update on other than from today until tomorrow, the team will be working nearly non-stop to get this done.  Will we sell a final release copy by the end of October? Maybe! If we’re lucky, everything goes smoothly, and things come together at the end here like we’ve been hoping they will.

Good luck to everyone else, and hopefully we’ll be posting some good news next time!

Hey ya’ll, it was a good effort… but things just didn’t come together like we had hoped.  We are a busy bunch of folks, and life calls.  We’ll get our game done eventually, hopefully within another month or so.   Keep a lookout for Splat! sometime or later

Cheers guys, and congrats to those who succeeded in the October Challenge!

– OPifex Entertainment-

Already the themes have us at the edge of our seats, anxiously waiting for that timer to count down to 0.  This is going to be so awesome.

We’re going to be using our “Rough Edges” engine, built for development in C#.  You can check out a sample of our engine here: Splat!

The team is made up of 3 1/2 coders, with hopefully some extra art and sound help thrown in.  This is going to be our first real game jam together, and we’re pumped!

We wish everyone the best of luck, and remember to sleep… for at least a few hours!

Ludum Dare 23 – OPifex Entertainment is ready!

We are halfway into the second day of Ludum Dare 23, and we’ve got a sweet demo for ya’ll!  Check out our million-particle system!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwJP-xVObXY&feature=g-upl&context=G2c49465AUAAAAAAAAAA

The particles move based on points of mass that we have as our game entities.  The bodies of mass are collected to create planets, and these particles move more and more around you as you grow larger.