This Week at Sauropod Studio: Design, Animation and Shading.

Designing Enemies

Germain and Benoit has been working on design and shaders a whole lot recently. Let’s start with the new design direction for the Corruptrons. The original design that you’ve seen in the prototype and the prototype video that we released last August was really just thrown together super fast. We didn’t put a whole lot of effort into the design at the time because we really just needed something then and there. While they turned out well, we really want them to be characters in and of themselves. They should have more personality. So, Germain started a series of new enemy designs, keeping in mind our original. Here’s how they look so far, we’ll let you figure out what types of enemies they’ll be. This is, of course, a work in progress.

Animation

We’ve been a little crippled by the fact we only have one artist on our team. Obviously, he can’t do all the work himself, especially since a lot of the work has a massive learning curve before you can say you’ve mastered it. Animation is the sort of task that isn’t really optional, but we don’t have anybody in the office who’s an expert with it. And there is a lot of animation that needs to be done for the game. Unity4 provides a really powerful tool for animation, but we haven’t had time to really dig into it yet. So, we’ve reached out to one of the animation engineers of Assasin’s Creed. We’ll be contracting them for two days a week to help us out with this work. It may be awhile before there’s anything to show, because we need to introduce them to our code before anything can really be done. And that’s no small task. Eventually, the animation will be touching the combat system, which will drastically effect gameplay. We need to have this part down pat.

Shaders

Good shaders can take a game from ‘me, it’s alright’ to ‘whoa, this is… Shiny! O_O’. I’m not saying every game needs to have incredible shaders to be great. Only that, according to the environment and gameplay, it can really enhance the quality of the game. One of the things we’ve started working on is the main crystal. It looks great as is, but it seems a little flat. So, here’s a little video showing off what we’re working on with multiple types of crystals. Also notice that they are now randomly generated, so the crystals won’t all look the same.

Fuzzywobs the Architect

In the past month, Fuzzywob has made a couple of incredibly buildings in our prototype. It seems that he’s not finished yet, since he’s made another timelapse this week. Once again, it includes explosions.

Thanks for reading!
Team Sauropod

We’ve got a few really awesome things to talk about this week. We’ll be covering a new aesthetic mechanic we’ve been working on that we’re calling ‘Distant Islands’, another stab at Linux support (and improved Mac support), some info for our Kickstarter backers, and another video from Fuzzywobs. Let’s dive right in, shall we?

Distant Islands

Recently, Benoit started working on fine tuning the level of detail system. But, more interestingly, he started work on another system that we’re calling ‘Distant Islands’. The idea behind the distant islands system is to gather all the islands you’ve worked on, then fill the world with them. Don’t worry, we’re not gonna grab all your islands and share them, this will only be grabbing your own islands. It might grab from you and whomever you’re playing with in multiplayer, but your islands won’t be getting uploaded to a central server. This is all the result of some R&D we are currently doing for multiplayer and to optimize the LOD. At this point, we’re only loading the same two islands, but eventually all the ones you will create will be updated in the world. Maybe you’ll see all the things you built in another game. The result is unbelievably satisfying, and you clearly feel less alone in the immensity of the sky.

here is an adventurous Bricktron who dreams to explore those far away islands!

Linux 2nd try

As you all may recall, last week was our first attempt to get the game running on linux in it’s current state. By removing the sound engine, I was able to compile it. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get past the menu. We got an update from Wwise this week, and it seems they won’t have a working beta for linux until later this year unfortunately. So, we’ve started exploring new solutions. We might have found one though, and I will talk about it once we’ve had the chance to test it a little. The good news is this. Removing the sound engine was the right way to do it for linux, and the reason it didn’t work afterwards was because I was using the latest version of unity. This version is incompatible with our game at the moment, so once I installed the same version as everyone else, I was able to get through the menu and load the game!

Once we have a little time, we’ll be sending this version to our alpha team so they can test it a little. This will probably happen next week. It should appear in your humble bundle shortly afterwards. I encountered a few little bugs but that could be related to using a virtual machine instead of running it in linux natively. OSX should start seeing better performance on the next version as well, since Wwise sent us an update recently that fixes a lot of the issues we’ve had reported. Hopefully, this will fix the black screen issue that so many of our Mac users have been plagued with. Sadly, this has been an issue we can’t reproduce, so we will ask for your help on that one!

Kickstarter backers, we haven’t forgotten you

Kickstarter is clearly a wonderful way to get funding for a project, but it’s also a painstaking task. We’ve put everything related to kickstarter on hold for a couple weeks, because it was taking up a ton of the time needed to work on the game. We needed to get a clearer view of what needed to be accomplished to get it all settled. We started compiling all the data, and filtered almost all the addresses. We’re working towards the point where we just need to put everything together and ship all the t-shirts and posters. One of the major issues we’ve had is that, in the address section of the form, people re-added everything. So we have tons of addresses like these in our system:

King Bricktron
kingbricktron, 0 ave de gaspé suite 1015, montreal,quebec,canada, K91 1L0,
montreal,quebec,canada,K91 1L0

The address is just repeating itself, and people at Poste Canada (the mailing system) really don’t like dealing with that sort of thing… On top of that, some ‘funny’ people added fictive addresses like ‘’The Milky way’’ and ‘’The Universe’’, so we had to filter those too.

But, as you can see in this picture, we received all the tubes we need for the posters this week! We aren’t handling the t-shirt shipping except for the ones that need signatures, or the ones that’re bundled with posters. All we need to do is get the extra t-shirts delivered to our office, and then we’ll take a weekend with some friends and do some assembly line work getting it all done. We also have a bunch of posters left over from PAX, so we’ll be more prepared if we decide to sell them all later on.

Building a Crazy (but totally safe) Castle

So last week, we featured a video from Fuzzywobs, who apparently really likes our prototype. He’s made a new timelapse where he built a unbeliveable castle (that doesn’t answer to any human physics). So check it out!

Support Tickets

Little shoutout to Jono20201 and Bills6693 who helped us out clearing the backlog of support tickets. Jono has blazed through a -ton- of tickets over the last couple of days, and has gotten us completely caught up. Thanks to their help, everything should move a lot quicker with our support now. They’ve all done a fantastic job! Thanks a bunch it’s really appreciated! Also, a shout out to TheBox and KsaRedFx, who are both on our support team as well.

Thanks for reading!

Team Sauropod

The blog this week will be pretty short, since we’re working on the same stuff as last week. Due to that, there really isn’t very much to show. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still have some stuff to talk about. So, on to stuff!

First Try On Linux

As you may recall from the Kickstarter, we said that we wanted to eventually have proper Linux support. So far, we haven’t had much luck with that. However, thanks to KsaredFX and bills6693 and their outstanding help with managing our support tickets, I’ve had more time to focus on other things. So, I’ve been working very hard on preparing the terrain for a Linux version. Sadly, there is no Unity3D for Linux, so it’s going to be hell to debug. I decided to try regardless because, personally, I really care about getting it running on this platform. We gave our word to you guys, so we’re not going to give up this easily. Unfortunately, our new first attempt failed the exact same way as the one from a couple months ago. We had hoped that the bug we were running into while compiling would have fixed itself magically… but it didn’t. So, after a few more attempts, and the removal of Wwise (our sound engine), and we finally got it to compile properly!
here is a video showing the game running on Ubuntu:

As you see, the menus work… But everything else is so very, very broken… Now, it’s worth mentioning that this build is having the exact same issue when we compile it for Windows, and it’s probably because we simply deleted the sound engine. We didn’t remove any of the calls to the sound engine that the rest of the game makes. The crash is likely happening because other parts of the code are still trying to call out to the sound engine, and it’s simply not there. Fortunately, we recently received an email from Wwise and they are about to send us their beta version for Linux. This is an obvious roadblock, so we’re waiting for this before we go any further with it.

How to build bridges

We have another video for you. But, this time, it’s not from us!
Fuzzywobs did a very nice timelapse of how he created a bridge with the latest version of the game. The result is really nice, and you should certainly check out his YouTube and Twitch.TV channels. Here is the timelapse in question:

Thanks for reading!

Team Sauropod

This week on the Sauropod Studio Show, you’ll see:
Corruptrons, we’ll get beneath the crust of this topic.
Building for Windows, Mac and Linux, an open window into the operation.
Explosions, we’ll expand your thoughts about them.
AMA, you’ve probably already read it.
(Yes, we’ve watched far too much How It’s Made)

Chased Bricktron

So let’s start with the most interesting of these topics, the Corruptrons. If you’ve played any version of the prototype, you know that the Corruptrons could be spawned with the debug menu. But, they didn’t have any behaviors except to attack any ‘’un-friendly’’ units that were within a certain range. They couldn’t break doors or throw rocks like we showed in the video, because the video was scripted to show what behaviors we intended them to eventually have
.
Recently, We started thinking about gameplay for single and multiplayer modes. For one of those ideas, we needed some enemies like the ones in the video we presented during the kickstarter campaign. It’s still in the very early stages, but the idea is that the Corruptrons wander around the map by themselves. Once they have an enemy in their sights, they start running after them. But then we thought it would be a better idea if the Corruptrons could communicate with one another. So, if there is a group of Corruptrons, and one of them spots a bricktron, he will ‘tell’ the others in his group about it.

But, what happens if you hide your units? The Corruptrons can remember the spot where they last saw the Bricktron, and it will be updated until they can no longer see it. In the first version of this system, the Corruptrons stopped right before reaching the hotspot, and we found that it was far too easy to hide from them. So now they go straight to the hot spot. If they can’t find the bricktron, they’ll start wandering, trying to find it.
Here’s a little video showing this idea in action:

The red dot/square you see is the last spot where the Corruptrons saw the Bricktron. One of them managed to get himself wedged into a mountain at the end, but I’m pretty sure you get the gist of it. And, just to answer the obvious question about what that “Round 2 begins in” stuff you see at the top, that was the timer for new waves of Corruptrons. The whole idea was to just make the testing easier.

Multiple platforms support

Building for different platforms, even with Unity3D, is not a simple task. We can’t even build the game in Linux at the moment, and our most stable version by far is the Windows one. As far as Mac goes, we’ve had a different issue with the sound engine. On top of that, it’s incredibly difficult to debug issues with the Mac version because we can’t get good crash dumps from the unity crashes. There are a few other solutions, and it’s something we’ve tried to implement over the past week. Unfortunately, we haven’t had a whole lot of success with that yet. We are working hard on it though, we aren’t giving up.
So what’s the issue with Linux? well, we set up a different phase of the project specifically for getting a working Linux build put together, unsuccessfully. Unfortunately, we were never able to figure out what wasn’t working, and since we had so many other issues to take care of at the time, we never got around to analyzing it further. Linux support is really important to me, so I’m starting to get it all installed myself to look into what could be breaking during the build process.

Explosions

Ever heard the sound of a computer exploding? I haven’t either. And that’s exactly what happened this week. The computer we use for compiling the game and for the sounds decided it had just had enough. Fortunately for us, it was simply the power supply that blew out. So it was easy for our friends at CIPC to fix it the same day.

AMA

I’ve heard that running an AMA(Ask Me Anything) on Reddit is a really nice opportunity to take a short break from coding and just talk with the community about the project. There are probably a ton of questions you guys want to ask us, and probably just as many suggestions too. This could be very interesting for us all, on both sides. But, before I go through the process of organizing something like that, I would like to ask your opinions of it. Is it worth it? Or is there a new way to do something similar that I haven’t heard of? We already tried something similar over on the IRC. It worked, but it was also very messy. :)

Thanks for reading!

Team Sauropod

Let’s get right into the subject of this weeks blog and talk about deferred rendering. You may be asking yourself, “What the brick is deferred rendering, and why should we care? Well, we’ll tell you! Put simply, it’s a technique to render the shaders of a scene. instead of rendering all shaders in the first pass of the process with everything else, it’s rendered a second pass.
Deferred rendering will let us to render multiple lights sources on the geometry without breaking everything, because previously, it broke everything.
Oh, hey, look, examples!.

Here’s how a very basic scene with multiple lights looks without deferred rendering:

Look at that beautiful, natural

light! Oh, wait, no,

that’s hopelessly broken. Light doesn’t work like that. So, this is a major problem when you want multiple light sources. Light sources such as, let’s say yellow crystals, to be rendered correctly when the night comes.

Now, here’s the exact same scene, with the only difference being deferred rendering:

Well holy brick, look at that! It works! IT LIVES! Ahem, sorry, moving on..

Here’s a series of screenshots we took while playing around with this. The big advantage is that we can add new shaders almost on the go. Sometimes, the results are even nice! You can judge for yourselves which ones you find nice or… Well, less nice! :P

FTL

You love lego? you love FTL? (I know I do!) Then you should vote for FTL lego here!

Finally! Internet!

As many of you already know, we’ve had a lot of problems with Bell. They said that they could provide us with a reliable, high speed connection. Well, as it turns out, they can’t! So we were stuck with two, let’s be charitable and say average, connections and a load balancer to help manage the server load. Well good news! Yesterday, we finally got a better connection! Instead of taking half an hour on a good day to make a new build and send it through the system, it takes less than 5 minute to do it all. so it’s much easier for us to work now. Yay!

Support ticket!

Almost forgot to talk about that, unfortunately there is still a minor bug that could cause major problem in our system, so unfortunately you still won’t be able to register new accounts, yet… Also we are migrating the helpdesk system to a private hosting. that way we will be able to add more people from the community to give me a hand with support.
thanks for your patience.

‘’Soundtrack’’ of the week

see you next week!

This week we were hard at work on a bunch of different things, as always. But, one of these things that may interest you is the new system Francois has been working on for the past few days. If you’ve played the game, you’ve likely noticed how easily bricktrons can get confused. It’s especially bad when you try to do big, complicated constructions, such as tall structures with only one set of stairs going up. Well apparently, Francois gave them a little more intelligence, so they’re faster at finding solutions when they encounter those annoying pathfinding issues. Next they’ll be finding a way to get out of the computer and subjugate us to their Bricktron might! Just to be safe, if any of them escape to read this, all hail Bilbo! If Bilbo did not come to rule, all hail whomever did. Whatevs.

Here is the second part of my stream from the test build. The first part is still available, but because of our internet connection, there were a lot of lag spikes.
You’ll see the little fellas working faster now, and even passing blocks to their friend when they’re in the way like they should

As you can see, this is going to help a whole lot in your future constructions. I’m not sure that I’m able to fully explain the technicality behind this improvement, but from what I understand, the bricktrons now search for the best brick to place instead of just plopping as you placed it. Also, they can no longer pass a brick to a bricktron that just passed it. That way, they don’t enter into an infinite loop of passing a brick.
If François has the time, I’ll ask him to explain in a little more in detail what it’s all about.
This update will be available for the beta version of the game.

I’ll also be trying to stream with each new test build we get up. We should have a better connection starting next week, according to Bell Canada…

Prototype.castlestory.net is down?

We’ve started importing the users from the old system to the new one. We should have that process finished next week, with the new registration process and all. Until then, you can’t change your password or register new accounts. We offer our profoundest apologies to the people who haven’t registered yet and wanted to do it. The system will be back up and running properly ASAP.

Support Ticket

Since we’ve gotten back from the GDC, we’ve received a lot of tickets and email. Sadly, we aren’t an army, and that’s why some of your tickets haven’t been answered yet. Some members of the community have offered their help, and I intend to take them up on that offer once we have the new system in place and working right.

Soundtrack of the week

a few months back, we received an email from a young artist who wanted to work for us on the game’s music. Unfortunately for him, we already had the composers we wanted for our project at the time. But, he was still inspired by our game and made a whole album from that inspiration. Here is the video of his Indiegogo campaign.

The Road trip to Boston

We had to split the team into two cars, since we had to bring a ton of stuff, such as the computers for testing the latest build and the posters. We also asked a couple of friends to help us out during the weekend, then with taking everything back to Montreal since we had to take the airplane bound for San Francisco. One of our groups made it through Boston without any issues, but the other one was slowed down by a lot of small problems. As a result, it took them almost three hours longer than the rest of us to get to the hotel. Boston is really beautiful, but the way the roads are designed are so chaotic from our point of view that we were driving nervously all the time. FX was a real champion driver and if we survive this trip, it’s probably because of him.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Fun fact time. The Boston roads are a nightmare, but this is because it’s such an old city. Originally, these roads were designed only for foot and horse traffic, with the occasional carriage. The designers of the original roads never could have guessed that their roads would one day be covered with asphalt and cars, and a ton of cars at that. As a result, the roads around Boston can sometimes seem like a poorly designed nightmare. In reality, they are perfectly designed for their original intent. –TheBox

PAX itself

First time at PAX, and this was the biggest and scariest event I’ve ever personally been at. It was very nice to finally meet some of our fans, and to finally be able to distribute our hugs from the Kickstarter campaign. There were a lot of big titles in the place, but what interested me the most was all the little indie companies we met there. The booth next to ours was another company from Montreal called Spearhead Games, and they’re making a very interesting game. you should check it out.
We’ve never seen so many people gathered in the same spot! And, strangely enough, none of them were aggressive. Everyone was polite and fun!
During that event, we finally opened pre-orders for Castle Story. We had flyers with QR codes on them for the game. Sadly, we were victims of the success of our little flyers, since the website went down for almost the entire first day. We also sold a couple of posters and that helped us out with paying for travel and the hotel.
To be honest, I don’t know what to say more than it was a great first experience. We met a ton of interesting people. Gamers, Programmers, even marketing managers who were really intrigued by our product. We had a lot of comments and feedback on how the game is at this point, and that will help us out with trying to fix the problems people encountered in front of us. The cosplayers were nice too. You guys have an enviable amount of patience and talent, and it was fun to see you wandering from booth to booth.
I also took a couple of pictures, you can see them here.

> PAX 2013 Gallery <

The Birthday Gift

Some of you figured out that it was my birthday, and I received a wonderful gift from one of you. It’s handmade and it’s also… Wireless! (Thx DoktorJ)

GDC

The GDC is clearly awesome. We met a lot of indie developers, and attended a lot of the conferences. Some of them were just for the pleasure of listening to someone we appreciate, but most of them were really instructive. It felt like school again and we learned so much. We also had the pleasure of meeting one of our composers, Josh, for the first time, and he’s a really nice guy!
This was our first trip to San Francisco, and we learned that waving hands at a taxi is useless. Josh explained to us that we needed the smartphone app to call them, which seemed very strange to us. Here in Montreal, Taxis almost kidnap you so they can get you in to the car, so it felt really weird.
I could continue talking about how much I loved this experience, but it seems there is so much to say, and I guess I could create a whole post just about that. Maybe I could try to get everyone in the team to talk about their experience if we find the time to do it someday.
Also, for people who were there, Peelander-Z was the strangest group we’ve ever seen…

Giveaway Contest

Hey guys, TheBox here! As I said in the blog I wrote 2 weeks back, we were running a giveaway contest for the game. Well, that contest has run full circle now! I’ve narrowed it down to the top entries, and as before, the final judgement will be during a live stream. We’ll be doing this livestream tomorrow, Friday the 5th, at 9:00 PM Central Time. I’m not 100% on the game we’ll be playing yet, as I like to kind of theme things, but rest assured that it’ll be fun. As always, we’ll be interacting with all of you in the chat. You can join us at http://www.Twitch.TV/TopianGaming

As many of you know, I’ve been helping Thierry out with the weekly blog. They’re super busy this week with PAX, so I offered to help out and write this weeks entry, just to make sure you guys get your Sauro-fix. I know what you’re gonna say, ‘but Box, you aren’t actually one of the devs, you’re just an editor, community moderator, and all around handsome, genius, and funny fellow’. Well you’re right.

Well, except for the end bit, maybe. Maybe you didn’t say that. Not saying you’d be wrong if you did, it’s absolutely accurate in my totally non-bias and absolutely correct opinion. Just saying that maybe you didn’t say it. Right now. This time. They’ll be time for that later. What were we talking about? OH YEAH!

I am not a bonified member of SPS, this is correct. I can’t speak with first hand knowledge about the state of the game. I can however talk about something else you guys are interested in. You read it every week after all. We’re going to talk about the blog in the blog. Very meta, no? Yo dawg, I heard you like blogs. Let’s go deeper, shall we?

Thierry, while perfectly capable of conveying information or a thought in English, is not a native English speaker. As a result, while the entries he writes certainly convey the thoughts, they runneth over with grammar issues and minor spelling mistakes. It’s far from awful, just needs a little fixing. If he could write the blog in his native French, it would likely be eloquent, even moving. However, 90% or so of us do not speak French, so it wouldn’t work well to have the blog in French, would it?

So, what’s the fix? ME! An editor. He writes out the blog, in English since I do not speak French either, and forwards it to me to edit. I reword things, give it better flow, and fix any grammar issues I come across. I do my best to make the points clear and concise. To make the blog flow well while changing as little as possible. Here, let me show you a before and after. Here’s a paragraph from an unedited version of the last blog.

This week Francois started exploring a little the suicidal bricktrons issues. The problem is that the stockpile pushes all the bricktrons away and sometime they fall from the island, they also get stuck in the middle when you build a 2×2 of stockpiles. We didn’t find any permanent solution yet but during the exploration we created a dancing bricktron. Enjoy!

And now, here’s that same paragraph as it appeared on the blog.

Brickocide
This week, Francois started digging into the suicidal bricktron issues. The problem is that stockpiles push all nearby bricktrons away from it, and sometimes they fall off the island as a result. They also have a tendency to get stuck in the middle of a stockpile when you build stockpiles in a 2×2 square. We haven’t found any permanent solutions yet, but during the exploration, we created a dancing bricktron. Enjoy!

Pretty noticable. Like I said before, it’s far from un-readable, it just needed a little modification by a native English speaker to make it flow a little better. I also coined the term ‘Brickocide’, which I rather enjoy.

Now, it’s not quite as easy as ‘get blog, edit blog, return blog’ either. I’m far from a professional writer/editor, same as the guys over at SPS, so it gets more than one pass. If you go back to when Thierry first took over the blog and read, you’ll still see issues. This is because I was doing single editting passes, then returning the blog for posting. After seeing things I would have rather phrased differently in multiple entries, I decided that it simply would not do. So, I set up a process.

Whenever Thierry has a blog written up, he pops me a message on Skype asking if I’m ready for it, then sends it over to me. The entry gets opened up in notepad, because I am a simple man when it comes to my text editting, and I give it a full read over. Nothing gets changed yet at this point, I’m just reading it, getting a feeling for it, and asking any questions I have to clarify things.

Next comes editting pass one. I make it a point to stay thorough, as though it will be stolen from me and posted after this pass. The more errors I get fixed, the better the next steps go. At the end of this, there may still be issues with the grammar, or with some wording, but it’s good overall.

The next step can go one of two ways. As you have all seen, there have been weeks where I’ve gotten together the sound track of the week. If it’s a week where they can’t come up with anything, I walk away from the entry and put together the sound track. Then, I write up the blurb for the sound track. If I’m not doing the sound track, then I just walk away and find something else to do for about an hour. Play a game, fix a computer, whatever. The point is to get away from the blog entry for a bit and clear it from my head. I need to be able to read it fresh for the next step.

After all of that, it’s time to read it again. Once more, I read it start to finish, without changing anything. I make notes along the way, but nothing gets changed yet. After reading through it again, I go back and give it all a second editting pass, fixing any remaining grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes, and rewording things to sound better. This pass also includes the blurb about the sound track now. As a result, the blurb only gets a single editting pass, but that’s ok. The blurb isn’t as important.

After all this mess is over with, I package it up and send it back to Thierry. He’ll then add in all the formatting for the bog, the widget for the sound track, all that jazz, and post it for all of you to read.

Spoiler alert, this entry went through the same process. Write, edit, sound track, edit again, format, and post. My part of the blog typically takes between one and two hours. This particular entry has taken me four, since I also had to write it initially. The process has given me a new respect for the amount of time and effort that goes into making this blog happen on a weekly basis. According to Thierry, he typically spends one to two hours writing the initial blog, including video. And when Germain used to handle it, it typically took him about half a day to knock it out when added to his other duties. A surprising amount of work goes into making sure you guys get this on a weekly basis.

Prototype contest

Here is as good a place to announce it as any. We’re running another prototype contest over on the community forums! The last contest was a blast, and I’m looking forward to seeing what people do this time around. As before, the contest will be running for one week. You can get all the details at this link: http://castlestoryonline.com/threads/prototype-giveaway-contest-2-finally.3490/#post-41102

Weekly Soundtrack

This week we have something a little different. I came across Big Giant Circles during the Desert Bus for Hope charity drive this last year. The artist came into the IRC chat and started giving out codes for the album, and I managed to snag one of them. The MP3′s quickly found a new home on my car’s MP3 player, and the entire album has seen regular play since then. A great deal of the album is very nostalgic for me, pulling a lot of my memories of gaming on the Nintendo and Super Nintendo to the surface. Enjoy and thanks for reading!

*sorry for the wierd formating this week, iM working from my tablet so it’s a little tricky to put everything together. I’ll fix that when I return.

As some of you already know, we’re going to PAX East this year. For those of you that didn’t, well.. WE’RE GOING TO PAX EAST! We’re going to be in booth #1188, near Super Giants and Double Fine. PAX will be a good oportunity for you to not only play the game, but also claim your hugs since the whole team will be present. We will have some free gifts for you, and if all goes according to plan, we’ll also be selling some posters based on the 3 t-shirts we made for the kickstarter campaign. That depends on if we can get them ready in time though.

As you might expect, getting ready for PAX took up a lot of our time. We are overjoyed that the whole preparation process is over. Now we can just enjoy the trip to boston. Some of us will be having to take off for the GDC before PAX is over. So ,if you want to see all of us, try to not come too late on sunday, because we might have to leave a little early.

Press schedule

Obviously, we’ve never gone to a convention like this, and we clearly don’t know what we’re doing. Apparently, we have to schedule times with you press guys, so please contact us at press@sauropodstudio.com and we will try to find the best time for both of us.

Prototype release

We released our official version of the prototype with the steam keys this week, and almost everything seems to be working like it should. Our fight with the OSX issues continues, but overall, we are satisfied with the whole release. There are still a few things we want to test before releasing it to the beta backers, but if everything works like it should, we should be able to release it next week. If it isn’t next week, you will unfortunately have to wait until we come back from GDC at the begining of april (don’t worry, no april’s fool here).

Brickocide

This week, Francois started digging into the suicidal bricktron issues. The problem is that stockpiles push all nearby bricktrons away from it, and sometimes they fall off the island as a result. They also have a tendency to get stuck in the middle of a stockpile when you build stockpiles in a 2×2 square. We haven’t found any permanent solutions yet, but during the exploration, we created a dancing bricktron. Enjoy!

Thanks for reading!

Team Sauropod