Kickstarter Has Launched: Show Your Support!

We are very excited to officially launch our Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2014686147/tumbleweed-express-the-steampunk-railshooter-tower

It would be great for the team if you could please show your support during this time! Once you have checked out our Kickstarter page, we have also re-launched on Greenlight with a full project moving forward on Steam; show us your thumbs:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=309156049

Thanks again for all your support!

Kickstarter Launch: September 2nd

Video Gamers United & Kickstarter

It has been a long 3 year journey to get this far, but I am happy to report that The Tumbleweed Express will be back on the road! Our team is really excited to announce that our latest build we be presented at Video Gamers United:

Our build will present a number of new features, which include:

• New enemies & fancier graphics.
• The beginning of our open world level system.
• Scaling difficulty of levels through side contracts.
• Improved weapons and interfaces.
• General usability improvements.

We're also proud to announce that we will launching our Kickstarter in September and we're inviting you all to be apart of the final stages of the production of our project. Finally, if you can't make it to VGU then you will have another chance to play the game at the Boston Festival of Indie Games also in September. Looking forward to seeing you take control of the Tumbleweed and supporting our team at these upcoming events!

New Alpha Trailer!

We just posted a new trailer showing off all our recent progress!

Check it out!

We also revamped out Greenlight concept page with new screenshots, descriptions, and of course the shiny new trailer. Please take a look and rate/favorite us :D

or Click Here

Another day. Another new level.

After several Jams of tidying up old levels for various showcases, we have finally had the chance to create a new one!

We went from this sketch in MS Paint:

To this first draft in L3DT:

And ended with this final landscape in Unity3D:                         

                               

We are very excited for the mission we have planned for this level. Here the Tumbleweed will come face to face with a new foe. Who is she? What does she want? And what's with all the sweet talk she's sending on over to dear old Sneaky Pete? Not quite sure I want to know the answer to that, but more to come soon!

Ride The Rails: With Oculus Rift!

Needless to say, here at Dirigiballers, we're excited about the Oculus Rift and the new opportunities it brings for immersive gaming... and our development kit finally arrived! This past weekend, we imported the Unity plugin and took it for a spin. If you've got your own headset, swap this video to fullscreen and check it out!

From a development standpoint, dropping the prefab into the scene was a breeze. After some selective renaming of cameras and connecting a few scripts, we were right there in it - riding the Tumbleweed Express. You can see from the footage it threw off our projectile launchpoint to a space above the caboose's turret (probably the result of interaction between our script calculating projectiles from a third-person mouse orbit and the "neck-height" magic of the Oculus prefab) - and of course our reticle disappeared since it's still keyed to the center of the screen and the GUI is pretty much lost. But the resulting feel? AMAZING. The depth really brings out the beauty of the Tumbleweed world and integrates well with our aiming mechanic (some of us don't want to go back to a mouse). The "aim-with-your-eyes" approach does make it difficult to switch back and forth between the front and back of the train so we'll get Sneaky Pete working on some sort of lever to bring the turret around faster than your neck can move.

Like many backers, we were disappointed to learn that "Unity Support" means "Unity Support (with Pro License)" but are grateful for the extension of the pro-trial to four months. Since upgrading the team to full licenses is somewhere in the range of college tuition or a new car, we experimented a bit with rolling our own dual-camera prefabs. Could we write our own scripts to read Oculus as a controller and simply output a 1280x800 view from two cameras? Splitting the screen for dual cameras is a pretty simple trick: under the Inspector Camera settings, use the "Normalized Rect View" to set the left camera W to 0.5 with X set to 0 right camera W to 0.5 with X set to 0.5 (i.e. make the cameras half as wide as the screen, and have the right camera view start at the midpoint of the screen). It's easy to see how this could be used in lots of games for handling multi-player on a single screen. With some key-commands to adjust the distance and rotation of the cameras, we were able to calibrate certain parts of the field of view into focus manually, but getting the whole thing in sync seems to depend on the "fisheye" lens-distorting you can see in the increasingly recognizable Oculus-view videos. The difference between the plugin and the roll-our-own dual screen was striking so much appreciation to the Oculus team for doing the heavy lifting! If you're reading this: thanks for keeping the SDK builds coming - we're hoping you're in talks with Unity to find a solution that will make it possible for indie devs to use it without breaking the bank.

Too Many Games: The Results

This past weekend a few of the Dirigiballers took our latest build to “Too Many Games”, which is an awesome convention just outside of Philadelphia. This was a major milestone for our team for many reasons. First, we hired two new developers (Duy Le and Ben Heard) this year and this build represents the first major release of their work alongside the continued efforts of our more senior team members. We saw the release of: (1) Track Switching, (2) Activate-able Bridges, (3) improved Dirigible behaviors and capabilities, (4) polished new menus centered around the improved Battle Menu that provides micromanagement of the players train, and (5) further integration of story and tutorial elements. I could go on about all the improvements, but let’s just say that we set our goals earlier this year and we exceed expectations.

Too Many Games: Pushing builds and playtesting!

The audience at the convention really seemed to enjoy all the new features and they provided ample feedback that we hope to incorporate into our next build shortly. It was a real pleasure to interact with the Philadelphia crowd, you guys really make game development worth it! I wanted to mention a few of the awesome indie developers that we got to speak with. The crew behind “Default Dan” was awesome to network with and their game is excellent. There was also a neat student project by the “The Automatic Gentlemen”, which was a great throwback to the platformer days of old though with an updated modern look and cheeky characters! Finally, a quick shout out to Horizon’s End and Broken Crown Games, LLC. Please check out these titles as well as all the other great Indies that attended the convention.

Too Many Games: A portion of our awesome audience and playtesters!

You might ask, what is next for the Dirigiballers? Well were still looking for support on our recently launched Steam Greenlight Concept page. We have an upcoming jam in two weeks where we will be setting our priorities for the rest of the year. We should also be working on updating our game trailer to show off the new content. We are really hoping to make it back to MAGFest and demo our planned co-op experience for the audience. In the immediate future, we will be bringing an intermediate build to “Indie Con DC”. This is a free and open to all ages event that is hosted by “Gaming in Public” and features many great Indie developers from around the DC area. The event will take place on August 3^rd, 2013 at PUBLIC tenley.  Additionally, Indie developers can get in touch with the organizers to get their games into the event. Please come out and support all the organizations that are making this unique event possible!