Yeah about that, it’s not going to be this Thursday.

Ever since indiegames.com wrote about the Irrupt trailer there’s been a couple of articles that took the release date from there, but it’s wrong. The game is currently still awaiting Apple’s approval. We’re hoping that we can have it out by next Thursday (4th of October) but again let me stress that we simply don’t know yet.

For the record, it’s not that indiegames.com made a mistake, I just worded my email to them vaguely (“if all goes well it’ll be out this thursday”) and since that’s not a great thing to be saying in an article, they just took the important bit of that sentence instead. Lesson learned, I won’t be saying vague things to the media anymore! 

so if you’ve been patiently looking forward to tomorrow so you can get your hands on Irrupt, i’m sorry. I hope you can wait another week!

It’ll be worth it.

- Folmer

As a visual-artist-turned-game-designer, I don’t come up with game concepts based on mechanics. I don’t prototype games using programmer art or boxes or borrowed sprites. I don’t play other games and decide to make something based on them. The only way I can get myself excited about making a game is by firing up Photoshop and drawing until I end up with something that looks like a video game to me. 

Basically, I make mock-ups and I let the images tell me what they want to be. There’s nothing planned out or technical about what I do, it’s just a feeling I get from what I’m seeing. Sometimes a pixel turns into a tile which turns into a set of tiles which tells me “oh. I guess we’re in a factory of some kind”. When I end up with tiles, I’ll lay them out to look like a level, and then populate the room with sprites. Most of the time, how the sprites look and how they’re placed in the rooms tells me where to go with the gameplay. 

As far as I can tell there’s nothing conscious about this process, it’s purely visual. I might draw a factory worker (seems like a logical choice) but at some point mess up a color, decide I like that particular shade of green better, and turn the poor dude into a monstrous blob. Great, now it’s a monster factory? Yeah ok that works. Good setting for an arena shooter! Ok so who’s killing these things? and why are they doing that? Who the heck would own a monster factory? To answer those questions I’ll just keep drawing until everything becomes clear. 

So how did Irrupt come to be?

Back when Andrew and I started making Irrupt, it looked like this: 

But here’s a secret: If you flip that picture 90 degrees counter-clockwise, you’re looking at a platformer where a lil’ ninja is jumping to reach an exit. 

When I made it, I was digging the color scheme and the patterns, but not the layout so much. So I played around with it until, for whatever reason, I started rotating the thing around. It clicked immediately: Blocks are falling down and the player is like a rocket that has to avoid these falling obstacles and get from right to left. This is an iOS game, this is something that you have to hold in your hand and interact with. It was obvious!

Excitedly, I showed the mockup to Andrew. At the time, Andrew was very interested in taking on something different from the flash games we’ve been making together so when he saw it, the first thing he said was “iOS.” Some people would call that sequence of events a coincidence, some would call it luck. I just call it Sets and Settings. 

As we started prototyping and coming up with gameplay ideas, the story started unfolding itself to me: It’s in space, the falling blocks are asteroids, you have to escort astronauts from one spaceship to another. I was thinking about that scene in Sunshine where the crew has to get back to Icarus II after having explored an abandoned Icarus I. With those things in mind, the original mockup didn’t seem to do it for me anymore. So it became this:

Better. I have a huge boner for 70’s scifi airbrush illustration so it felt like a perfect fit. Popping colors, hard shapes, and just a tiny bit of dirty noise. Inspired by the works of Chris Foss and Shusei Nagaoka, I started exploring this style more and more.

Definitely getting there, until I started doing the menu screen. Which originally looked like this:

Except that there was no reasonable explanation to have a big structure in the center of the screen which would switch over to two similar looking structures at the edges. It felt jarring to me. And that feeling was what finalized the look of Irrupt.

Now, every screen you end up on is a configuration of the same thing. I spent a lot of time making sure that there was a visual flow, and for every transition an elaborate animation will play. It feels like you’re playing with a toy when you touch a button, almost like a Rubik’s Cube on speed is angry that you’re poking at it.

We’ve just submitted Irrupt to the App Store. I can’t wait for people to start poking.

- Folmer

Now that the release of our fifth game (in 6 months) is imminent, I thought I’d write a little bit about something that we ourselves have been discussing a lot in the recent days: our partnership. I’m not going to make this into one of those “7 Steps to Finding a Good Partner and Happiness” articles, because honestly anything I say here might not work out for you. But, I think someone might learn something from our experiences or get inspired or whatever.

First, a little background on how we started working together. I started a thread on Something Awful that proposed a bi-weekly game jam, just so people could start actually making games. When I did that, I had an idea for a jam similar to the TIGsource A/B jam, so I asked for any pixel artists to get in contact for a future thread theme. Lo and behold, a user named the chaos engine sent me a pm and said he was okay at pixel art. But alas, as fate would have it, I never used that theme in the thread and I didn’t have him actually draw anything.

Fast forward about a month. I had finally come up with a game I wanted to make, and I threw together a prototype over a weekend using the oryx sprites. I was really happy with it and wanted to release it, but I couldn’t with any of the oryx art. So naturally, I checked my pm’s for the dude who had contacted me before, and we started working together to bring the yet un-released Cargo Breach into this world. After that we did GRAVNAV, and then we decided to come up with a name for our stuff so that people could refer to us as one. Hence, sets and settings was born.

However, there’s something about our partnership that’s incredibly special. We came from opposite ends of the gamedev spectrum: Folmer is an artist limited by programming, and I’m a programmer limited by art. But hey, there’s lot of programmer-artist duos out there, so what makes ours any different? Whenever we work on a project, we enter into a sort of feedback loop. He’ll make a mockup that’ll inspire me, so I’ll make that same thing as a prototype. That prototype will get him excited, so he’ll make some sweet sprites. Of course once I see those sprites, I just have to get them into the game animated, and so on and so forth. What ends up happening is that we complete entire projects without facing any real burnout. If there’s a dull moment, we only have to wait a few days at most before the other will deliver something exciting again. It really is incredible.

It’s tough to boil our relationship down to a single element, but I would say the most important thing is trust. We are always on the same page with everything, from art to gameplay to twitter posts. I’ve never had to worry whether or not the new piece of art was going to be amazing, and I don’t think he’s ever had to wonder if my programming is going to be up to par. In fact, just today we were remarking that if we both came up with an idea, we could probably make most of the game without talking at all. We communicate through our respective disciplines. I get a sprite and I know exactly what he’s thinking gameplay, and when I give him a prototype he knows exactly where to go with both art and gameplay. It’s totally stress-free.

The second thing that makes working together unlike any other team effort I’ve been a part of is a total lack of blame.  If something goes wrong, even though it’s pretty clear whose fault it is, we figure out what it is and the person who can fix it fixes it. If one of us simply doesn’t have the skill to do something (such as Folmer can’t do portraits or I can’t do homing missiles at this point), we just re-evaluate our situation and figure out a different way to do it. And I mean this; in the 6 months that we’ve worked together and talked nearly every day, we’ve never had a real argument. Or a fake one. Or any type of argument really. A few days ago we pretended to do a breakup, and our callouts were so stupid that we both agreed there was literally nothing to complain about. We simply couldn’t come up with anything. Like I said above; it’s totally stress free all the time.

Anyways, I thought that this might be interesting to some people looking to get into partnerships of their own. My advice to those people is that you don’t have to compromise when it comes to partnership: there’s somebody out there for you (romantic, right?). And I can honestly say that once you find that person, you can’t imagine working with anyone else.

(As for IRRUPT chat: it’s coming. Really soon. Our playtesters love it, and the polish we’re putting on it is making us really excited. It’s by far our best work yet. I think Folmer had said something about doing a post about the art iteration we went through, so maybe he’ll actually use this blog for once.)

-Andrew

Shout out to Andrew’s hand for posing for us, we couldn’t have done it without you Andrew’s hand!

- Folmer

Over the weekend we put in a combined total of over 100 hours as a part of the Ludum Dare Game Jam to bring you NICE SHOOT. It’s a game about evolving bullets.

Some cool facts about this game: 

• It boasts the most lines of code of any project we’ve done.
• It features an impressive 120 frames of animation. Just for bullets.
• The sound effects are basically totally broken.
• 34 (!) different levels, plus an awesome boss fight.
• 5 weapons, with up to 8 levels each.

Want to see one of those weapons? Here’s a little preview:

There’s plenty more where that came from, so go play it you goon:

NICE SHOOT

(You can read about our game and ludum dare here.)

-With love, Andrew and Folmer

(you can also expect our post-mortems sometime soon, in which we complain about how hard sitting a computer typing and clicking was. or something like that.)