Infinitap Games

Now I have to wait until later this year for the conclusion! *grumble* I knew I should have waited until act 2 came out and played them both at the same time. Curse my impatience!

It is the first game I finished on my Steam Machine with the Steam Controller.

Normally I'm right with you, I tend to buy episodic games after they've all released, but in this case there's no way I could have waited until the next Act. I've been following every one of the documentary episodes since they started doing them, and it was worth it just to see how it all came together. Plus it was cool to sort of feel like I was part of an "exclusive" backer group getting to play it a little bit early (along with about 87,000 other people, so not that exclusive really!) Man it is going to be a long wait until the next one though.

Also, very cool, how's the Steam Machine looking so far?

I'm thinking about giving out Neverending Nightmares to backers early as well. It's weird doing alpha builds because I worry about things being shown at bad times, but probably any exposure we get is good.

I've actually been skipping the documentary series (other than the first episode), so I could be more surprised going into the game. I certainly was surprised! I had no idea what to expect for the world or even the art style. It blew me away.

The Steam Machine is... interesting. I have a dev diary coming up where I talk about it. The one we got has intel integrated graphics, so it isn't a powerhouse, but it's really small, which is cool. It is basically exactly the same as Big Picture Mode running on Windows except it only plays linux game. Well, there is the in home streaming, which apparently requires 0 configuration, but I haven't tried it yet. Maybe I'll give Retro/Grade a spin.

The Steam Controller is different. I need to spend a lot more time using it before I can give my full thoughts, but I can say with certainty that games that use legacy mode (like pretty much every old game out there) will be a lot less fun than games that use the special controller API (like Neverending Nightmares as of yesterday). It feels quite different than I'd expect. I have no idea what we are going to do with the haptics for our game.

The documentary is very professional and well done, it alone was worth the money I gave them through Kickstarter. The game turning out so good made it a win win situation all around.

The art really is something special, there is a lot of focus in the doc episodes on the art and artists, seeing how the style was developed and tweaked was fascinating. They have some incredibly talented people working there. All episodes they've released so far (13 main episodes) are all about Act I, so now that you've played through it, I'd recommend watching it.

matt wrote: The Steam Machine is... interesting. I have a dev diary coming up where I talk about it. .

Cool, looking forward to that!

The art style is really great. I am not sure how they did it, but they did zooms and camera motion almost effortlessly. Because of our art style, we can't do that because it looks weird. Maybe they did everything high rez and mip mapped it. Too bad that doesn't work super great for us.

I am pretty busy trying to finish my own game, but I'll definitely watch them when I get a chance. So much to do, so litle time!

matt wrote:The art style is really great. I am not sure how they did it, but they did zooms and camera motion almost effortlessly. Because of our art style, we can't do that because it looks weird. Maybe they did everything high rez and mip mapped it. Too bad that doesn't work super great for us.

I want to say they covered some of that stuff in the documentary episodes, but it's been so long since I started watching them that I can't remember for sure, and the episodes themselves don't usually get too in-depth on the nuts and bolts. I'm sure one of the programmer or artists' forum updates probably goes into it, they did a bunch of those throughout the development that get pretty technical, but I can't remember for sure, and there is a lot to dig through at this point. This one talks about mip-mapping some, but it's all pretty far over my head! (backer only link): http://www.doublefine.com/dfa/content/u ... _pipeline/

I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the link!

I have so much stuff in my backlog (especially a ton of promising indie titles) and so little time for playing... nope, didn't play it yet. I'll probably get it eventually - I really like Double Fine - but by that time there's probably a Complete Edition out or something.

Not a bad idea. It ends on a cliffhanger, so I just wanna know what happens! I guess that is good "episodic" design, but it is tough to stomach a several month wait...

I suppose that in a way I feel the same way about playing the NN alpha, but then if I hadn't, I couldn't have been part of the conversation.