Alternate State Developer Blogs

In 1999, we first registered alternatestate.com and there was a bit of a lull in renewing the domain. Hence the current alternate-state.com domain.

For the past few days I get these emails from a Mr. John Timmers:

John Timmers <john@intrustdelivery.net> wrote:

Last Call For Domain alternatestate.com:

We will be offering alternatestate.com for sale today.  We see that you previously respond to an email about this domain, but did not submit an offer. This is your last chance to submit an offer on alternatestate.com, or we will make other arrangements.

To submit an offer of at least $97 now,

It’s been a little while since I last updated the blogs and since I’ve got a few minutes I wanted to take some time and provide a quick update.

Progress is going well, Steve is working hard at modelling our first level (and all the components within). Danny has completed his first pass at the game shell (so we can have something to load & test our stuff). Now that Danny has a decent shell, he’s helping me provide code for the game’s objects in order to bring them alive.

I’ve been busy going general business stuff and have a few irons in the fire that have my fingers crossed.

We’re still looking for someone who’s both a character modeller AND animator. We’ve received a lot of great submissions for the modelling part - just that we’re trying to find someone who can also animate the characters they create. If you or anyone know of someone that has the talent, please email me.

I wanted to close off this blog update with some screen shots.

Raceway Gas station

Checkout!

Pump you up!

Check-out 2

Well this has been a crazy week. I’ll be away due to a death in the family but while I’m gone Danny and Stephen are working to put together a proof-of-concept demo for a couple of publishers. Whan I get back we should have a first pass demo that has almost everything that we’re looking to have in our game. Of course, I’d be happy to post any sceen shots that are worth showing.

Any questions or comments feel free to email me or leave comments on the board. I also welcome those people to check out our forums.

Alternate State Forums

–Scott

It’s been a while without any updates but I figured that today would it would be worthwhile.
I’d like to welcome old time 3D Realms collegue, Stephen Hornback. Stephen will be joining us as our Art Director. Steve is a vetran of the computer gaming industry with his work on countless titles fromas early as Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 3D, American McGee’s Alice just to name a few. Until his blog is set up, you can head on over to his site w

At anyrate we’re working on a few things which we’ll announce here first. So check back later.

That’s it for now.

–Scott

Well, It’s bright and early Saturday morning. I’ve got to straighten some things out with our servers. A few weeks ago *suddenly* all of our email addresses disappeared. Other strange things happened too. Needless to say, I’m going to be testing out both HostGator and my DiscountASP.NET. Personally , I like both of these servers and despite the flub up, HostGator definitely gets the 2 thumbs up for hosting. However, we’re doing a little work in the office today to see if we can get Visual Studio 2008 Pro to run properly *and* connect properly to the Windows server HostGator as been gracious enough to let us test out (because we’re *special*

But there’s been some issues along the way and they’ve added some new features but what I’m trying to do is to get away from PHP and enter the new century with ASP.NET 3.5 (maybe 2.0). So this site (and others) may be up and down this weekend as I work on things - just letting you know nothings wrong.

Ok that stuff aside for the moment - I would like to mention that we’re going to bringing on another Unity programmer (which could be 2 in total excluding myself or 3 depending if I hear back from someone else).

That leaves me doing the artwork, design and the pixeltricks. Though I’d rather be coding (sounds like a bumper sticker).

I’ve talked about Mastermind a while - and I’m sure that by the name you can guess as to what it will be - AND NO IT”S NOT A REMAKE OF THE OLD PEG BASED BOARD GAME! The game will consist of a lot of strategy, some RPG and action mixed in. I don’t want to say too much but I really liked how they handled Fallout 1 (except the turn-based thing) it was a good mixture of these three components. Due to the target audience, there won’t be any cussing or guys getting their heads blown off - mainly because that’s not the point of the game.

Mastermind will be released in segments. The first, will be here on our website. Fully playable and you won’t have to wait longer than a few seconds to begin playing.  The second stage will be to have the Windows team convert that to Windows and me, myself and I, port it over to the iPhone/iPod. Now that version 3.0 has been released I can talk about some features we’re hoping Unity will implement (such as the personal networking - this is where two people can play a game together without having to worry about network lag).

After the Web, Windows & iPhone be released we’re going to be releasing it for the Mac OX 10.5.

Oh, I wanted to give a quick screen shot at some of the work Danny’s been doing. The picture is just a VERY  first draft of interface layout. Weapons on top, health meter, direction pad an if you look hard (because it’s black) there’s a dashboard tab bar that swings up and down.

–Scott

scott@alternate-state.com

Greetings,

Well, I’ve finally sorted out the missions of our sociopath criminal mastermind. Some people asked me why not make a game with some secret agent in training. I suppose that can be fun but I keep remembering that list of things people always wanted to do but knew they couldn’t and being a thief was one of the biggest thrills peoeple wanted to experience. Don’t get me wrong, I love games like Splinter Cell and such but lets face it, there’s far too many “do-gooder” games out there. It’s time to have a game that’s the polar opposite of that.  You still get the fancy items that “Q” would give bond but , well, lets just say that it will be one killer of game.

Our first goal is to prepare an online version that people can play for free (thanks to the Unity Web Player)

On another note, we will be preparing something called the SoftwareVortex. I can’t give too much information away right now but Mastermind will be integrated into this new system. I do invite other developers (big or small)  who wish to take their games to a new level, please feel free to email me at scott@alternate-state.com

More news to come

Danny’s busy working on the GUI system which he has a great handle on at the moment so he’s moving over to begin coding some game objects. Jon is just getting himself up to speed with Unity and will eventually move on to do some modeling and pitch in with some coding.

I’m almost done with the game design bible as well as the technical design documents so hopefully I can get back to the fun stuff soon.

While the game is planned for release on Windows, Mac and the iPhone/iPod one interesting hurdle Danny and I have worked to solve is having a useful interface system for the iPhone/iPod version. While the Windows/Mac version you have a bigger screen so you can have a few more windows. However when it comes to the iPhone/iPod one has to be careful not to clutter up the screen with windows and stuff. Keeping it as concise and useful as possible.

Since the game is a combination of action, strategy  and also has some elements of an RPG game. There’s going to be a bunch of useful windows in addition to the standard health/ammo type stats. Doing this on a Windows or Mac is a lot easier but with limited screen space of these devices make things kind of awkward.

While the game will be criminal in nature - it’s not going to be as violent as say Grand Theft Auto but it will have some of the same intensity.

Of course as with any good heist, it requires some planning so that’s where the strategy part comes in. However, trying to fit it all in to the small screen of the iPhone will be a challenge since it’s critical to have a functional interface especially in a game like this - otherwise it’ll be virtually unplayable. Think of how the old Rainbow Six games had the screen where you plan out your routes, waypoints and stuff like that? Well, trying to get that to fit in and be functional on the iPhone will be a challenge.

Hopefully soon we’ll having an integrated build and if we’re pleased with that, maybe post a screen shot or two.

–Scott

Alternate State Entertainment brought on another fellow gamer, coder & artist today who will be helping us out with some coding as well as 3D modeling. He’s a local Kingston resident who graduated  St. Lawrence College Computer Programming course.

While he’ll be working part-time, we’re still on the look out for any other 3D Modelers & Animators who have worked with 3D Studio Max 2008+ or Lightwave 3D (or Blender) as Unity works really well with either of these applications.

Ideally, what were hoping for is someone who is looking to break into the game industry and get a title under his or her belt and as far as financial compensation, I’m sure we can work out something even if it may be on the backend. So obviously, if you’re looking for full-time work with the yearly salary this probably would not be for you. This would be  best suited for someone looking to be working at an intern level.

If you’re interested, please feel free to e-mail me and we can discuss it further.

–Scott

Due to the problems we had over the weekend we saw fit to take advantage of giving the website a bit of an overhaul in addition to fixing some of the problems from our Web server.

Aside from this things are going pretty well, we’re making some progress!

When I have something that I’m comfortable in showing that be more than happy to post a screenshot here but unfortunately I’m stuck having to do with the webwork right now. I’d much rather be developing!

Since were part of the Apple developer program we’ve been using iPhone OS 3.0 for awhile now and just recently got the final release. Unless again I’m pretty happy with it while I have an iPod Touch the addition of the Bluetooth feature is ultra cool. However for some reason I’ve never been able to get the voice memos to work right even though I have a mic attached to my Bluetooth headset.

I’m hoping that soon, Unity Technologies will release an update to Unity iPhone that supports the 3.0 version of the operating system. Because are some very fancy features and think our game to take vantage of.

I’ve been working on the budget documents lately (as a developer, I hate writing documents ;-)) documents that cover the technical design specs, game design document, presentations and so forth which is kept me pretty busy for the most part.

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of various 3-D technology. Some that have been licensed and some that has been made by hand. And I’ve got to say that the Unity engine is on par with most of them. The part I liked the best though it’s not having to learn Objective-C I can continue using C# or JavaScript for coding of the game.

The iPhone and iPod have a lot of untapped potential with the 3-D capabilities of these handheld devices. After building a level and running it on Windows, my Mac and then my iPod I was extremely pleased that I did not have to make any special modifications to get it to run on my iPod.

Anyways, since I’ve got a ton more work to do with this web stuff and catching up on my recent work - I’ve gotta run for now.

Feel free to check out our forums at: http://forums.alternate-state.com and while Danny will probably get a chance to update his blog before I will, I will eventually get around to it. For now, my personal blog is pretty “out of the box” default - for now. But that too will change.

Now, I’ve gotta go and fix up our main web page.

–Scott