I’m proud to present EXO ONE, a surreal, exoplanetary exploration game. Teaser below:
EXO ONE is on Steam Greenlight now, so please vote and leave a comment. It will be available on Itch.io’s First Access program to buy (500 only to start with) soon after AVCON (Australia’s Video Game/Anime Festival) on July 15th. If you’re in Adelaide, South Australia, you can come and be among the first to play the game at the Indie Games Room at AVCON.
Here’s the full press release:
EXO ONE – Reveal Teaser
A surreal, exoplanetary exploration game in development for PC.
Adelaide, South Australia – July 12, 2016 – Exbleative is proud to announce EXO ONE, a surreal, exoplanetary exploration game currently in development for PC. A teaser video is available using entirely in-engine footage and displays a mix of gameplay and atmospheric shots.
In EXO ONE, the focus is shifted away from traditional sci-fi and space game tropes, such as space combat. Instead, it encourages a relaxed state of flow by using a gravity-based movement system to traverse and explore high sci-fi planets.
Pilot a spherical, gravity powered probe through awe-inspiring, enigmatic alien worlds. Watch cloud formations float across barren, lightning wracked fields. Drop beneath the waves of an ocean world. Ride the peaks of mountain tops and slide down alien dunes.
Upon reaching the first planet, players will encounter a surreal alien presence almost defying explanation. Accompanying the gameplay are highly atmospheric visuals, otherworldly audio and a hypnotic, electric guitar and synth-laden soundtrack.
EXO ONE is and continues to be inspired by the many discoveries of the Kepler spacecraft, and the mysteries of what may lay out in interstellar space for future explorers.
Features:
– An array of unique, open worlds to explore, from traditional terrestrial planets to water worlds to gas giants
– Pilot a probe featuring multiple movement modes. Rolling, sliding, gliding/flying, with control over gravity and anti-gravity.
– Use these movement modes to build momentum, slide down dunes and catapult off hilltops.
– Glide through clouds and catch thermals that lift you high into alien atmospheres.
– Drop beneath the waves of boiling oceans under the glow of distant suns.
– Wind down and travel at your own pace. There are no challenges, wars or enemies.
– Listen to the sounds of the planets and contemplate the alien presence that occupies them.
– A minimalist yet mysterious narrative that allows players to form their own conclusions of the story.
EXO ONE is being developed for PC, with other platforms TBD. The release date is tentatively slated for mid-2017. It will be shown for the first time in Adelaide, Australia at the AVCON anime and video game festival on the 15th of July, at the end of this week.
EXO ONE
Surreal, Exoplanetary Exploration.
Coming Soon.
Exbleative (http://www.exbleative.com) is Jay Weston, who has worked on titles including Powerslide, Dirt Track Racing, Zombie Outbreak Simulator, Class 3 Outbreak and Unknown Orbit.
June 8, 2016 / Jay / Comments Off on Just a quick Rocket League brag post!
*edit I’ve added another full length game:
Almost a full year since Rocket League was released (wow I don’t blog much) and it’s still pretty much the only game I ever play. For such a simple game with effectively one car and one pitch, that’s pretty amazing.
Anyways, here’s the brag play, felt pretty amazing to pull this one off with a fellow random player:
I got this idea from Tom Francis of GunPoint and Crate & Crowbar fame, and thought I’d do a recap of every game I’ve worked on. Partially this is an attempt to share my game dev history, partially to make myself feel better about the lack of progress I’ve made in the last couple of years(!).
I’ll start with the oldest games and end with my most recent.
Powerslide
I worked on this game straight out of high school, it was a post apocalyptic racing game that focused a lot on, yes – powersliding physics. I made (if I can recall that far back) 1-3 tracks, I definitely did the majority of the desert track and maybe a lot of the dam and mountain (?) tracks. As my first job, first game and first crew of non-school related co-workers and friends, it was a pretty huge deal and I’ve got a lot of great memories. A Powerslide ‘plaque’ still sits behind me here in my office, which consists of a team photo and signed gold master disc.
Role: 3D artist / Texturing
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: PC
Year: 1998
Dirt Track Racing
When you’ve got a game with nice powersliding physics, dirt oval racing is a pretty logical move. DTR let you race in a career mode that mimicked real life competition, complete with sponsorship, multiple classes and progression. I think I was credited as game designer, but when you’re modeling a real life competition from real racing, the game is practically already designed for you.
Role: Game Designer / (artist? so long ago!)
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: PC
Year: 2000
“Next Game”
Looking back, this was probably an overly ambitious title for its time, and the game designs I wrote for it probably didn’t help! The concept would have looked a lot like GTA but in a Mad Max world, complete with FPS and car combat sections, and an in depth story to boot. I recall the original game design by Richard Harrison (part owner of Ratbag) was far more realistic but I had some huge thing for people leaning out of windows and shooting each other rather than ‘copying’ Interstate 76. Anyway, I think this design morphed over time but never saw the light of day.
Somehow, after getting my dream designer role at Ratbag, I just didn’t seem happy at all, in fact it was the opposite, the last year I was there I wasn’t enjoying it at all. I guess I went from making DTR where I had a lot to do, to being someone who sat in front of the game design document all day long. I left Ratbag in the early stages of development, having picked up a copy of Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad Poor Dad” – I had a need to go start my own business.
So here’s where I left and formed Hyperfocal Design (sells HDRI sky maps). After the sort of crazy schedules games demanded, I’d somewhat sworn off returning to developing them.
Here’s a video, which ended up being fairly different gameplay wise from what I’d proposed:
I cringe looking back at how much harder the prototyping process was (I don’t think there was one at all), especially with today’s tools like Unity. Back then I’m sure I’d have realised early on that dudes leaning out of car windows shooting at each other in a big open desert would have been a little boring!
“Concrete”
I managed to secure some early funding from our state government for this one, but at the time, with this concept, it was unrealistic to produce without a large team. Even today I’d say unless it was top down/2d sprite based or something it was another over ambitious title and I didn’t want to form the next Ratbag to do it. I got as far as actually meeting with a couple of venture capital people but didn’t get any interest. The gameplay again was GTA-like but ‘cops and robbers’ where the robbers could mark territory with spray paint and blend into the general population (there were no names hovering above heads). I suppose in hindsight the design is a little like APB (minus the MMO part), which was a spectacular failure.
“Zombie Outbreak Simulator”
I teamed up with Saxon Druce from Ratbag to make this one about 5 years ago. It was step one on the way to releasing the next game, Class 3 Outbreak. ZOS was a sandbox simulation, not really a game at all, where you could adjust various attributes of zombies such as their speed, infection time and so on. We had some success in terms of press coverage because the game ran on Google Maps and it had a big novelty hook.
Role: Game Designer/Artist
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: Web, then iOS, then Android
Year: 2009
“Class 3 Outbreak”
With ZOS ‘complete’, we then released the ‘real game’, which I still felt was quite devoid of features. At least it had a fairly nice core mechanic where you had to use police units to stop the zombies multiplying out of control. Unfortunately, due to Saxon being only part time on the coding side, and due to changes with Google’s APIs, and then some huge screw ups with funding from the government, this never went much further. Eventually Saxon and I went different ways – I was always pushing for more gameplay but he wanted to focus on things like the map editor. We butted heads a bit and eventually I handed over my share of Binary Space to him.
Role: Game Designer/Artist
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: Web
Year: 2010
“Unknown Orbit”
I’m fairly proud of this little title, which I developed in a year and released on the Apple app store. It’s essentially a 3D Tiny Wings/Endless Runner where you orbit around a small planet as a comet. It did pretty average, made maybe $2-3k or so and now sells a copy a day. I think the biggest let downs from this game were that I probably made it too hard and didn’t make enough content, ie other planets to fly around.
Role: All things! No wait, Rhys Lindsay did the music and Saxon helped with some high score code!
Made with: Unity, Playmaker
Platform: iOS
Year: 2013
Enter the ‘prototype years’
Whereby I make lots of prototypes and never finish anything:
“Zombie Games”
I messed around with a number of different designs for zombie games and never quite settled on any.
Status: This one is still simmering in the background, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I tackled a strategic zombie game at some stage in the future.
“Generation Ship”
I then entered a phase where I thought I’d like to make a game with no combat in it. I still feel this is a very noble goal and that potentially there’s a lot of uncovered non-combat stuff out there, but I didn’t do a great job of finding it. I wanted to make a game about a Generation Ship that was trying to survive out in space, you had a galaxy map and a crew, and had to decide where to go, what to do to survive. In the end it was just no fun, there wasn’t much to do, and I’ve since seen other games come out with similar mechanics that I didn’t like much either!
Status: Now ‘reborn’ (below)
“Fighter Tactics”
Obviously here I’ve totally given up on that theory and decided to do a turn based space combat game. This was probably my most promising prototype, which I abandoned when I saw the Oculus Rift.
Status: Also reborn (below)
“The Station”
This was an Oculus Rift prototype that also got quite far along. I wrote an entire script for it, characters, made a prototype… The only gameplay consisted of this kind of ‘dimensional tuning’, controlled by head movement, that never really seemed to resonate with people. Also I realised if I was going to make this game, I’d become a full time 3D artist again, which didn’t appeal to me.
At this stage I’m realising how lucky I am to have Hyperfocal Design paying my bills.
Status: I may come back to this one day, I’m not sure – I liked the story and concept but just didn’t want to make it I suppose. Its also a pretty big commercial gamble having no idea how Rift games would sell.
“Generation Fleet”
This idea didn’t seem to leave me, and I thought, why the hell didn’t I try combining the two ideas of the Generation Ship and Fighter Tactics? I was thinking a lot about Battlestar Galactica as well, and Star Trek Voyager’s Year of Hell episode. In terms of games, FTL is an obvious inspiration, as is XCom, and I really liked SteamBirds and Hero Generations. So that’s where I stand right now – the Generation Fleet/Fighter Tactics game is in prototype phase, I like the game play and I’m just trying some variants to make sure the turn based space combat is as fun and strategically deep as possible. The Generation Fleet story/world surrounding it will form a kind of XCom style meta game.
The last blog I posted, I outlined how Unknown Orbit had dropped to around a sale a day, and that my next step would be to try setting UO to be free for a day or two.
Soon after, I was contacted by a new free app company called 3 Magic Shots, who claim to “… find top rated apps and get the developers under our spell to have them make it free for you.” I hadn’t really looked into any other free app a day services after hearing how expensive they were, and these guys sent me a professional, hand crafted email with a very professional looking website and app to go with it. So I said, sure why not! They had only launched a few weeks ago, and I was able to use the service for free, whereas it sounds likely to one day become a paid service.
I ended up giving them a bunch of marketing, text and image resources, some review quotes, that sort of thing, and then a week or so later I set UO to be free. On that day, 3 Magic Shots featured my game on their website, app and twitter. I got a push notification saying that it was available, and UO did look really nice within 3MS’s app interface on my phone. The game was also featured on a few other free app sites, and it ended up getting downloaded 26,000 times that day, tailing off to a few hundred 4-5 days later.
Overall the free version was downloaded over 45,000 times, and when it returned to a 99c app, sales were up to 10-15 a day, where they still are now. It will remain to be seen if I can stay at that level or not, but it would be nicer pocket money than $365 a year! I’d like to say a big thanks to 3 Magic Shots for providing a hassle free and very professional promotion service, their staff are great and my game was featured in the best light possible. A 10x sales increase is quite good (though of course, my sales were miniscule to begin with!), and perhaps with an app that was a bit stickier or more fun, I’d have seen even better results. I highly suggest you contact them if you’re considering some kind of free period for your game.
Surprisingly, while I was fully expecting to get a deluge of poor reviews from free users, reviews stayed at mostly 5 stars in the USA and Australia. Not many people appear to like it in the UK, however!
In terms of how UO has gone in general, on the one hand I feel like I did really well to get a highly rated and reviewed game out there, in front of all the big sites, yet it has been a fairly standard app store flop. On the other hand, I do understand that the game has its shortcomings, and I certainly don’t have any kind of feeling that I deserved to do better from it. I think if I did have this feeling, I would perhaps be doing more updates and trying to promote it further. I did my best with the skills and time I had, and decided to release when the game was ‘good enough’, while not spending too long on such a simple game.
In the mean time I’ve been prototyping a couple of games with the composer of Unknown Orbit and Class 3 Outbreak/Zombie Outbreak Simulator, Rhys Lindsay. This has mostly taken the form of board game mockups which have been really enjoyable. Despite apparently being a game designer, I had never done this before and it was really illuminating. It gives me much greater confidence to begin creating a computer prototype, knowing that I’ve almost played through the finished game a few times. If all goes well I hope to begin sharing details on that next game soon.
January 22, 2013 / Jay / Comments Off on Unknown Orbit, 1 Month On + 2012 Wrap Up.
If you didn’t catch my first post-release wrap up, you can read it here. In a nutshell, the release of Unknown Orbit went well, and I got reviewed by a lot of big sites, but sales didn’t launch in a big way.
So how’s it all going now that things are well and truly settled? Here’s the sales graph by week:
Things started out alright, and sales haven’t been a total embarrassment, but now I’m down to around 1-5 sales a day, its just pocket money. I’m going to try offering the game free for a day or four to promote the game a bit more soon, but this is probably where I leave it for now. I was seriously considering doing an update, but its just not worth it for the sales and initial reaction I got. I’m getting more and more eager to begin work on something with some more depth and meaning.
Despite the rather average sales, I felt like the game was well worth my time and effort. I learnt a lot in 2012 about Unity, Playmaker (the visual state editor that I use instead of programming) and met some great people in London. Also got an article published in Gamasutra, so I’m overall quite pleased and ready to move on to the next game.
I’ve just moved back to my home town of Adelaide, so I’m using this opportunity to think, ponder and dream about next game possibilities while I get setup. I’m also going to take this chance to study some more game design, and branch out some more creatively. I’ve been reading Mastery by Robert Green, Art of Game Design, and I’m generally just trying to shake things up a bit more by doing some more drawing, guitar, and reading before I decide on the next game. I’m also going to commit to a more constant study process, whether that’s specific game design books, philosophy, psychology, art, design, etc. I’ll also be continuing to practice and flesh out my skills in Unity and Playmaker so I can prototype and build the next game even faster.
I’m also going to be thinking about partnering up with someone for the next game, perhaps once I’ve gotten a ways into the prototype development, game design, etc. Making UO on my own was fun, but if I want to develop something more in depth, then I shouldn’t fool myself that I can do it solo!
The only thing I can say almost for sure about the next game is that it will be about people. Something I’m very interested in is getting players attached to characters, so I will see what I can do to turn this effect up in my next game as much as possible. I’ve got a few great ideas I’m throwing around at the moment, its just a matter of choosing one!
Stay tuned for future updates, looking forward to sharing my next game.
Unknown Orbit went live 1 week ago, and my trigger finger is sore from pressing refresh on AppFigures, Twitter, and Google. I’ve gone from being very disheartened on release day, with none of my planned reviews going live, to unbelievably stoked that I got a video review by the one and only Touch Arcade! The video was mixed but mostly positive, and it was a shame that the guy playing it wasn’t the greatest at it, but seeing that video was one of the biggest professional thrills of my career. Its amazing how much importance I (developers in general?) place on these reviews. I could pretty much die happy after seeing it! If I ever got featured by Apple, I think I would explode! Having gotten that review plus one on 148 and AppAdvice, I’m now pretty happy that I’ve gone almost as far as I possibly can with promoting the game. Hopefully I’ll see a few more reviews spawn from the TA/148/AppAdvice ones, but chances are this is probably as good as it gets.
The 3 reviews, plus a prmac press release, some twitter, reddit and facebook managed to keep UO around the 125 ranking mark in the app store (for iPad/iPhone Arcade/Action) for the whole week, and sales have been ok, but nothing to shout about. If this is my initial sales spike, and I’m about to fall off a cliff, I’ll be making $1 a day soon :) I’ll post a graph maybe in a week or so, so that there’s some decent data to look at. Even getting reviewed by all the big sites doesn’t seem to have that big an effect, but my greatest hope now is that because I’ve gotten on those sites, I now may get noticed and featured by Apple in some way. I’m prepping my Featured artwork now, just in case!
Unknown Orbit Response/Feedback
Feedback on the game itself has mostly been mixed, and I’d summarize that most people think that the concept, visuals, sound, music, and atmosphere are good/great, but the game lacks a little something in terms of goals, fun, progression and content. Namely more planets, which is one of the hardest things for me to add due to the hardware/loading times. I’m now thinking about what I can do in this regard, and whether its even possible to do an update where I remove support for older phones (as load times for the planet on 3gs/iPhone 4 is a huge 35-40secs). I’m going to look into potentially procedurally generating planets/systems as well – I like the idea of having a different system each time, but procedural generation can be quite tricky. I spent a long time hand making this one planet, however I did begin with mostly random perlin noise type setups, which played well too. This would be quite a task, so I’d have to decide whether the game is really doing well enough to justify it.
UO Release Date
I chose to release UO on the Tuesday for a couple of reasons, a) because I figured most developers like Thursday, and I didn’t want to compete with them at this time of year, and b) Press have more time to get onto the game, and during a more quiet time of the week. This certainly seemed to work well with TA reviewing me on Friday, right before the weekend, but who knows if they just planned to do the review at that time anyway *shrug*. I certainly failed to “get all the reviews out on the same day” as seems the classic strategy. At the end of the day you have no control over this, and just have to hope for the best. I imagine the better your game, the more likely you’ll get it featured/reviewed closer to your release date.
Gamasutra Article
I also managed to get an article published on Gamasutra called “Suck at Coding, But Make Games Anyway“, which has gone over well. Whether this had much/anything to do with getting some of the reviews, or helped my rankings, I’m not sure. It was published the day after the game went live on Wednesday. I then posted it on Reddit, which seemed rather popular too. Reddit is my new favourite site for just about everything!
Problems
There wasn’t much in the way of problems – probably the only thing that’s gone a little awry is that I had to use my company, Hyperfocal Design, to publish the game (long story, I’m in London, company is Australian, couldn’t form a new company…) so I just had to use it and say it was developed by Exbleative. Most people reported that the game was made by Hyperfocal, because that’s how it appears on the app store.
End!
Looking at my current ranking on Monday night GMT, it seems I’m still up around the 150 ranking mark (iPad/Aracade) in the US app store, which is nice considering I don’t think any major press has done features in the last couple days. If I could carry on making $30-50 a day or so, then that’d be a nice additional income stream.
Next? I’m thinking a lot about what game/update I’d like to do next. Its also coming up on Christmas/New Year, and I’m moving back to Australia in mid January, so I doubt I’ll get a huge amount done before then. I’ll be talking to some people about the procedural generation stuff, brainstorming new ideas, and eating XMas turkey. I’m glad I got this thing out before Christmas, its a load off!
Thanks for everyone who helped me with the game, reviewed or chatted with me on the forums.
Also a big thanks to this guy on the UK app store for this thoughtful and hilarious review. I’ll end with it, for the lols:
You lot should thank me for buying this before you
by Stumpyjay on Friday, December 07 2012 version 1.0
“69p is way too much for this catastrophe of a game. Trust me shoemaker levy 9 moved better than this rubbish after it had smashed into jupiter. I just wish it had taken this tripe with it. Utter drivel. If i see 1 more negative review then you should really read reviews first you idiot and it serves you right. 69p is all this guy should ever make from this tripe. The other review is obviously fake”
I have sent out a press release via PRMac, and I believe I will get a couple of reviews from some big name sites as well, but I wont hold my breath until they actually appear! I’m going to now do a little more promotion on Reddit and Twitter, some token Facebook ads and then I’m finished fo’ realz. Or at least until a future update!
I’ve also been been talking to Gamasutra about an article on making games with no code (how Unknown Orbit was made), so that may appear soon. If not I’ll be posting it here.
Cross your fingers for me, and please lend a hand if you can by sharing/retweeting, etc!
I’m now days away from submitting to the app store, after a year of developing Unknown Orbit, I’m super excited/terrified/(?) to see how it goes. I feel like I’ve ticked all the boxes in terms of marketing, screenshots, trailers, press packs etc, I like the icon I’ve developed and I quite like the game I’ve made, so I like my chances of it doing at least reasonably well.
I actually feel like UO is the first game I’ve ever made. While I have worked with other people on games before, this is the first game that I conceived of, prototyped, then created all on my own. When I was a game designer with Ratbag, I recreated stock car racing rules, and then worked on a game design for a GTA/Mad Max style game which was never finished, and barely started. At Binary Space, I was never happy with how much gameplay we put in to the zombie games, and I was reliant on Saxon, my programming/biz partner to implement things. We also often disagreed about what features should go in, and being part time, many of my plans for the game just never made it in. So again, this feels like its ‘all me’, which is sort of scary… unless it’s a huge hit, in which case I will do an extravagant dance.
The game is probably 90% of what I wanted it to be. That 10% is probably half due to technical limitations and half lack of time, skills and resources. I imagine this is true for most games, though, and if things go well I’ll certainly be investigating updates or sequels.
Right now I’m waiting for Apple to change my account from an individual to a company. It will change from Jay Weston to Hyperfocal Design (my texture/hdri company), unfortunately I can’t use a trade name (Exbleative) nor do I want to form another pty ltd company, so I felt like this was the only option. Luckily Hyperfocal’s name somewhat translates well to games, and hopefully there isn’t much confusion as I try to promote the game under the Exbleative name!
Once I’m set to go with Hyperfocal, it’ll be one release candidate round on Testflight for super-final-for-realz testing, then I’ll submit and lose around 1 weeks worth of sleep.
Cross your fingers for me that some press like the game and review it!
Thought I’d write a quick post on this most standout indie game. I’m planning on writing a bit more in the coming months about other games, some critiques, some reviews, some gushing “omg that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen” type of blabber. So here comes the first one:
I have to admit, I didn’t always think this looked all that hot – I saw some gameplay at Rezzed and wrote it off as ‘yet another pixel art shooter’. Then I saw it got best at show. “Judges are so easily pleased I guess” I mused to my superior taste wielding self(?) But my interest was piqued and I started to learn a little more. I still wasn’t too sold, the gameplay looked cool but still, it looked like just another violent top down shooter of some kind, and these days I grow ever more tired of the same old stuff (or so I tell myself).
Then I played it at Eurogamer, finally. I actually played it twice – first time I didn’t even bother putting on headphones, and I picked up where someone else left off. I think they were a ways through and I had no tutorial to help me out, so I was killed so, many, times. I had only just got to Eurogamer so I got up and played some other games.
I returned again after seeing everything else, determined to give it one last “proper chance”, with head phones on, from the beginning. This made all the difference – I was quickly transported into Hotline’s psychadelic, dream-like world. I wanted to know who I was, who was I talking to, and the story sucked me in. The music, the sound, the graphical style and the writing is all art, and of course the face-stomping violence sets it all off. And then there’s the masks, each one its own lovingly crafted, horror-weird item seamlessly blending Hotline’s style with some great gameplay choices.
One of the things I admire the most about Miami is the way it almost naturally markets itself. It’s not just another pixel art game with the same old look – the colours, effects, character/mask styling all put it into its own category. The 80’s/hotline/miami words conjure up that place in time, describes the story and at the same time creates its own droolworthy little marketing angles that Devolver/Dennaton (they seem like old childhood friends?) have polished to a shine. 1800 numbers on its website, glorious 80’s colours, and lately even some live action trailers. How can you go wrong? The game and theme both do sell themselves, but then they are pushed so much farther! It even feels a little like the developers and the game itself have some mystery surrounding them. You don’t just get a feature list on the website, they give you a splattering of weird game themed stuff and a trailer, and even their blog is a little that way, its all… very strange.
I highly recommend you pick this game up, install, turn off the lights and stick on your headphones, loud! It’s currently on Steam right hither: http://store.steampowered.com/app/219150/
Thanks Hotline Miami, for teaching me I’m not yet above “generic top down shooters” or games with violence (lots and lots of it). But then, that’s not all the game is :)
