Thursday, March 5, 2015

Welcome to Gladiotron (in robot voice)

Hey everyone,

Here are a few shots from a game my company, Full Circle CS has been working on off and on for a couple years (I think 3yrs actually, but who's counting?)  Anyways,  I've recently decided, now that things are settling down in my life for the time being, to make a concerted push to get this game out in the next few months (We'll see what happens!)

If you remember a game called Smash TV for SNES, that's the basic inspiration.  Although, trying to keep the concept as clean as possible, I wanted the enemies to be robots instead of people (or zombies for that matter)

Me and a couple of colleagues, Tony Tie (Producer/Make things happen guy) and Greg Wright (All around 2D/3D art generalist and co-founder of Full Circle CS) set out to make a really simple and easy to finish game, after the first project we embarked on proved to be too ambitious for us.  Especially since we didn't know any programmers!

Anyways, long story short, we set out to make a simple game, that we ended up making way to big and complicated and we were going to make it all in 2d using a cool game engine called Engine 001 (coming very soon to steam, keep an eye out).  Tony managed to track down the talented creator of the engine and proposed having him support us in making our game using the engine.  At the time, Unity was becoming a big deal and Mike (The creator of 001)  was pretty busy just making the engine so couldn't help us with our particular game too much.  So Tony, being Tony found another talented developer named Nikita K.  (He has kind of  a long last name, don't want to mess it up!) http://compilererrorgames.blogspot.ca/ .  Anyways, he expressed some interest in learning the Unity platform, so we switched our 2d game over to Unity.  Me being pretty naive said 'Hey!  Let's make the game in 3d since we're using a 3d engine!  We'll be able to finish it off in a couple months!".  Silly, silly me.  2.5 half years later, much of which was spent not working on the game at all.  I spent a year in between doing art for the game game Buzzle with my other company Glowbug Labs that I started with some friends I worked with at Gameloft.  All the while doing my best to spend quality time with my growing family and working full time, and teaching part time.

It was a pretty crazy 2 years to say the least.  So at the end of 2014, being too busy and failing to live up the the expectations I had of myself with regards to work.  I did some soul searching, and I decided to cut back on the freelance, and extra stuff, so that I could really enjoy my free time with my family and friends.  And when the opportunity presented itself.  Work on projects that I was very passionate about.  Which led me back to Gladiotron.  We had a really talented team of people breath life into the game in the form of animations, models, music, and sfx.  So I just really wanted to recommit myself to the completion of the game.  Not to mention, 2 years ago, I made a pact with Tony and Greg that I wouldn't cut my hair until the game was done (originally it was my beard, but that got pretty ridiculous pretty fast, so I had to switch it up), so now my hair is really long, and I kind of want to keep it, but that's a different story for a different day.

Back to the game!

Gladiotron is a dual analog multidirectional shooter, similar to Smash TV and more recently, Zombiewood.  So the playstyle should feel very familiar, but with a few twists that we'd like to implement.

 So anyways, Nikita is back on board, Greg is back on board, I'm back on board, we have some talented interns helping us and hopefully we'll be able to release something really cool in the next few months.  Our goal is to get the game onto the Wii U indie shop, since I'm such a huge Nintendo fan.  The longterm goal is to become a new Rare, making original games, with original characters, that fit comfortably with Nintendo's great lineup of family friendly games.

So there it is, my long ramble about this game that we're making.  We'd love to find ways to better engage with potential players, so I'll do my best to update this space and share my adventure in trying to release this game!

Take care everyone,

G