Introducing - Equilibrium


Tenuki

Still Fresh
Joined
Oct 7, 2009
Messages
20
Hi dear everyone,

My name is Kestutis Tauckela. I'm professional games developer, developing games since 1994. Together with several other talented developers we have decided to create a high quality game to demo our skills and possibilities as a team. It was a puzzle to find decent development platform for this goal. After quite a bit of research I have found OpenPandora console. The platform looked very promising and the more I learned about open development - the more I liked it. Our main objective is IGF Mobile competition. This can be very useful for us to make first firm steps towards independent games development and to promove OpenPandora console and whole open for development idea behind it.

Briefly about the game:
It's a realtime 3D strategy game, reminiscent of Tower Defence. Players will build various houses and towers to increase production level of their village and to defend from attacks. Regularly armies will be sent towards opponent's village with an attempt to weaken or destroy it. There will be no control over armies except their composition and direction of an attack.

Whole project is open source and everyone is welcome to have a look, comment, borrow something useful and maybe learn something new. Currently we are developing for OpenPandora exclusively. Whole game will be available free of charge to everyone. We might release later a bonus DLC with a minor price attached as a possibility to support us, but I will repeat myself - for now, our goal is exclusively IGF Mobile competition width deadline on 1st December 2010 (yet to be confirmed).

Mockup image:

Equilibrium - Real time strategy for OpenPandora


You can find more information, demo for Windows, documentation and source here:
http://www.outlanderstudios.com

We are still waiting to receive real Pandora unit, ordered around November 2009 (1700-1800 in the queue). Although it would be massivelly useful to receive the device as early as possible to do some real tests and adjust development as necessary - same unit is going to be sent to judges at the competition so Top Quality is equally important. I tried to contact OpenPandora team asking to send one device sooner, but I still respect their responce that they are not going to alter queue order.

Besides feedback on the game, which is always welcome, I'm looking for following two people to supplement our team:
1. We badly need audio composer. Someone who is good in creating music and/or audio effect files. Although main push (in terms of competition) of our game will be for visual quality, audio is very well sync'ed with gameplay so having a talented person - there would be reasonable to believe we can have good chances to get attechtion on audio side as well.
2. We are developing using Mono/C# and OpenGL 2.0 ES. We have people with considerable experience in closed source games development - Linux (and all open development) is still very new field to us. We are looking for a fearless programmer who could be confident to deal with any unpredictable OpenPandora specific problems we might face. This can be from issues compiling Mono for OpenPandora up to OpenGL driver quirks.
- If you think you are one of these two people and you would like to join our team - please contact me and we can discuss the details.

Cheers!
 
An open source game by a professional games developer and focused on the Pandora as main platform ! That's just awesome !

I guess the Pandora is probably a good choice for an open development platform. Only problem is availability of the system...
Are you going to make good use of the Pandora control ? That's one of the main selling point of the device.

Not that mainly using the touchscreen would be a bad thing... especially being a strategy game. But then I guess you could have focused Android or another platform with broader audience.

I can't help you with programming / audio but I wish you good luck :)
I am definitely looking forward to playing it.
 
This looks great. I can't wait, if it's free that's even better. I'd be more than happy to pay for DLC in the eventual future
 
I don't have any skills to contribute, but I would also like to say that this looks pretty cool. Having a Pandora game submitted to IGF would likely do wonders for the platform's profile.

A bit of warning, though: I don't think anyone has determined how well Mono will run on the Pandora. But I don't know anything about it beyond that; hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in.
 
Well, I'm no mozart, but when I saw this thread about 3 hours ago, I decided I would throw this together

http://www.mediafire.com/?kjnoiidij2y

My current life goal is to develop and sell a professional video game with music, art, writing, and coding all done by myself. Currently, I'm in the process of putting together the necessary skills.

I would be grateful and honored if you guys would let me make you a few tracks. At the very least they could be placeholders until you find someone with a bit more musical talent.
 
God Ginrai said:
Has mono even been ported to the ARM platform?

-God Ginrai

Yeah, I've used it successfully on my n810. The little program I wrote loaded very slowly but ran quite well. Not as fast as a very similar thing in Qt but usable.

[edit] It's already in the Angstrom Arm repo, search for libmono.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Independent games? The kind of awesome independent games that compete in the IGF? On Pandora?

I'm thrilled! :D

Downloading the Windows demo now...found the game design document, very thorough!

update: Download. It's pretty cool what you guys did in the demo. Would I be right in supposing it's mainly meant to showcase the menu system for now?

Unfortunately, I have no valuable programming experience to contribute. However, if you ever need help with web stuff, please keep us posted, as I would love to contribute. I stay rather busy these days, but if I find free time, I'd be willing.
 
Amigo Bandito Crujiente said:
Well, I'm no mozart, but when I saw this thread about 3 hours ago, I decided I would throw this together

http://www.mediafire.com/?kjnoiidij2y

My current life goal is to develop and sell a professional video game with music, art, writing, and coding all done by myself. Currently, I'm in the process of putting together the necessary skills.

I would be grateful and honored if you guys would let me make you a few tracks. At the very least they could be placeholders until you find someone with a bit more musical talent.

Very nice! I was thinking about offering my music too but when I heard your "throwing together", I would rather stay in the shade :p
May I ask what software you use for this kind of music? Especially the dynamics are interesting. I still stick to Renoise and various VSTi as I mainly do electronic music and game music remixes..


Tenuki: the game looks cool, wish you good luck with it :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Very promising project! I wish you luck with the competition.

I'm a college level computer animator with experience in concept art, modeling, and animation, but it seems you have all that covered. If I can lend a hand with any of that stuff in anyway though, I'd be glad to help.
 
I'm a programmer and a musician, and I'd love to assist with this project .. my first bit of 3D hacking for the Pandora will consist of porting some of the OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 demos to the Pandora platform (I've already done this for Android/iPhone and Creative Zii Egg platforms, btw) and releasing the code for others to use to get bootstrapped, so I hope that will be useful for you ..
 
WhiteFalcon said:
Very nice! I was thinking about offering my music too but when I heard your "throwing together", I would rather stay in the shade :p
May I ask what software you use for this kind of music? Especially the dynamics are interesting. I still stick to Renoise and various VSTi as I mainly do electronic music and game music remixes..

I use FL studio and just one VST plugin right now. I kinda wish I had more stuff to work with, but it gets the job done.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Tenuki,

What kind of music are you looking for? May I suggest to base the soundtrack on heavy metal? As frightening as that would sound some calm popular based metal would be a great addition to any video game that is based in a middle age, fantasy, action, dark or gothic theme. What I'm hoping for is metal symphonies, not commercial tracks. As you would have to license commercial tracks to be used (maybe it can be included in a paid DLC campaign?).

If you are interested I can ask some friends for help, maybe we can make some calm heavy and melodic symphonies, but I cant promise anything since I don't have a full band as of now. If I got help, we could implement Piano/keyboard, multiple guitars bass and drums (I would not suggest vocals for such a project). Maybe even if I could solder up a theremin I could record it :)

Either way, since no one cant make one track that everyone will enjoy (maybe exception for Stairway to heaven and Nothing else matters), I suggest the possibility to use MP3 files located on SD cards for people who just have to listen to their favorite songs while playing :)

I will play the Windows Demo to see if I can get inspired too :)
 
Thank you for your kind words and wishes of good luck.

Just to be sure I explained it properly. There are two competitions with very similar name IGF Mobile and IGF. We can only apply to IGF Mobile one as it requires only 1 unique device to be sent to the judges (unlike 10 units - for IGF). IGF Mobile is currently dominated by iPhone games. I bet it will be extraordinary for them to receive anything non-iPhone as a candidate.

It is good to see people of different areas willing to help us. Although currently we are looking for two mentioned people only, it is possible we might need a faster push in some other area. In case anything would change - I shall let you know.

Although we have quite small team working on the game (and only on their free time), having support and feedback from you guys - submitting to the competition will feel like community effort.

We are definitely going to adjust game to exploit unique input possibilities of Pandora device. Majority of input will remain to be touch-screen based. Quite obviously we need to use actual Pandora for a bit to get a feeling how to apply it's uniqueness in the games. While in current Windows demo mostly Menu is working, you can do following things:
* Choose Chaos side. Go into gameplay area. Select an empty spot and press 1,2,3,4 or 5 on your keyboard. You will see Chaos building spawning into the game.
* Delete or PageDn to rotate camera. These are going to be mapped to Pandora's shoulder buttons, so I'm expecting it to be way more usable than on PC.
* Mouse right-click to switch into finger simulation mode.
* Alt+Enter to switch to full screen (note: will work only on some resolutions)
* F12 - capture a screenshot.
* F11 - toggle between normal and debug-fly camera. In fly mode you can use WASD+Mouse to navigate. Rough, but sometimes useful.

It is a bit sad that we had to cut Multiplayer feature. We would need two Pandoras for testing, two to send to the judges, having small current Pandoras community it would be a bit underused feature and also - cutting that will save us quite a bit of time. I'm explaining this so that you would not get confused by the presence of Multiplayer option in MainMenu of Equilibrium demo.

I'm looking forward to the day when Equilibrium will start working on actual Pandora unit so you all can play it for real and give feedback for improvements. Meanwhile I would appreciate any feedback you can from the limited information available from the documentation and Windows demo. Thanks!

EDIT: Regarding music, there is no specific style we are look for. There is only need to express nature of a specific faction and daytime. I'll post more information regarding music soon (today/tomorrow).
 
I bought two Pandoras precisely for the reason that I want to develop multiplayer games for the Pandora, and having two of them just increases the chances of that happening! :)
 
Tenuki said:
It is good to see people of different areas willing to help us. Although currently we are looking for two mentioned people only, it is possible we might need a faster push in some other area. In case anything would change - I shall let you know.

EDIT: Regarding music, there is no specific style we are look for. There is only need to express nature of a specific faction and daytime. I'll post more information regarding music soon (today/tomorrow).

About the number of mentioned people, if it helps a band would only need one mentioned band name, and if possible a link to facebook/myspace page.

Ahout the music, I would be glad to have a dialog about the music mood and theme if you would want our help. I would also express that I would like to make music that is able to be changed by fading over while different events occur, like combat, daytime or other extraordinary events.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Right, something a tad more complete.
http://www.mediafire.com/?d4umtmnz3om
The song kinda feels like a 'morning after the attack' kinda thing; it starts in minor, bridges with some really nasty sounding violin, then switches to major, with a rebuilding feel.

As for procedural music, I think I have a way of doing it quite well.

f9e1k9.jpg


It starts with a simple theme and a battle theme for each faction.

I'm not sure exactly what criteria could be used as triggers, but knowing which track was played previously and limiting the possible tracks that it can change to based on that will allow the music to flow better.

The themes only need to be 1:00-2:00 loops, with a total of almost 15 minutes of music for each faction, which is enough to prevent monotony while still being reasonable to make.

An even simpler way would be to have a hidden value that estimates how you're doing based on how many enemies are approaching, how many buildings/upgrades you have, and change tracks along two separate axises, one for combat and one for peace

Peaceful
Losing, sad track | Winning, happy track
|---------------------------------------------------------------|

Battle

Losing, frantic track | Winning, victory fanfare
|---------------------------------------------------------------|


Also, I'm having trouble starting the demo on windows 7

This is the error info I got, not sure if it will help.
Description:
Stopped working

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: CLR20r3
Problem Signature 01: equilibrium.exe
Problem Signature 02: 1.0.0.0
Problem Signature 03: 4c02396f
Problem Signature 04: Equilibrium
Problem Signature 05: 1.0.0.0
Problem Signature 06: 4c02396f
Problem Signature 07: 15
Problem Signature 08: 0
Problem Signature 09: System.TypeInitialization
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
 
Back
Top