We were doing QA in the office, and we needed a way to record some of the particularly hard to reproduce bugs.

Solution: masking tape of course.

The result? Well we still can’t work out what was causing the bug, but now I can capture me beating Agent Simon’s high scores on video which is ultimately much more satisfying.

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We’ve prototyped a lot of games over the last few months, some of them were made and discarded within 2-3 days, others had a much longer development process and Slingshot was one of those games. Since I previously posted a concept video of the game here on our blog I thought I do a Postmortem on the project.

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PLAY

This prototype is one in a series of time mechanic puzzles we’ve been exploring recently. Tian and I created this prototype and with some additional coding help from the other Voxels. It progressed from concept to prototype in just three days. While this concept as it stands will probably not be something we develop further, it has spawned some very interesting derivative ideas and creations.

I particularly believe in the navigation controls and we’ve been developing some quite special with them. Hopefully we’ll be able to show you this in the near future.

Time-Travel Treasure Hunt is a an observation-puzzle game where the players goal is to locate stars which are hidden in a scene. The scene changes over time, playing back a simple story, and the player can follow the events from start to finish or can reverse and scrub time however they please. As the scene unfolds, objects and patterns will collide and overlay each other to form a star-shape. The player must observe these shapes, and click them at the right moment to identify where they are hidden.

Here’s an example of 3 animated shapes dancing and having an absolute blast in the snow. Can you see when they align to form a star?

Click the link below to play the game! Rules:

• Locate the stars in the animation and click on them when you spot them. We don’t mean the obvious stars in the night sky, but the hidden stars formed by shapes and patterns, as well as pink stars.
• Use the scrubber to scrub time backwards and forwards, and use the arrow keys to jump a single frame at a time.
• Pink stars will briefly appear for just a split second and it’s only possible to click them when they are visible.
• Other stars have been cleverly hidden in the environment and take shape when objects align.

There a total of 10 stars. See if you can find them all. Click here to play:  Time-Travel Treasure Hunt [35 MB]

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So here is a game idea that I’ve been working on. The inspiration came from looking at build-orders in starcraft, and thinking about how we can use that to generate tunes. This simple prototype is still in the extreme early stages, but it’s enough to get a feel for what some RTS generated music might sound like.

Click on a circle to build a building. The resource bases generate up to 5 gatherers each, which play notes in the gathering song. If you build a baracks (Drum track!) – they will send out swarms of marines armed with notes from Ode to Joy. It takes a while to process the sound waves, so expect a little bit of lag when it starts up.  The game uses AS3SFXR for its sound engine - http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/

Let us know what you think!

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Yangtian Li is joins us as our new graphic designer and she will also be the Minister for Pranks. Tian is a very passionate artist has a love of drawing and animation. She came to Australia from her home country of China to study and to pursue her creative ambitions. Tian is a hard core gamer – no one in the office can beat her high score at game dev story. Tian likes all sorts of art and creation including cooking and of course eating. Yum yum. She hates most sports except the ones that have background music. Tian’s short-term goal is to continue to have her work featured in artbooks and exhibitions, and also to avoid getting hit by a car because she doesn’t have health insurance. Tian was the valedictorian of her class at QANTM and has a very bright future in the gaming and animation industry. 

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Become the greatest Train Conductor in the Golden Age of Steam!

These are the settings of the first two levels.
We’re not showing the gameplay just yet, it’s top secret!

The great Australian Outback.

Enjoy the gorgeous beaches of Queensland.

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We had some requests from our twitter feed (follow us here) for some screenies of our latest game so we’ll put these ones out there.

Bear in mind that this game still has to go through some more QA but this is our latest creation in all its glory.

We’ll work on a video of gameplay for you guys.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, criticisms… compliments… much appreciated

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