EXO ONE is a momentum-based, exoplanetary exploration game being developed mostly by myself (Jay Weston) in Unity. Players pilot a strange, spherical alien craft that can manipulate the laws of gravity, on mankind’s first ill-fated mission outside the solar system. The gameplay mechanics are inspired by games like Tiny Wings (iOS), Journey (PS3), and Tribes Ascend (PC). Every aspect of the game is laser focussed towards delivering an entrancing, flowing and exhilarating feeling of movement across a range of alien exoplanets.
EXO ONE at EGX Rezzed
After being selected to show the game in the EGX Rezzed: Leftfield Collection in London, EXO ONE received praise from a range of media at the event, going on to be named among the events top games by Eurogamer and The Guardian (among others!).
Edge-y
This month, Edge magazine, in a 2-page preview, said, “Tiny Wings, Journey and Kubrick collide in this sci-fi delight”.
This is a real career highlight for me, I can’t say I ever expected to see my name or my game in its pages. And yes, it’ll be framed on my wall for alllll timmmeee! Now all I have to do is live up to the hype! Eep!
The New Reveal Trailer
You can watch the Reveal Trailer, launching today to coincide with the Kickstarter:
The trailer shows for the first time substantially more gameplay, as well as the future-historian narrator that features throughout the game.
Kickstarter
So after over a year of development on the game, I decided to move forward with the Kickstarter launch to raise the quality bar, and help fund the remaining 8-9 months of development. Myself, along with Rhys Lindsay (our musician) and Tim Mcburnie (artist) will be looking for $35,000 AUD (or $26,000 USD) to complete all 12 planets, record music, develop concept art, record the voice overs and optimize the game. The campaign focuses on almost entirely digital rewards to keep overhead low when fulfilling rewards, with the sole physical reward being a limited run of one of Tim’s posters, signed by the team. The campaign will run until the end of the month.
Here’s the reward grid:
Hyping
A week ago I began sending out preview builds to press in the hopes for some launch day coverage of the campaign. The preview build, which will be similar to the Backer Alpha build reward, contains a quick tutorial scene and 2 planets. I’ve also beamed out a press release, which you can check out here if you’re curious. And I’ll be all over the rest of the internet as well, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc!
Helping
As you perhaps know, the first 48 hrs of a Kickstarter are super important, so if you’re thinking of backing EXO ONE, I’d love if you considered backing it on day one to help drive momentum and help the campaign become a success! Otherwise, I’d be super grateful if you could help out in the following ways!
Forward this email to someone who likes space/sci-fi games or games like Journey, Tiny Wings, Tribes Ascend, or Abzu.
Tell your friends!
After a long crunch period working up to EGX Rezzed, and then without much pause to get this campaign ready, I feel like I have done all I can to try and make the Kickstarter a success. With a little luck and your support, hopefully, the campaign will reach its goal!
Earlier this year I got a rather excellent email notifying me that I’d been selected to show EXO ONE in EGX Rezzed’s Leftfield collection, a curated selection of indie games. I had set my expectations and hopes for Rezzed to go something like this:
Have some fun at the event
Meet some cool new people
Hopefully appear in at least 1 or 2 articles
See old friends and family
All of those things happened + more!
The things as they happened
Day 0
The day before Rezzed, things started off super rocky. As I arrived to set up and test the game, it was rendering with a pure black sky. I had backup builds, but this appeared to be more a bug or incompatibility with a graphics card. Luckily, I checked the build logs and pasted the error line into Google and one other person reported the same issue, solved by downloading the 2010 Direct X SDK.
The phew’ing was deafening. Almost paid $1500 for a ticket to Rezzed to look at some other people’s games! Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. I’d of had to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.
Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. It’d be awkward to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.
I put my poster up, chatted with a few people from Leftfield and grabbed food with Jai from FINIFUGU.
Here’s the poster at my station, drawn by Tim McBurnie:
Day 1
Used my London coffee app to find ONLY THE BEST coffee, in this case, the closest was LMNH Kitchen (look mum no hands). Truly an important step that cannot be overlooked!
Bumped into Andreas of Promoter app fame, who thought I was the event organizer, David Hayward (this seemed to happen to numerous, different people throughout the event, which was odd). Andreas was also showing his game, Future Unfolding. I had some really amazing moments after playing it for just 10 minutes. His description goes like, “Future Unfolding is an action adventure that is all about exploration. Your goal is to unfold the mysteries and solve the puzzles hidden in the beautiful landscapes around you. There are no tutorials, and no one is telling you what to do.” I definitely advise not to look at trailers or anything before playing.
We had breakfast/coffee here on all three days and I really enjoyed chatting game dev, promoter app/biz stuff and events in general. It was nice to start each day at Rezzed with such great food, coffee and company! Andreas is a real dude, and his app looks quite good too, I’ll probably try it on the lead up to EXO ONE’s release.
This was just one of many real-dude encounters I had during the show. I’m not sure what it was about all the people in Leftfield, but I seemed to get along really well with everyone. In particular, since they shared my wall/opposite wall, I got to chat a lot with Jai, the guys from Alpixels (A Place for the Unwilling) , Joe from Four Last Things, Richard Boeser from Chalo Chalo , the PjamaLlamians who are making Flotsam, and the girls from Oniri Islands. Some of these peeps I felt an instant connection with, and it makes me kinda sad they’re now on the opposite side of the world.
This first day was kinda quiet, and there was occasionally some down time, but it was nice to be able to ease into things.
I had one press meeting that went well and resulted in me appearing in this:
After the first day I went and met an old Londonian friend for drinks, but I was so dead from not taking a break all day that I had to return to home base and eat, immediately followed by sleep. Didn’t seem to get much in the way of jet lag, luckily.
Day 2
This was a little busier than Day 1, got lots of good feedback, ideas, etc, all of which I wrote down during the day. Had another press meet up today which resulted in EXO ONE being included in this article, which painted the game in quite a glowing light!
This is the Outside Xtra trio who came and hooked up their gear to do a bit of an impromptu Let’s Play of the game. The video isn’t out yet (and there was some sound technical issues) but I can’t wait to see it. Outside Xtra have quite a fan following, and during a ‘meet’ event at Rezzed I heard they had a line that stretched half of the building.
After the day was over, there was the The Rock Paper Shotgun drinks night, and a bunch of the Leftfieldians went out for dinner beforehand, which was at an old pub overlooking the Thames. Then I met and hung out with another old friend from when I used to live in London, who introduced me to some cool people. I didn’t do much in the way of networking with press, though. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m trying to befriend them partly to improve my chances of them writing about my game. Maybe a missed opportunity, I dunno. I seemed to do fine regardless.
Day 3
This was the busiest day, and I’d often be standing a couple rows deep behind my game. I’m still told Rezzed is a pretty quiet event in the scheme of things. Again, nice to just ease into my first big event instead of DIVE in the deep end.
Met up with and hung out with a couple more friends and contacts on this day as well. Despite the larger numbers of people, I possibly talked to players less because I was just pushed back (or wanted to get out the way so others could watch). So it wasn’t manic or anything.
Had dinner after with some Leftfielders again then I was convinced to attend the after party, which was good fun with yet more games in every room. Checked out some of the retro games and played a bit of Joe Bain’s new game, Yucatan, which was super madness fun! There was some crowd based game in another room I think, but didn’t get to see it!
Press
I think my press strategy was pretty ‘normal’. I suppose I often thought I needed to be doing some secret tricks or ‘know people’ or something special to really get noticed and stand out, etc. But now that the event is over and I got basically the best response I could have ever hoped for, I guess the basics worked pretty well.
Before the event, I made the following Rezzed trailer that I pinned to my Twitter, saying I’d be at Rezzed, along with my email address (no it wasn’t even spammed):
I emailed around 20 writers/game sites/YouTubers with somewhat personalized emails (more so if I knew more about them) saying essentially, “come play EXO ONE at Rezzed Leftfield”, and included the above, very short video. Got 2 solid meeting times, maybe 2-3 “I’ll come over at some point, whenevzies” and a bunch of ignores. Some ignores ended up turning up regardless, but I don’t know whether that was from my email or just because they happened to be in Leftfield. I talked to a handful of other developers in Leftfield about their press outreach efforts, and most did nothing at all, so if that was common within Leftfield or Rezzed in general, then contacting the press potentially puts you a step ahead just by pressing send.
I ordered 3 t-shirts online which I could have spent too much time on, but ended up just using my EXO ONE logo on the front and back, with “developer” written on the back, so if anyone was looking to chat with the developer, they could easily spot me.
Press Stealth Abilities
Something I noticed about press at the event was that almost all of them (unless I’d set up a meeting) liked to fly in under the radar and play without me spotting/recognizing them. That worked for a few people who I saw write/tweet about the game afterward, but otherwise, if I recognized someone I just said so. Otherwise, I’d risk being weird (sorry, person I was totally weird to!). I imagine this is done so the developer doesn’t bug them too much or affect their play experience any more than it should. Generally, I just said something like, “the tutorial is kinda bad right now, so if you need any help lemme know”, then I left them to it.
I definitely felt that fan-boy factor a little with some people I met, but I had some great chats with press, gamers and devs alike. For the most part, with press, they’d come play the game, ask between 0 and a dozen questions then take off pretty quickly. Wasn’t overly hard, and while I practiced a bunch of practice answers to questions, many never came up.
After the event, I wrote and thanked anyone who wrote about EXO ONE, if I had their email address/Twitter.
Tweets ‘n Articles
Here’s most of the press/tweets I got during the event and after:
Rezzed people. If you've not seen Exo One, go see Exo One.
Damn it, I didn’t meet Terry! Terry is one of these darned people who don’t use a photo on their Twitter profile, I didn’t recognise him! I do recall seeing he was showing his game before flying over, but slipped my mind once I was there. I may have met him or Ruari as I recall one of the State Machine (his game) devs chatting to me. Tried to go play before open one day but someone was on it. Huge fan of Super Hexagon, so would have liked to have gone and been a weird fanboy/say hi briefly :P
Ordered about 500 and used a quarter of them, mostly taken by gamers. I put a screenshot on the front and some words (game name, my name, contact details) on the back.
Newsletter
One small error perhaps I could have improved would have been some way to sign people up to the newsletter at the event. The Flotsam guys had some kinda small iPad with a sign-up form on it, others went for the handwritten method. I guess the handwritten way stands out as being a mailing list quite obviously due to the email addresses on it, while the iPad kinda requires prompting (“hey you, sign up for our newsletter?”).
I’m not sure how many people went home then signed up for the EXO ONE mailing list, but over the entire event I added about 80 people to my list. Really don’t know if this is “good” or not.
Before the event, I asked everyone I knew for advice, including some people I didn’t know. This resulted in a couple of meetings that might not have otherwise happened, various tips/tricks for events, who to look out for (I hadn’t heard of OutsideXtra for example), introductions to press, how to keep my expectations realistic for a single, small-ish event and more.
What did I learn about EXO ONE?
The biggest stand out problem with the game was the first tutorial level, which is going to be getting some major love and redesigning soon. The camera I’m using hates the kinds of movement you can do in the starting level, and I throw a bunch of controls at the player and pray they remember (they never do). So this resulted in many players not ‘getting’ the game as they were missing pieces of the puzzle. Most people that I helped out ended up getting the hang of it, and luckily all press did too.
I got mixed feedback on the story, but I’d say fairly overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the story as-is, but also some very convincing “you should make it less literal” arguments.
Also received a handful of comments that there were too many controls. Mentioned this to some other Leftfielders and of course heard the opposite, “I had no problem with the controls”. Simpler is definitely better, but I feel like I might be able to remove at least one control combo (like holding two things to glide up for example).
Thankfully most of the feedback hit exactly the mark I was going for, with comments like:
That was super relaxing
It was mesmerizing
The sense of speed and feeling you get when you reach the clouds is amazing
I could just watch it all day
Like the Adelaide games event before (AVCON), people sat to play and didn’t want to get off. I should have forced an end timer on the demo as people had to wait ages to play in some cases. I was lucky the musician, Rhys, told me to shorten the first level, since even after doing so, people sometimes asked me if they could ever reach the transport structures in the distance. A classic example of the game developer being too good (fast) at their own game.
Quick Notes on Other Games
Since this post is getting long… Quick bullets on other games (I mentioned Future Unfolding above) that were near me and I played in Leftfield.
Great multiplayer iPad game that uses physical chess-like pieces (cute little figures) to move characters around on screen. Great for playing with kids.
Intriguing ‘mini-society’ and village full of characters whom you interact with and have influence over/effects on during ‘end times’. Great spooky vibes!
Those rolling quadrupeds… I saw some really, really weird stuff happen in this game during the event! I jumped on for 2 minutes, but think I need to have a proper go and hear the narration/music to really get into it.
Special Thanks
…to David Hayward for organizing the event, it went off without a hitch! And thanks to SEGA for sponsoring Leftfield.
It really was an amazing event, surrounded by awesome people and great games! With any luck, I’ll bump into some of my new friends again at another games event… *sniff*!
Edge
I’ve left the best till last! I’m wildly excited to announce that next month (May) EXO ONE is getting a 2-page preview in Edge magazine! So pumped! I’m not a huge games magazine reader, but whenever I do pick one up, it’s always Edge!
Next – Kickstarter
I’ve increasingly gone from ‘maybe doing a Kickstarter’ to ‘probably doing one’ to ‘doing one’ to ‘most likely doing one in May’. It takes time to build up the courage, you see. I’m going to get some advice on exact dates, but that’s my current thoughts. I’ll be announcing an exact date soon, so if this is something you’re interested in, you can sign up to my newsletter below:
My main priority this week (or the first day or two) will be completing my wormhole upgrade, complete with smoother transitions and loading. With any luck it’ll just be a few hours, but I seem to have introduced some new bugs at the same time.
Then I’m back onto a bit of story related stuff, and after that I might reassess what to do next for this Rezzed build.
Monday
Smooth wormhole transitions ~6 hrs
Fixing new WH related bugs ~2 hrs
“Pro” coding tip and OMGTHX to Mr Rhys Lindsay, our EXO ONE musician:
If you start a coroutine from one script on another, ie “StartCoroutine(AnotherScript.instance.thing())” and then destroy your scipt/unload the scene, your coroutine will be destroyed, and you will wonder for HOURS why the helllll said coroutine fails to continue…!
Cleaning up from yesterday. Wormholes mostly working as intended now. Didn’t really get the nice super smooth transitions I wanted by loading the next level in the wormhole, but I think that is perhaps a much bigger task than I realised.
Wormhole clean up completed, bugs removed ~3 hrs
Fixing up overlays a bit when wormhole camera comes on, but still a very average solution. Think I might need some kinda ‘overlay’ camera that handles all my post processing! ~1hr
Fixed random sound loss on first planet ~30 mins
Tutorial tweaks ~30 mins
A whole bunch of other tweaks, now that everything is working again! ~2 hrs
Profiling/fixing some resource hogs
Fixed wrong ground contact sound in tutorial
Added wormhole exit effects to 2nd planet
etc
So, happy to report game is buildable and pretty much bug free.
Wednesday
Going to profile the game a bit and see how the frame rate is, if there’s any easy wins to make it smoother. Noticed some frame hiccups near monoliths, for example…
Sole remaining bugs:
Null ref on some sounds. ~30mins
Somehow at some point, the ParticlePlayground (plugin) manager disappeared from the wormhole scene, which meant I couldn’t turn it back on… Took me ages to realise this! ~2hrs…!
Then I wrestled unsuccessfully with why, in editor, the wormhole transition looks fine, but colors break in the build… ~2hrs
Similar to above where the entire game start screen was broken in build but not editor… ~1hr
Sucky day!
Thursday
Wasted another day in town waiting for my car to be re-repaired (they didn’t fix it the first time…)
Now I need to hunt down why there’s issues with my build, but not the editor. Checking:
Player log for any errors. Went in and fixed some warnings just in case.
Noticed maybe we weren’t in the right quality setting… That wasn’t it.
Logs pointed to my scene loading stuff, realised the intro scene wasn’t loading. Put in a million debug lines.
Tracked it down to (I guess due to load speeds between build and editor) the wormhole scene not finishing loading in time and messing up a coroutine sequence
2 hrs
Perhaps not overly wise (I don’t know?) I updated the camera system to reduce the amount of cliff/ground staring you can do sometimes! Still needs fine tuning but liking the result ~2hrs.
Friday
Indiecade E3 deadline is tomorrow, and I’m wondering whether to submit to that or not.
Pros:
Might have less competition with other submissions because it’s the earliest submission date
Could send it and ‘forget it’/not spend more time on event/award submissions for a while.
Cons:
Potentially lower my chances of being selected because I have less time to improve the game
Barely enough time right now to test the build
I’m going to work assuming I’ll submit for the e3 deadline, then see where I get up to and make a decision tonight/tomorrow morning.
Tasks for tonight’s deadline
Restarting levels/game is a bit broken. Perhaps not a massive problem, especially if I make a note to restart the exe instead, I dunno. Not a great foot to put forward… “my game is broke so don’t press THIS button”.
Had a huge amount of trouble getting this to work in wormholes as I was async loading the next level in the wormhole, and you can’t cancel async operations… Gave up on pause in wormhole! ~3 hrs wasted
Checking normal pause/restart stuff working ~1 hr
Perhaps minor color bug when we enter a wormhole in the tutorial. Ignoring!
Decide whether to fix or remove some new ‘story-like’ feature in the 2nd world (don’t want to spoil) which isn’t 100% working. Fixed this, took ages ~3 hrs
Fine tune new camera stuff or just use old one?
Had a play and had the new stuff working quite fast so sticking with new ~30 mins
Not obvious enough ‘objective arrow’. Use some combination of:
Text/blinking text (at least at start/level load, then turn off). “Energy signature”.
Start the arrow size large/blinking then quickly reduce size.
~1 hr (still not obvious enough!)
Final testing
Picked up lots of restart level/restart game issues. Restart level I removed completely as I was stumped and had no time left. ~2 hrs
Numerous other tweaks to planets, UI, sound, etc, etc. ~2 hrs
Profiling for frame rate issues ~1 hr
Playing through the entire build many many times ~2 hrs.
I ended up pulling an all-nighter to get this finished before the deadline. I still had ~4 hours before the deadline, but I opted to work all night just in case it came down to the wire.
Also quite badly underestimated how much work was required for the Indiecade submission in terms of text. They needed ~300 word answers to a bunch of questions, and that was rather hard at 5-6 am. Took me another hour or two.
Now going to take a day or two off to recharge before Rezzed!
March 13, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on 3 Weeks Until Rezzed Countdown
Last week I created a fully playable build that I submitted to Amaze and Momocon that I could take with me to Rezzed. So on the one hand, I could decide to use that and focus more on long-term tasks, but at the same time there’s not much downside if I work on some stuff and either don’t complete them or the build breaks at the last minute or whatever.
Rezzed build tasks this week
The current weak points I’m thinking of trying to bring up are:
Loading between scenes/wormholes is a bit janky still.
Harsh cut-off in audio between scene loads
No fading in/out (need to develop a system that can be used in many situations)
Kinda two different wormhole effects, need to adjust the old to match the new
3rd person camera not handling non-terrain objects at all. Don’t like my chances of fixing this but will have a go for a day at least.
Still unsure if I should change up the tutorial level.
Occasional performance issues
In terms of just adding more stuff, I find it a little hard to prioritize. Maybe:
Story related stuff (won’t elaborate cos spoilers)
Third planet
Wot I Gone Got Done On Mon
Added story stuff and system for unique cutscenes on each planet ~2 hrs
Removed ability to endlessly jump in clouds ~15mins
Rezzed trailer changes based on feedback ~1 hr
Fixed lightning sounds in clouds ~15 mins
Tuesday
Zero done – had car problems, needed to take to the service shop for the day.
Wednesday
Trailer Mk2 ~2hrs
Story sequence stuff ~2 hrs
Emailing journalists and YouTubers for Rezzed ~4 hrs
Here’s the teaser for Rezzed. This went over pretty well and is looking to soon have over 100 likes and 20 RTs:
Thursday
Fixed crappy tutorial camera. Made it follow faster (easier to keep track of where we are) and fixed the collision with walls. You used to be able to see through walls…! 1hr
Better wormhole transitions (required a bit of reworking of a bunch of stuff) ~2hrs
Improved tutorial sequence so it’s more focused. All text/directions are just top center without the fluff/distraction text on the left. ~30 mins
Had a great meeting with Adelaide’s Emilia Chignola (IGDA/Two Lives Left) and Carmine Fantarella (Icebox/Games of Edan) about my game, plans, Rezzed plans, PR/marketing stuff, etc. Two of the most helpful and nicest peeps I’ve met! ~2.5hrs
Friday
Noticed the earliest IndieCade deadline is rolling around in a week… Can’t believe it’s almost been a year since I submitted last! I’ll definitely put something together, but not sure which deadline.
Completing wormhole transitions. This was a far bigger task than anticipated, needed to rework how all the level loading worked…! About 95% the way to finished, though. Took all day!
February 8, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on EXO ONE Selected for EGX Rezzed Leftfield!
Super stoked to announce that last week I was notified that EXO ONE has been selected to be shown at EGX Rezzed, a London games event, as part of their Leftfield indie games collection. EXO ONE was chosen from a record number of submissions and will be featured alongside 17 other games. Check them all out here.
The event will take place on March 30-April 1 and if you happen to be in London, you’ll be able to go play it, complete with the 2nd, and maybe 3rd planets.
This will be the second event EXO ONE has shown at, after debuting at AVCON last year.
I actually attended Rezzed 5 years ago when I lived in London, and met some really cool people, including Chris England from the indie hit Xenonauts. I’d love to attend again with EXO ONE, but the cost may be a bit prohibitive. Spending money on international flights is a slight luxury right now! I’ll be looking into who might be able to take my place so to speak, but if all else fails, it sounds like the Leftfield guys have everyone covered with a bunch of their own people that will be there to troubleshoot/take photos/generally help out.
Crossing my fingers (and beginning some actual planning) for some good coverage of the game. Will see what comes of it! Can’t wait!
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