State of the Union, 2010

First off; apologies for laying low. We haven’t been posting much lately because we’ve been working quietly on a number of projects which shall be revealed shortly. We hope you like our site’s new look.

Progress on ‘Fray’ (the game formerly known as Project Slideblox) is coming along nicely. We decided to use the game as an opportunity to implement some key technologies which should speed up the development of future games significantly.

One of the new features that we have added to our game engine is scripted animation. Our new Animation Engine, written using C++ and OpenGL, handles all scripted animation within the game. This includes our intro animations, logo, main menus, level backgrounds, the pause menu and more.

The Animation Engine works in a manner similar to Adobe Flash, you specify the position, rotation, color and state of an object at specific keyframes and the engine interpolates between them. It can handle plain images, images loaded from a texture atlas and buttons, which are a collection of images representing the various button states. Expect some demonstration and discussion of the animation engine to come soon.

In other news, we are planning a new web venture which we are keeping under wraps for now. If our market research says it’s viable, we’ll run with it and you’ll find out about it right here.

One more thing, Dave decided to play around with the Adobe Flex SDK yesterday in order to evaluate it’s potential as a tool for rapid prototyping, the result? He made this little game, check it out: Gravity Game.