Developer Diary 5

Are there no moral boundaries to some people? Is it necessary to go out of your way to make someone's life more difficult than it already is? Rituals are sacred and should never be messed with. It's hard for me to find the words to describe this terrible injustice that has been done to us...  so I'll give it a try later on in this article.

With rage still flowing through my veins I'll try and give you a short explanation of what we have produced as a group. The first things that come to mind are the awesome voice-overs that have been recorded this week. Honestly, when faced with a problem, call Daryll. With an expertise for solving problems second only to MacGyver, Daryll quickly had the audio-studio running. Young Nathan never sounded more alive with Hanny giving him a nice British accent. Smashing.

Our Animator has also been hard at work, as concetrated as Daryll in his special zone, slowly working towards creating a full animation for our main character. Mad props to René for working extremely hard and focussed, the only distraction being a short Harry Potter discussion(He's in Gryffindor). This week Lars was mostly confined to his house, having gone through an epic operation that would leave even Steve-O disgusted. He did however manage to visit school on Friday to deliver a much needed Pie, which we are extremely grateful for. It's also further proof to my theory that Pieday transcends any physical boundaries.

Myself I've been cramming the intro story into a 1:30 minute long monologue, which was anything but an easy task. Thankfully I was helped by amazing feedback from many of the Quark members. Daryll continued improving the core gameplay, now adding a way our character can walk through the environments without him going anywhere we don't want to(a sewer drainage comes to mind). Hanny and Nils have also been making great progress with the characters and environments respectively. Being a programmer myself I know fuck-all of any graphical terms to use, suffice it to say that what has been made can be considered awesome.

The second half of our Friday was spent most curiously creating a threatening letter to an other group within our minor. For repeatedly messing up our well-respected Fail-o-Meter we have declared war on Classified. In secret we have captured a fugitive bunny we suspect to be of great value to their group. He is now being held in a secure location and is to be tortured and interrogated. Unfortunately we have yet to retract any useful information from him but I have no doubt that will happen in the near future. To let Classified know their bunny is being held captive we have posted the threatening letter with an awe-inspiring photo of ourselves the terrorists as can be seen above. All we have to do now is wait for a response from Classified. From there on we'll see how the war will progress. After all you never know how a cow catches a rabbit.

-      Robert

Developer Diary 2

It's time for another Developer Diary. This one will focus mainly on the concept and story of our game and will thus be written by the Lead Writer of the group. Throughout the blog we have posted many articles about our activities as a group. Newcomers might be left wondering what it is we are actually working on. Though I won't go into aything that might be a possible spoiler I'll talk a bit about the game as a whole and the story we are trying so hard to integrate seamlessly into the game.

The game we are creating is a 2D point-and-clik adventure game focused mainly on the plot. The player will take control of Nathan Quin(who's name will be altered at a later stage). With the help of a psychologist Nathan relives a moment from his life which has been long forgotten, and for good reason. By using items from the environment and combining them the player must solve a manner of puzzles which all give hints of the things yet to come. Together with Nathan the player will discover events that happened in Nathan's past which marked him for life.

For as long as he can remember Nathan Quin has been afraid of the dark. This constant fear has affected his life in many ways and has forced him to live with a mask on. Nathan thinks he has found a place for his fear and is willing to life with it until a certain incident occurs. When the life of his oldest son is put in danger because of Nathan he decides it is time to get rid of his fear forever and taes the important step to see a psychologist. Together with the psychologist Nathan will try to uncover the events that caused his to be constantly afraid of the dark.

Atmosphere is an important part of the game as the main character will be spending a lot of time in dark places. The environment will be extremely frightful for him and this will be respresented within the game as the environments will look frightening and threatening. Concept art can be seen to the right.

I hope this post helped a bit in clearing some of the confusion that could very well be present. In short this is the product we are working on and we are very pleased to see how well it has been recieved so far. We will continue working on it and will let you know of our progress along the way.

-    Robert

Developer Diary 1

Quark decided to make and maintain weekly developer diaries. This will be the first of many!

So let us tell you about last week.  A few interesting things happened that boosted our progress greatly.
Our story for the character has been finished by our great story writer Robert. It has to be changed now though, because of an interesting talk we had with our advisory body Theo Bouman, that led us in a new direction. The story has to be way more of an impact to our poor Nathan, ouch...

Technical and Graphical Design are almost done by now yay... The finishing touch will most likely be done this week, especially the graphics part. This is important because some people really need to produce their asses off to create that single prototype.

So well I'm sorry Hanny but no 'Healthy Hopper' achievement for you :(. You wanted it so bad but you became ill... too bad. Better luck next sprint :) and of course we're happy you're back now.
Yes why thank you, I really wanted that achievement you know. *makes sad face* - Hanny

Also our planner Rene came back after a hard time so, welcome back Rene! You know we missed you. We´ll be looking forward to your work. All in all I can say we worked hard and of course we had the usual fun together. Enjoy being in Quark, enjoy being a Quarky.

Edit:  Desperately needed spellingscheck performed by Robert :p

Edit: Shouldn't we put a concept description up here you guys? I can just imagine the WTF faces of the people reading our posts about our awesome project because they don't know a ruddy thing about it, which is also fun but not our main point. Ghehe - Hanny



- Daryll