Dear everyone: This page is a bit outdated. This has been going on for some time. I'm going to rejigger it soon and put up some new screenshots and stuff. When that happens, I will remove this message, obviously. But in the meantime, it's a bit outdated. Sorry. Good evening! This is a page about my game, Colourbind. If you read it and decide you're interested, you can get updates about Colourbind by: - Looking back here from time to time - Following Colourbind on twitter - Fanning/liking Colourbind on facebook - Emailing colourbindgame@gmail.com and telling me you'd like to receive updates about the game. Anyway, that's enough contact information for the moment - back to the game. Colourbind is a physics/puzzle/platform game that involves doing strange things with coloured gravity. There's a trailer now, which may or may not provide some insight into what the game's like. Coloured gravity? The basic idea is that with regular gravity, things fall down. In Colourbind, however, things can fall in different directions - instead of gravity just being down, there are three different gravities, each of a different colour. So red gravity might be down, but blue gravity could be up and green gravity, over to the right. That means that red objects fall down, as normal, but blue objects fall up to the ceiling, and green objects fall to the right. Here's a screenshot of some things behaving like that:  What actually happens in the game? You control a little two-wheeled car thingy, and the goal is to get to the spinning coloured triangle. Sounds so simple, right? There are a bunch of levels, and they get quite challenging. The core of the gameplay revolves around the odd gravity mechanics - not only does each level have different coloured gravity, but gravity can be changed by hitting switches, or by timed game events (for instance, in one level green gravity reverses itself every couple of seconds, that kind of thing). I've come up with quite a few very different challenges that make use of this strange gravity system, and my goal is for each level to require the player to think in new ways. Will I actually like this game? Maybe. It's a game for people who would probably describe themselves as oldschool, and enjoy a bit of frustration in their gaming. If that sounds like you, you might really like it. If that makes you think that you'll hate the game, then perhaps you will. Soon there'll be a demo, and you can see for yourself. I don't want to put one over on anyone though - the game's not for everyone, and I don't especially want to inflict a frustrating game on lots of people who don't want it, if for no other reason then for my own safety. So can I actually play the thing or what? Soon. The game's not quite ready for public consumption yet, unfortunately. It'll be finished, hopefully, around the end of this year or the start of next year (2011). There will at the very least be a demo at that point, and probably before. It'll be for sale through an online store of some kind - the details of which I haven't yet worked out - and available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux around January 2011, for something in the vicinity of $5. That release date is a guess on my part, but I'll try hard to make it there or at least not far off. The details you have provided so far are woefully inadequate. Sorry. Here's a rundown of some of the features the game will have: - About fifty levels. - Old school challenge - Colourbind's about puzzles, but it's also a game of skill. So, something to frustrate everyone. - Input via keyboard or a game controller (including analogue controls). - Cooperative multiplayer! A separate set of puzzles specifically designed to take advantage of all the cool stuff this will make possible. - Audio, including nifty interactive background music. This is actually going to be done by someone who knows knows what they're doing, unlike the art which is done by me (I'm a programmer). - The ability to save replays, in case you accidentally do something cool. - The ability to play the game if you're colourblind. Colours will be replaced with patterns when colourblindness mode is turned on, to help out the ten (ten?) percent of folks out there for whom the game is currently a confusing mess. - A level editor! Very commonly requested feature, that one - something about the game makes people want to mess around with the physics, it seems. - A ridiculous host of features to support crazy people who want all the challenges they can get their hands on. Harder versions of basic levels, secret levels, speed run support, special goals like finishing a level without touching a certain object, replay the game with octagonal wheels... that kind of ludicrous stuff. Depending on what platform I manage to release the game on, this stuff might tie in with some kind of achievement system. Not all this stuff will be in the demo, naturally, but I hope for the demo to be a worthwhile thing in itself instead of a deliberately incomplete teaser. I'll try to put it together more with a mind to the 'demo' being a free, small version of the game. Then if that seems like your kind thing, you can buy the full version, 'Colourbind Plus' if you will, for a modest fee (as mentioned, somewhere around five bucks). What will be the system requirements? I'm not sure yet, but the game seems to run fine on the fairly old crappy computer that I'm developing it on (very early dual core desktop processor, two gig of memory, that kind of affair). The graphics card requirements will be pretty minimal - integrated graphics should work fine - but I wouldn't necessarily assume it'll run like a dream on really ancient machines or netbooks. Best bet will be to give the demo a crack and see what happens. Will you port it to any other platforms? I think it'd be a good fit as a downloadable title for the XBox 360 or the PS3, and possibly the Wii as well, but I really don't have the ability to work on closed platforms like that at the moment. Maybe, maybe, if it goes well on computer platforms. I have no plans to release it for the iPhone - in fact, I have actively planned not to - but it's possible that I'll release a different game with a similar coloured gravity puzzle mechanic for iPhone/Android, one day in the far off future. It's currently being developed for Windows, but I've kept my options open in terms of cross-platform technology so porting it to MacOS and Linux is very much on the cards. What technology does it use? It's all pretty basic. The game's written in C++. The physics is using a library called ODE (Open Dynamics Engine), but the collision detection isn't ODE, but rather a product of my own fevered mind. The graphics are all OpenGL, the windowing is currently managed by GLUT but that will soon change (probably to GLFW), the font rendering uses Freetype, the audio will be OpenAL when I get around to implementing it. I think that's everything. Haven't I played this game before? It's possible. Colourbind was originally made for a competition at Eegra a couple of years back. The competition had a three month time limit, and the theme was colour (not color - it's an Australian website). That version of the game, while cool, was dramatically less cool than the version I'm working on now - those who have played it will see a pretty obvious difference in the screenshots - but more importantly, the controls in the old version were FRUSTRATING. And I like frustrating games, too... but they were a bit much. You could probably find the original version around the interwebs, but I urge you to wait for the better version lest you get turned off the game entirely. Also I must warn you that playing the original might spoil the flow of the full version to some extent. Like, a few original puzzles are present in updated form in the new game, and if you've seen them before the snazzier versions will seem a bit out of sequence. Whereas the demo for the new version will avoid sequence-breaking. So... yeah. Oh and it came third in that competition, in case you were wondering. Where'd you get that rad music that's going on in the background of the trailer? A fellow by the name of Bart Klepka wrote it for Colourbind out of the goodness of his heart, after seeing the game at Freeplay not long ago. There is, or will be, some stuff of his located at http://www.bartklepka.com/ Why is this website so poorly designed? Seriously, it's like a wall of text. It's because I'm naively neglecting the marketing process for my game, as fledgling independent developers traditionally do. In my defense, I am gradually trying to improve the situation. Thanks for being one of the no-doubt few people who read this far, though. :) Would you like to post a disorganised bunch of screenshots now or what? Why yes indeed, and thanks for bringing it up.  Those tassel-looking things hang in the direction of the appropriate colour of gravity, so you can more easily see what's happening.    |