Posts | The Silent Age

Crunching

Posted on 29 Feb 2012 by Thomas

We’ve been crunching! We’ve been at work all through the weekend from 8.30 in the morning, which is really early for an indie games company. The story guy, the programmer guy, the game designer guy and the sound designer girl all gave up an entire weekend of partying and couch potatoing. Even the company baby was there.

The plan was to finish up ~~most~~ half of The Silent Age Episode One by Monday – a plan which went very well until a horde of bugs and unforseen challenges showed up. We did suspect that something like that might happen, and we did manage to get a lot of stuff done. The Silent Age Ep. 1 is in good shape.

We also managed to add an extra feature: We’re now able to add an overall colour tint to Joe’s sprite. This means that we can make Joe all green, all yellow or all black! As you can see in the above example, we can now place Joe in a semi-dark room without having him look like a flourescent sticker!

The team, busy planning.

Anders, the story guy.

Nevin, the sound girl. Only people with a high IQ are able to work on two laptops simultaneously.

Uni, the producer, looks at the ever growing task list.

Share your comments and feedback on facebook.

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged Crunching | Comments Off

Slicing

Posted on 14 Feb 2012 by Thomas

They did it to the latest Twilight Saga and Harry Potter movies. They did it in Berlin and Korea. Now we’re doing it:

We’re slicing up the game!

We have been working on The Silent Age for… well… ages! Let’s call it a year on and off. We could easily go on for another six months of solitary ~~confinement~~ development, but we feel a strong need to stop brewing for a moment and start letting you have a taste of what we’re brewing instead.

So we have decided to release The Silent Age in two episodes. Rather than keeping you waiting any longer, we would like to get your response to the game as we move along. The critique we get from the first episode will help us improve the experience as we work on the second episode.

The plan is to include the first 5 chapters in Episode One, which is very close to being considered beta. Episode Two will contain the last 5 chapters, which is scheduled to be released… When it’s Done.

As always, we would love to hear your comments and feedback.

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged business | Comments Off

Nordic Game Jam

Posted on 1 Feb 2012 by Thomas

This weekend, the House on Fire team participated in the Nordic Game Jam, an annual event, where programmers, graphic artists and nerds in general meet up for a world wide game making rendez-vous!

The House on Fire Team split into two fractions: Here’s one part of the team, proudly advertising a secret upcoming project. From left it’s: Lasse, some random guy not from House on Fire, André, Uni and Linda.

The team worked hard, fueled by a mix of adrenaline and beers, and with the helping hand from the random guy not from House on Fire, they managed to make a rather weird game.

I partnered up with fellow font geek Alexandra Mariner from Funrigger to open a Logo Shop during the event. The Logo Shop was a 100% free enterprise, providing custom made logos for game jammers! By the way, this picture kinda reminds me of a certain Kraftwerk sleeve.

Nordic Game Jam was great fun, and a great place to network with fellow videogame-geeks.

Giana uttered her first word shortly after the jam ended. Uni claims it was “Babba!” but others say it might have been “Data!”…

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged Nordic Game Jam, Snake Rider Yo!, Snot!, team | 2 Comments

How Fast Should Joe Read?

Posted on 13 Jan 2012 by Uni

How fast do people read? Asked another way, how quickly should text disappear from the screen?

Being a point-and-click adventure game, ehm, a tap-and-click adventure game, there is a lot of story to be told. The narrative and dialog is done by the very talented Anders Pedersen, and I think you guys will love it.

We would love nothing more than being able to afford voice actors to do the dialog and narrative. But on our tight budget, we’ll have to go the classic way. And it does suite the style of the game very well.

We are currently working on the whole dialog and text system. Whenever the player click, eh, taps on an object, Joe will walk over to it and describe it. Often with a comment which might tell more about Joe’s personality and situation, then the object itself. This is how much of the back-story is told, and is our primary way of informing the player.

The comments are displayed at the top of the screen. Unobtrusive, it won’t take away the flow of the game, and the player can continue on without tapping pages and pages of text, if she doesn’t want to read it.

But every now and then, Joe needs to talks to people. This is usually important for knowing your actual goal in the game. So we have made a dialog system which pops up in the middle of the screen. It displays a profile picture next to the text so you can tell, who is saying what.

As it turns out, there is a whole science behind reading, reading speed, and type of reading. Looking at the Wikipedia page, our player will read for comprehension, which is for an adult between 200 and 400 words per minute, at a average word-length of 6.

I am pretty bad at reading myself. So we have set the text to display at 200 wpm with an added one second fixed reaction time. In dialog between the protagonist and other NPCs, we have decided to require the player to tap to the next page, so she won’t miss important plot-points (unless she want to).

How fast do you read? Please leave your comments and opinions in the comments below or on Facebook.

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged code, game design, Joe, narrative | 1 Comment

Aloha 2012

Posted on 31 Dec 2011 by Thomas

2011 ends! Tonight! According to the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar and the great German movie director Roland Emmerich, 2012 marks the End of the World As We Know It. Fortunately the cataclysmic events will not occur until December 21, so it seems we’ll have time enough to release The Silent Age before Armageddon.

Things were a bit less dramatic in 1972. Joe spends New Years Eve on the coast of Honolulu, Hawaii, getting drunk and playing songs on his ukulele. He has bought a pack of cigarettes, hoping to build up a smoking habit. But Alas, the cheap rum makes his ukulele sound like Stockhausen on a bad day and the cigarettes just make him dizzy. Poor Joe. Let’s hope some dramatic event will turn his life upside down in the near future.

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged 2012, Armageddon, Honolulu, Joe, New Years, Roland Emmerich | Comments Off

Thoughts of a Marketer

Posted on 26 Dec 2011 by Thomas

Hello World! I’m Daan and I’m currently handling marketing, communication and community here at House on Fire. The team asked me if I could write something about me coming to Denmark to work for them and so I did! Being in marketing I tried to make it a “tongue-in-cheek” reference to the usage of buzzwords in marketing hence it might seem a tad quaint to some. Hope you’ll enjoy it!

In early 2011 I started preparing for my quest to leave my homeland in search of better grounds. My study gave me the possibility to follow a placement abroad so I decided that could be a perfect stepping board for my quest. I soon came to the conclusion I had to move up north as far as I could to get away from the unbearable temperatures in north-western Europe. I started my search on the World Wide Web hoping to find a company that might take me under their wings. After a long search time started to run out but right in that moment of adversity I got approached by two individuals from Denmark representing two different companies. Both opportunities sounded awesome and after a quick question I found out the companies belonged to the same union. This made it possible for them to share my talents and gave me the opportunity to experience life in another country.

In the end of August the time to leave had finally arrived and I could feel me at the start of the cone of uncertainty (which isn’t at all unusual when you’re at the start of a possibly life changing endeavour) almost like I’m standing on the crossroads of my life… Though I was very sure which way I wanted to go and so, filled with inspiration, I set out to occupy the position of marketing expert at House on Fire and community manager for Big Bite Games.

I had no clue what I could expect from working in the indie scene, for all I knew I would end up with a bunch of Hacktivists or something. I was happily surprised to find myself in good company though. These guys clearly had a good sense of innovation and the game Neon Zone has even been compared to Portal at one point which is one of the most successful indie games around. All of this attention and praise does should theoretically point to a real winner but we soon found out it’s not enough for a game to sell. In order to do that, we needed to induce some form of remembrance in the consumers, preferably on par with the Brazilian floods or the Japan earthquake and Tsunami earlier this year (though obviously not in such a dramatic fashion). It goes without saying that this task of ginormous proportions rested near solely on my shoulders.

In order to make a winning strategy I was forced to focus all my time and energy on my work which had the fortunate side effect that I had no time to embarrass myself by planking on one of the national monuments around here in Copenhagen. One problem I did encounter by working for an indie developer is that I had to start the revolution without a budget (wouldn’t it be better if indie developers had a similar virtually unlimited financial power as a Super PAC?.., though that obviously would completely take away the charm of all that’s indie). I started my marketing immersion by tagging up every mentioning of our game out there and by writing fabulous press releases.

The remaining question of course is if this all has worked, was it a great success or merely a waste of web-space? Well I certainly hope that it was, though as long as Neon Zone is not next to Angry Birds (or preferably above it) there is still work to be done. Of course practise makes perfect and everything takes time so I will conclude this episode as of great educational value and hope that both Neon Zone, The Silent Age and House on Fire will go down in history as great names and hopefully one day be able to claim a legendary status like the first Carmageddon or Tetris (to pick two completely different examples).

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged business, christmas, Marketing | Comments Off

Meet Joe

Posted on 19 Dec 2011 by Thomas

Our recent exposure on the IndieGames Weblog has spawned a lot of comments on the main character Joe. Joe is literally an Average Joe, living an average life and taking care of an average job. Let me explain why we created such a rather dull character for our game:

We decided early on to give Joe a very weak personality to make more room for the surrounding scenery. The story takes place in both the early Seventies and in a future where mankind has become extinct, and both settings are visually rich and offers great possibilities for exploration. We felt that having a main character with a strong personality would steal away too much attention from the surroundings.

When working with Joe, we soon realized that the most interesting situations occurs when Joe’s personality is directly in contrast to the surrounding world. For example, in the above scene Joe finds himself in a room surrounded by stylish Seventies art and design. Joe has no appreciation or understanding of neither, and this enables us to have him comment on the room in funny or unexpected ways.

Joe starts out his adventure as a slightly naive working class nobody. His life is quite tragic, but he’s totally unaware of his own miserable situation. As the story progresses, he becomes gradually more aware of his own situation and is forced to evolve accordingly.

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged Indiegames, Joe Average | Comments Off

December Update

Posted on 1 Dec 2011 by Thomas

All of November, we’ve been busy promoting Neon Zone. We don’t have a publisher, so we’ve had to do everything ourselves. This is our first experience with marketing, and we were shocked by the amount of work that it has required.

Sadly, this means that The Silent Age has been neglected. But don’t worry, as of December 1st we’re back on track with fresh eyes and full of post apocalyptic energy.

Joe himself has been busy supporting the charity event Movember by growing a nice hipster moustache. We haven’t really decided yet whether he should be allowed to keep it or not.

Posted in The Silent Age | Tagged December, moustache, Movember, winter | 3 Comments

Neon Zone

Posted on 31 Oct 2011 by Thomas

Did you know that The Silent Age isn’t the only thing we do? That’s right, we’ve just released another game called Neon Zone, a minimalistic brain puzzler!