Artwork images

So here are some of the illustrations for the Etheric Swarm (the Bad Guys, or some of many actually!)... in their unmanifest form they are tendrilly, un-solid.  Our artist Stephen Crowe described them perfectly... "A roiling mass that sort of 'unfolds' into existence, and is constantly changing, but always has a shape of 'intent' - a kind of direction or purpose". 

As they manifest they solidify into their more human appearance.

Sketch of an Etheric in the manifesting process

The finished version

An Etheric in manifest form, about to do something nasty:) Imagine a large 'swarm' of these guys descending on you...

Stephen really captured the kind of 'nasty' we wanted, and we're excited about seeing more characters come to life.

48 Hour Film Competition: Necromance Soundtrack

This is one of the band's songs we used for the recent 48 film competition here in NZ.

It's a result of Margs and I sitting down and agreeing on Dflat minor as a key for some incidental sketches we were working on in late 2010, and the song Tantra came to life soon after (Drop DFlat tuning on gat and bass - oh yeah!). Enjoy!

We'll try and get the finished edit we used for the film up at some stage soon, as Margs put some awesome occasional riffs over the metal part!

Art Work

My turn to hold the talking stick or blogging stick or whatever!

We’re really excited about some visuals we’ve had created for the game. We engaged the services of illustrator and concept artist Stephen Crowe in Wellington NZ to produce them for us, and we couldn’t be happier with the result.

I’ll post some images in the next day or so. So exciting to see what we’ve been working on starting to come to life!

Of physics and AI

Have been working on getting the AI integrated with the Bullet Physics Engine. Finally I have managed to get it working as I want it to so I have a swarm of nasties moving around the stage without disappearing of the edges. Next step is to add buildings and make it look more like a proper stage rather than an open field :). So the swarming is all controlled through the AI, and physics engine is doing collision detection for the various obstacles. The step to add buildings will be very straight forward as they are created in exactly the same way as the stage boundaries. Essentially, the AI uses bullet to query for collisions and adds any collisions for a character to its collision queue. On the next tick, the character takes into account the queued collisions. This should allow the various parts to be separately threaded to make best use of available CPU resource - well that's the plan anyway, we'll see how it goes.

The bullet physics engine is reasonably easy to use with most of the concepts illustrated through demonstration projects. The rest of the documentation is reasonably brief but it does point you to the appropriate demo project. Once the concepts are understood, integration is pretty straightforward. I should add that I have no background in physics engines or previous experience so I have learnt this from the ground up.

Will add some shots, maybe video in the next few days.

What started it for me...

Back in December of 2009 I took some time off to record some songs and release a video on the Internet. I didn't realise at the time that I was starting a process that would lead me into a dream contract and eventually being part of a company making games and producing music.

The results of that time can be found at http://www.davewallacelive.com/ and isn't for the darkhearted. I'm a little musically schizophrenic, one part of me writing tragically terminal and melancholic love songs, the other producing industrial-Gothic-metal. Such is life.

But that release lead me on to an embryonic side project at Stickmen Studios, writing for a Gothic-horror game. From there I met up with Margaret and Matt and we formed Daywalkers.

Don't want to get mushy and teary-eyed on you all, but good things can happen when you follow your passion. Or for the realists out there, sometimes you get lucky when you have money to burn, no real idea what you're doing, and some really good friends and business partners.