Closure Development Blog

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noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:32:00 +0000

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IGF!

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:43:00 +0000

3 NOMINATIONS!

Excellence in Audio!

Technical Excellence!

Nuovo Innovation Award!

Root for us in March and congrats to the rest!

Flash Version nominated for Bytejacker Indie of the Year

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 01:36:00 +0000

The flash version of Closure was nominated for Bytejacker's Free Indie of the Year award.

Go vote for it here

http://www.bytejacker.com/

There's lots of competition, so go vote!

Press Release 11/11/09: Full Title

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:16:00 +0000

The full title of "Closure" will be "Closure: on the EDGE of reality™"

We feel that this will embrace the theme of the game, which fundamentally takes place on the EDGE between reality and nonexistence. The title also represents many of the technical algorithms we used to create the game, such as EDGE Processing, EDGE detection, EDGE*, Separating EDGE Theorem, EDGE Mapping, EDGING, and EDGE-SORT.

Hopefully you're all ready for an EDGY ADVENTURE!

Read here for more information

™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™™
Related:
Fez becomes Fedge
Eliss follow-up Edgeliss
Closure becomes Closure on the Edge of Reality
Ledge Dismount
Edward McEdgington
Critter Crunch becomes Critter Credge
Canabalt becomes Canabedge
Edgeform: On the Edge of Insanity
And Yet it Moves becomes And Edge It Moves
Edgeless
EeeEEEEeeEeEEEEeeeEdge!
and,
An explanation may be warranted.

Become a fan of Closure on Facebook!

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Schubbe) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:50:00 +0000

Right here. It's a good way to get little snippets of information when there's an update!

More Sample Music

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:24:00 +0000

Here is a sample of more of the music to appear in the game, yet again created by the amazing Chris Rhyne (who I'm still urging to get a website set up for himself)

Indiecade

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:38:00 +0000

Prepare for a looooong blog post, filled with interesting pictures and stories from my week in Culver City.

Closure and Aether were both finalists in the festival. If you don't know or remember, I was half of Aether too. Because Edmund McMillen was listed first on Aether and I was listed first on Closure, there was a mix up and the two games were placed in separate galleries. The event was split up amongst 3 buildings, which I didn't realize at first or else I would have let them know. Not a problem, I thought, they'll supply the computers so I can leave my booth to walk around, and Edmund would arrive on day 2 so he could watch the Aether booth if necessary and I'd only have to cover both day 1. I'm foreshadowing disaster here. You'll see.

Anyway on Wednesday, I arrived in LA and spent the day with my uncle (who's also doing the music for the game). We talked about the atmosphere and mood and he worked on the music a bit, and we got something really great coming soon music-wise. On Thursday, he drove me into Culver City where I met up with Mike and Greg and Daniel Benmergui. We were splitting a room a few blocks away from the event so we wouldn't have to spend much money for a hotel.

Day 1 begins. I wanted to show off the new version of the game, despite submitting the flash version to the festival. They had mac towers to show off with (cause I didn't get the controller working with windows yet), but unfortunately they were older PowerPC macs, so I had to set up my laptop as the demo station. This was my station:

So, the room was kinda cool. I was right underneath a whole ton of original Disney and Simpsons animation frames. But unfortunately, since my laptop was now my demo machine, I couldn't leave it alone to go watch other booths or other people's stuff unless someone was there. Not a huge deal, really. Enough people were around that I could talk to and show the game to, but not too many, so I could take breaks.

The judges and press came around that day and I told them about the game. Then the opening party was that night. It was at a gallery a ways away, where art was hanging on the walls, music was playing, and the waitresses, dressed up as french maids, served us free food and drinks (delicious food too). The art in the gallery was pretty cool

But some of it was pretty questionable

I gave my "mini-microtalk" for Closure, which consisted of 12 slides at 16 seconds each. It was fun struggling to keep up with the slides but it went very well.

Day 2 was a normal day. It turned out Edmund was sick and might not make it to the festival, so Aether went unwatched that day. I tried to check up on it. The awards ceremony was that night. If Aether won an award, I was to call Edmund and he'd say some words through the phone, through the microphone. Jon showed up that day too, with Luis and Nick. Jon and Luis had a lot of fun at the award ceremony. Perhaps, too much fun?

Lots of free food at the ceremony too. Free food is always good. The Sony Pictures Building was massively huge, my camera couldn't take a good distance picture in it. Oh ya and Closure won for Gameplay Innovation. The trophy looks like a bong. And weighs like 20 pounds. And there's no way I was gonna get it on to the airplane.

My uncle was nice enough to ship it out for me. It's crazy how much family I have all over the country and how willing they are to drive me around and ship stuff for me.

Day 3 came. There wasn't much to say about that day, other than the fact that Tim Langdell showed up. He's infamous for suing the hell out of people that "infringe" on his "famous" trademark "EDGE", and fairly universally hated by the independent gaming community right now, so it struck everyone as a wtf moment when he showed up to INDIEcade. Maybe he's looking for more trademarks, considering EA is ripping him a new hole and using the courts to strip him of his precious trademarked words. I should register Closure sometime soon come to think of it. I have protection by default at least, and I can use the "tm" symbol whenever I want, so you may see that start popping up soon for my own good.

Day 4 was interesting. It was a short day, followed by a second awards party. I found out Edmund went into the ER in the morning. I had no idea what was going on. At the awards ceremony, Aether won an honorable mention, so I called Edmund to see if he was good enough to say something. His wife Danielle picked up, and said he was "unconscious", and everyone was a little worried. Later in the evening I got the call from Edmund, he had gallstones and his gallbladder needed to be removed. Not life threatening at all, but extremely painful. Also he doesn't have insurance, so if you want you can donate some money to help him foot the bill.

This was our prize. Not as cool as a 20 pound cast iron sculpture of death, but interesting nonetheless. I had to assemble it myself.

The game developers life is fun. Unfortunately these types of events can't last forever, or else we'd all be having too much fun to actually make games. So, back to work for me. Next major festival is GDC in march, so I have quite a bit of time to *yawn* actually do some work instead of goofing around with fun people.

Go team Closure GO!

Indiecade

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:06:00 +0000

Closure won for "Gameplay Innovation". Will post pics soon.

Indiecade

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:56:00 +0000

Heading to LA tomorrow for IndieCade. They put Aether and Closure in different buildings so I'm gonna have a lot of running around to do to keep up with it all.

Notice:

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:26:00 +0000

The Xbox button icons in the PAX demo video are not indicative of the release platform. The 360 controller has a USB plug, that's why I used it at PAX and that's why those buttons show in the video.

Release platform is still yet to be decided.

Sorry for any misunderstandings.

PAX Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:43:00 +0000

What? VIDEOS? Finally?

Ya we got something good enough to show.

Now, I cut out a few levels to fit in with the length, and keep in mind this demo was meant to show off features, not provide a uniform gameplay experience.

So, up next on my list of dates is Indiecade, in October. Closure and Aether are BOTH finalists in that, so I will be flying out to Los Angeles to demo them both. Edmund will be there to man the Aether booth so I can focus on Closure. We got a lot of feedback at PAX from watching people play the game (like this clip right here, at ~1:30 in), so we're gonna cull and fix the levels shown here, fix some graphics stuff, and in parallel work on getting the atmosphere of the game ready.

The atmosphere. It's the biggest hurdle we have with the game right now. The flash version had a very oppressing, claustrophobic, and dark atmosphere to it. This one so far, not so much. You can kinda tell from the video that it's missing the key feature that made the flash version so good. We're working on that. It's no trivial task, and both the art, music, and level design aren't quite there yet. Don't fret though, we WILL get it right.

PAX Flu

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Schubbe) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:36:00 +0000

all the pax photos (160 something plus a video of a large man falling off the darksiders horse in like 10 seconds) i took here on photobucket

So yea I stayed at glaiel's apartment to go to pax with him and got sick too. the plane rides home sucked. But the weekend was pretty crazy. Had to walk 2 miles to his place after getting off the bus then stay up really really late every night doing random stuff like working on finishing the demo, fixing bugs, and playing games with he, derek yu (tigsource), and andy hull (storyfort). one night we went to a grill with all the pax10 and indie developers we saw there that day and played pool, too. glaiel and i crushed derek and andy.

the pax 10 booth went really well too, especially at Closure's kiosk. someone was always playing and someone else was always watching which is a huge difference from showing the flash game off at E3, where the big named developers couldn't care less about the indiecade booth (see Example 1: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25158). g4 people stopped by to play and hopefully there will be coverage on that in the next few days. we got awesome positive feedback. unfortunately some feedback was too positive and didn't offer anything constructive but it was awesome nonetheless! (thanks to everyone who wrote something!)

we were basically there and at the behemoth booth right next door the entire weekend. not really time to walk around, afraid of missing any sort of media or cameras coming around. glaiel, tom and i walked over to scribblenauts to try to see it and play it a few times but that's about it for me. the sumo sacs were indeed helpful resting tools but i could have used a regular chair at times.

besides all the indie developers i met, i also met a couple people i have known online for awhile: monkokio and thejermz. monkokio actually gave us a ride home the last day and woke up extremely early to give me a ride to the airport this morning which was nice of him.

and I met other newgrounders as well: mexifry, faux, fluffkomix, and morichax (and dan paladin, didn't talk to him that much though as he looked very busy drawing for people)

everyone i met that day was really really cool so no newgrounds drama ensued

it was all just so awesome, i'd say it was better than E3 from the amount that was going on; and the fact that at PAX, people come to play new games, not just watch new trailers and do executive and corporate business.

thanks tom for all the merchandise i bought from the behemoth booth too!

ps. i think writing this thing was way more than i had to do in the first place so i didn't link to anyone's names

pss. fan art to me of my first game ever from derek:

Notable selections from my PAX comment sheet

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 06:35:00 +0000

I'll post pictures when I'm not so about to fall asleep now and lose my grammer and tyeping abilitess.

These were from my guest book. If you are at PAX this weekend, pop by, play the game, and leave a comment.

"GR8 GAME GUYS! Tom Fulp - LV 20"

- Tom beat all 20 levels

"Fun, wish there was more ways to die"

- average gamer person who popped by.

"AWESOME GAME - I LOVE PUZZLES BRAID-LIKE BUT THAT IS A GOOD GAME TO BE COMPARED TO"

- must have been drunk

"Morgan says- AWESOME!!! good luck, I can't wait to play"

- Morgan Webb (G4)

"I am the greatest Closure player in the world. TIM SCHAFER (PS Awesome game!)"

- The clip of Tim Schafer and Morgan Webb playing the game will show on Xplay on G4 next week sometime. Keep an eye out.

"[doodle of tim schafer] - Derek"

- I will post Derek Yu's doodle later on

PAX

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:37:00 +0000

Pax begins in like 8 hours... I should get some sleep but the game's so close to being ready

Here's my booth. After the event I'll have to think of something fun to do with the sign I had to go get printed. Was not planning on spending that much money today.

(thanks to Brittany Aubert for the pic... I stupidly forgot my camera during setup time)

More incentive to come to pax

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:12:00 +0000

Here's more incentive to come to PAX this year if playing the game wasn't enough

I'm no artist, but...

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:55:00 +0000

I decided to draw my own promo art for the game while Jon's away.

One leap forward, 2 steps back

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:20:00 +0000

I solved the physics problem talked about earlier. Once I have it tweaked right, I may write an article on my method for the potential of others to improve upon it and add it to the Box2D standard, but I need to iron out the small bugs in it first.

PHYSICS ENGINE: Box2D

Anyway, the game took a huge leap forward with the addition of "real" physics. Unfortunately, I now need to go back and rework the game's water behavior, sound effects, and most of the level design, and tweak the mechanics of the character, and fix a bunch of animation bugs brought in by the murdering of my own precious little *sniff* mechanics engine.

That's gonna take a while.

Luckily for you I saved the older build of the game and all its source so we can show that one off at PAX if I don't get boxy2d here ready in time.

I'm probably gonna need to rework the graphics engine some time in the future too. Ah well, I knew from the start that I'd end up writing the whole engine 2-3 times during the course of this project.

16:9, 4:3

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:39:00 +0000

For now, the game simply letterboxes itself to fit in with 4:3 screen ratios, as it is natively meant to run in 16:9 format.

It was a design decision to not make levels scroll and to make them all fit in one screen. We're gonna do our best to provide a smooth transition between levels to make the game feel connected and to make all the levels feel like they belong together. I tried scrolling the level in an early test. It felt pretty neat, made the game feel a little larger, but it absolutely killed the gameplay and puzzles when you couldn't easily see the whole level. It was a huge problem and we decided after much deliberation to do the game with entirely single screen puzzles, and make up for that fact by providing a ton of art and decoration for each level. It's gonna feel rich.

The final game will have over a hundred built in levels, with DLC level packs a possibility, if we aren't wiped out after designing and illustrating the first 120 levels.

Anyway, I thought about 4:3 ratios today, and was wondering about perhaps making the game fill up the whole screen, then scrolling slightly to the left and right as you move to preserve the 16:9 ratio size for levels. Would you rather have that, or the current solution of letterboxing? I'd prefer the letterboxing for reasons stated above, but I know some of you might get annoyed that the game would waste a portion of the screen that could be put to better use.

I'll probably make that an option in the settings for those who still have 4:3 TVs or monitors.

Physics

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:45:00 +0000

The simple task of "add physics to Closure!!1!1" turns out to be not so simple after all. Currently I only have balls in the game, implemented with my own hacky physics system (as in I wrote it in 1.5 days just so I could "have something in the game, I'll fix it later". I'm mostly typing this out as a way to organize my thoughts, a lot of programmers do that.

I have a really easy way of telling if a point is lit up, I simply look up the color of the light on that pixel (light is a small texture upscaled with bilinear filtering, I take this into account). In the new game, it is more than simply circles. I use a bunch of textures, blurring, and odd shapes (including spotlights) to create a good looking light texture, and describing it via geometric shapes is near impossible to do in real time.

The land is triangles, but currently for purposes of speed I have it save a collision map so I can use bitmap collision. I compare the level with the light to determine if a point is colliding.

I suppose I'm gonna have to fall back to hacking my ball collision into box2D, then constructing the box out of 14 or more connected balls along the perimeter

I can estimate surface normals this way too, and indeed I use that for my hacked ball physics.

Unfortunately adding box physics keeps haunting me as there doesn't seem to be a simple or speedy way to do so.

I'm considering this option right now. I can use an existing engine like Box2D.

Subdivide my shapes into these formations:

Turn off collision for segments not in light:

I have the level stored as triangles anyway.

This would make the raw detection portion similar to my current method of "check points around the perimeter" but would offload that to the physics engine.

Crud though as I type this I realize its flaws. That's why I'm typing it out I guess, to organize my thoughts here. If an object is inside a land triangle when it is turned on, it will resolve out of the triangle, whether lit or not, when in reality, if the light bisects one of the land triangles, I only want it to resolve out of the lit portion of the triangle.

A predicament

I suppose I may have to resort to hacking my ball collision into an engine such as Box2D, then constructing a square out of a bunch of small balls (for collision with the land) and one large square (for collision with other boxes and balls).

Music

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:19:00 +0000

Here's an early sample mix of some music for the game created by Chris Rhyne.

Artistic Direction

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:51:00 +0000

We have made many decisions on how we want the game to look, and yet we are nowhere near finalizing a style for the game. It'll looking as though we'll have to whip something up quick for PAX, then evolve that style as we work. Anyway, since I'm a programmer by nature and a pretty horrible artist, all I can think of is how the art should work on a theoretical level.

Essentially, we needed to qualify exactly what about the art in the first game was appealing, in an attempt to achieve the same effect with a more advanced and detailed style.

Background art specifically is what we were talking about, since Jon's already got a bit of work done on the game sprites (at least I keep hoping he does...).

Most importantly about background art, we decided that the point of Closure's art is to bring life to static objects through clever use of lighting. My engine supports animated background elements and scripted interactive background elements so we could fill the world with life if we wanted to.

But that's not what the game is about. It's about the light. The light is what makes everything feel alive. It creates a primitive sense of fear not unlike imagining seeing things in the middle of the night because a shadow, a broom, and a volleyball kinda looks like a person. I figure, the fear is more valid when it coms from the player's imagination, rather than mine. This was an unexpected side effect of the graphics in the first game, and it makes for an extremely difficult challenge in this game to preserve effects that were accidents in the first place.

I doubt we'll nail the mood for PAX. In fact, if we do that is a BAD sign because stuff should never work that early on. I have a feeling that even though the game's level design may be complete by June next year, we will still be spending months and months and months making sure that we can make the game feel right. It's a huge task, probably more difficult than any amount of code or art.

Which is precisely why discussing the art is important. We decided to make the backgrounds as static as possible, yet as varied and original as possible. Animated graphics and scripted stuff will show up every now and then as an accent rather than the main focus. Gameplaywise, the light brings motion to static levels; Elevators, moving platforms, etc are all created through lighting over a flat, immobile, static level. It makes sense that the graphics should echo the same effect.

JON, POST SOME ART!

Closure Killed Itself

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:12:00 +0000

Yup. If the game freezes, I have it kill itself now.

I had fun doing that. In the rush to get the game ready for the fall convention craziness, I had to put a little fail-safe in the game which causes it to brutally stab itself to death in the case that it freezes. The plus side is that now I can figure out what went wrong when it freezes, rather than just speculating, which will help me prevent those freezes for the final release.

It's every game's goal to be bug-free and crashless, but that's not always possible. If we choose to leave the level editor in there, there's nothing preventing someone from say, adding 400000000 spotlights into a level besides time (but someone could and will figure out the level file format and make "crash" levels and send them to people, it's inevitable), so it'd be useful for the game to kill itself in the case it can't handle an abusive level, rather than eat up resources and bog down the user's computer.

I should have the game give itself a funeral too.

Damn it I'm just procrastinating doing something useful, back to work!

Pax10

noreply@blogger.com (Tyler Glaiel) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:11:00 +0000

http://www.paxsite.com/pax10.php

We're in. If you're at PAX, you'll get a chance to try the game out. Not the flash version either, THIS version!

Character Concept Art

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Schubbe) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:42:00 +0000

I've been drawing some character art recently and I was thinking...What if the focused graphics, ground, character, main puzzle objects, etc, stand in too much with the other grayscale graphics? Well, we could just brighten them and make them much brighter. That is one option and I can see it working, but I also played with the idea of maybe trying the old two-tone style on the main graphics and grayscale fogged objects in the background. The two-tone style looks interesting in the fog. More to come though. Hard to see how it will all play out without seeing post-processed graphics all flowing together in-game but I'll test that out a bit later.

(Click to enlarge)

Gametopius Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Schubbe) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Thomas Cross, a writer for Gametopius.com, stopped by my booth at E3 and really enjoyed Closure. So he decided to give us questions! You can read it here.