TIMEframe - Featured in Multiplicidade Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Thanks to our friends at Gamesquare, TIMEframe was featured in a live music performance by Astromash for the Festival Multiplicidade audience in August of 2015. Unfortunately we were not able to make the trip down to Rio de Janeiro ourselves, but the pictures of the show look great! We also have a little video clip for you to check out.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #23 - Steam Dev Days and The Months Ahead

Hi there! My name is Tyler Owen and I'm the lead developer for Lacuna Passage. I normally write these posts anyway, but I wanted to make this one a little more personal while discussing some of our plans for the coming weeks and months ahead of us.

Steam Dev Days

This Wednesday and Thursday I will be attending the first Steam Dev Days event in Seattle with my father Jeff Owen (who has been kindly assisting with many of the financial and business-related elements of Random Seed Games). The conference is an invite-only event for approved Steam partners, which, thanks to the support of our followers on Steam Greenlight, we are.

Our goals in attending the event are threefold. 1) To learn more about the specifics of Steam publishing and SDK integration, 2) To explore the future possibilities related to VR and Steam Machines, and 3) To meet up with other indie developers.

This will be our first real conference visit since starting development of Lacuna Passage. Unfortunately we will not have a proper demo along with us, but it seems that will not be the focus of the conference anyways. The announced sessions and the fact that this is invite only for developers indicate that this conference will not be about promoting or demoing games. It will be about learning the Steam infrastructure directly from Valve and networking with other developers to learn from their experiences. That's what we intend to do. Our acceptance onto Steam through the Greenlight process might arguably be more important to the future of our company than even the funding support we received via Kickstarter so we don't want to waste this opportunity.

If any other developers are interested in talking shop while at the conference, please get in touch with us via email or twitter and we can figure out a time to meet up.

The Months Ahead

It is becoming apparent that we may not be able to provide as many behind-the-scenes details over the coming months as we have since the Kickstarter. This is due to many factors, but most importantly, we don't want to spoil things for our players. Since so much of Lacuna Passage revolves around the story we want to tell, we need to be careful that those story details are not revealed too early. We want many of our art assets and locations in the game to be a genuine surprise. What that means is that as we continue development there may be periods of time where we are unable to share what we are working on. A lack of updates will NOT mean a lack of progress. We will try to continue discussing our work as best as we can, but our visual updates may be fewer and farther between. We hope you all understand.

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With that being said, we do have just a small visual preview of a large asset from our lead artist Cameron. Above is the nearly finished high poly render of the mobile drilling rig.

"Ask an Astronaut" - Lacuna Passage Contest Winners

After reading through 30 excellent entries in our "Ask an Astronaut" writing contest we came to six finalists that really impressed us. Of those six we had a difficult time narrowing it down to only three winners, so... we are happy to announce our FOUR winners and two honorable mentions!

Each of our four winners will have their message included in the game as well as responses from the in-game characters they chose to write to. We settled on these particular entries because each of them presented unique ways for us to respond that will allow for great character building opportunities and entertaining side narratives. Join us in congratulating our winners by reading their entries below, but you will have to wait to hear the characters' responses in the final game! Here they are in no particular order:

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Entry by Douglas Bonderud

To: Anton Bolshov
From: Vladimir Bolshov
Subject: была не была

Anton,

One of your friends came by the farmhouse today. It seems you are finally going. What assurances have they made of your return? The fields you seek could be fallow, or burning. What can you know of where God steps alone?

Your mother worries, wondering if they feed you enough and what you will eat on that forsaken rock. I am held captive by memory; your beardless face gray and pallid as I pulled you from the car, battery long dead in the storm. Three miles from the farm, and nearly lost forever—what happens at three million? Who comes for you then?

I would rather disagree with a son than bury him. Return home, and all is forgiven. Leave, and let come what may.

Entry by Barry Neville

To: Devi Chawla-Stuart
From: Louise Godrey
Subject: UK Female Today Reader Questions

Greetings Commander,

Being an award winning UK women's magazine we have taken a keen interest in both your mission and in particular yourself,  the sole UK national and sole female crewmember..

We intend to run an in-depth article hoping to discover more about you, your struggles to balance your UK upbringing with your Indian heritage, the impact your educational and career choices had upon your family and friends and to explore the moment you discovered your hard work and sacrifice had paid off and that you had been chosen to represent the UK and women everywhere on this legendary mission.  

In the lead up to this we have recently run a competition giving one lucky reader the chance to ask you 3 hard-hitting questions!
Our randomly chosen winner is Ms Audrey Neville and her questions are:

1. Do you wear special space bras?
2. How excited are you to be cooped up with 4 fit foreign men for so long?
3. How will you maintain your complexion in such a dry place so far away from the sun?
 
Kind Regards

Louise Godfrey
Editor of UK Female Today

Entry by Mark Biswas

To: Hermes Crew
From: Davis Jamies
Subject: (None)

Dear Hermes crew,

I’m an eighth-grade science teacher. I just wanted to first say thank you. None of you have ever met any of my students, but you have no idea how you motivate them. Just the fact that this mission exists makes science real and exciting to them, in a way that I could never impart. They all have a year-running science project where they track your progress and report on the news, which we do at the end of every week. They always want to talk about it––sometimes making it difficult to transition to other subjects!

I believe science education in the United States and elsewhere is too neglected, and it is important that children are able to be inspired to pursue STEM careers, as each of you were, if we are to solve the coming problems ahead. Unfortunately, we can’t have missions to Mars running all the time to capture students’ imaginations, so I’d like to ask you, what do you think should be done to improve science education and foster science literacy?

Kind Regards,

Davis Jamies
Guy B. Phillips Middle School
Chapel Hill, NC

Entry by Joseph Peterson

To: Hermes Crew
From: Samantha Beiswenger
Subject: "Ask an Astronaut" Question

To the Crew of the Hermes:

My name is Samantha Beiswenger from PS37 in Worthington. I am in the 5th grade. Ms. Bittles our principal assigned the entire school this “Ask an Astronaut” task. Lots of people have really good questions, some people have really stupid ones. Since I was sick the day it was assigned, I had a hard time coming up with a question that someone hadn’t already asked. Mr. Marginess is keeping a log so that way we don’t have copies :)

So, because Jane and Kip both wanted to know, and it seems I’m the only one brave enough to ask:

What do you do with all your poop?

Sincerely,
Samantha Beiswenger

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Entry by Jon Parsons

Entry by Kevin Heyse

Thank you to all who entered. Keep an eye out for other contests we might open in the future!

"Ask an Astronaut" - Lacuna Passage Writing Contest

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A large part of the storytelling in Lacuna Passage takes place via written or audible journal entries, mission logs, communication between crew members, or communications from Earth. Some of these story fragments are critical to the plot related to the missing crew members of the Hermes and some of them are there to build a world around the characters and who they are.

Today we would like to announce a contest to incorporate your writing in Lacuna Passage. Your challenge is to write an email directed to the Hermes crew astronauts asking them questions about their mission before they arrive on the Red Planet. The top three entries will be selected and included in the game along with a response from one or more of the characters answering your questions. You will also receive the Physical Collector’s Edition of the game, Closed Beta access, and the Limited Edition Poster (all previously only available to Kickstarter backers).

To be eligible your entry needs to follow some basic guidelines:

  1. No more than 200 words.

  2. The text must be “in-fiction”. Do not make references to the game Lacuna Passage. You are communicating with fictional characters in the game, and if your entry is selected they will “communicate” back to you via in-game text.

  3. You may use your real name and details about you in the message, but that must be made clear in an explanation about your entry and you must give us permission to use your name in the game if we select your entry.

  4. You may submit no more than 5 entries.

Some ideas for framing your message:

  1. Write a message from a curious student who wants to know how to become an astronaut.

  2. Write a message from yourself asking specifics about the mission to Mars.

  3. Write a message from someone who knows the astronaut personally. If we like what you come up with we may incorporate the relationship into the astronaut’s backstory.

Your message can be directed at the crew of the Hermes (the 1st mission to Mars) as a group or any particular member of the crew. The following details about the crew should give you a start.

Commander - Anton Bolshov - Russia

Pilot - Elijah Conners - USA

Payload Commander - Devi Chawla-Stuart - UK/India

Flight Engineer - George Carpenter - USA

Science Officer - Dimitri Moroshkin - Russia

To submit your entry email us at info [at] lacunapassage.com. You can include your text as an attachment or in the body of the email. The deadline for entry will be 11:59PM Central Time US on Saturday, November 30th. Entries received after that time will not be eligible. Depending on the number of entries, we should be able to announce the winners by the end of December.

Make sure to spread the word on Twitter and Facebook, and good luck!

Lacuna Passage - Quick Update

We have been uncharacteristically silent lately and that's because we have our heads down in preparation for a Kickstarter campaign launch later this month. There is a lot to do, and even though we don't have any strict deadlines, we would like to hold ourselves accountable to our goals. We have many additions to make to the gameplay prototype, a pitch video to shoot, and backer reward levels to finalize. As much as we love sharing our progress we hope you will forgive us for holding a few reveals back for the Kickstarter launch. We have been stunned by the amount of support we have received in the last few months and we are sure that all of you can help us make this game a success. Stay tuned for more information. If you follow our blog then you will be the first to know about the Kickstarter launch and there may be a few early bird reward tiers for you to take advantage of. Alright... back to work!

Lacuna Passage - A note about Oculus Rift support

Since we decided to take the plunge into becoming Oculus Rift compatible we needed to update to the most recent version of Unity Pro (upgrading from 3.5 to 4.0). This was something we knew needed to be done, but it resulted in over 150 errors in our project that needed to be cleaned up to comply with new standards in the engine. Not only has this been a headache for the development side of things, it has also left a sizable hole in my personal finances (The upgrade cost $750 on top of the $300 Rift devkit). It will still be awhile until we get our Rift devkit, but when it comes we will be ready. There’s no telling just how much work it will be to adapt the current game to be Rift compatible, but we are hopeful that it will be well worth the effort.