Author Archives: jonathanagregoire

Chained – Launch Trailer

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Chained has gone gold! After 8 hard months of work, the team is happy to announce that Chained has been completed. Soon, we will have a link on where you can download and play the game.

Thanks for staying in touch with us and we hope you check out the other projects we will work on in the future.

Beta Build

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Alright, the moment you have all been waiting for, a playable version of our game! Here it is! Enjoy!

ImageClick the image to open up a new tab.

You’ll need to download the Unity web player, sorry for the load times!

DEV CHEATS:

Hold Right Shift + P to teleport Player to Mouse Location

Hold Right Shift + a # to jump to that level

Due to it being a web build, you are unfortunately missing out on the awesome shadows and more advanced graphics. Once we hit Gold, we will post an installer that will let you experience the game in all of its glory.

Until then,

Jonathan

Week 11 Update

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Hello everyone, Jonathan here.

It has been a little bit since I last got to keep you updated about what has been happening, but hopefully you have at least noticed the Beta Build we have just posted above. We are incredibly proud of the work and quality the game is currently at, and we are even more excited to continue working on it and making it even better.

GDC

Perhaps you saw some of us there, but a good portion of our group went to GDC in San Francisco. We had a great time, especially when we showed off our game at the YetiZen party. The feedback was amazing, and was far beyond what we were expecting to hear. We had a large crowd of people as they were either playing or watching the game be played, and it seemed that people were blown away by our project. That is super heartening to hear and definitely boosted our spirits. Not to mention we all got to meet some really cool people there. Thanks guys.

We also wanted to take a moment to thank Intel for hosting the University Game Showcase on last Thursday. I know that David made a mention about it on this website. We spent a good amount of time making a very professional and engaging presentation, and when we went on stage, we definitely did not disappoint. We were one of the few teams without a single technical issue and the crowd seemed thoroughly engaged. While we did not win, we were still very pleased with the experience. Congratulations to Kraven Manor and Demon Wagon studios for winning best gameplay and visuals at the event. All of the games there looked really interesting to play.
ImageA badly-lit photo of us at the Intel Event.

From Top Left: David Scamehorn, Anne Feeny, Jonathan Gregoire, Decker “Fantastic” Geddes, Jon Everist
From Bottom Left: Brandon Anderson, David Fenton

As you can imagine, with GDC happening, not much work got done on the game. More importantly, everyone on the team was able to enjoy their spring break and are excited to finish up the game.

See you guys around,

Jonathan

Quick Update

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Hey Everyone, Jonathan here.

Pretty soon we will be putting up the Beta build of the game, including a playable web build here on this website. Before we do that however, the team noticed a few usability issues that we wanted to fix first, so, as soon as that is done, we will have a playable version posted here.

We expect to have it up and running no later than this Tuesday, March 25th.

To hold you guys over until then, we hope this video of one of our later levels will help the wait.

Thanks,

Jonathan

Week 3 Update

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Hey everyone, I am Jonathan, the Game Director of Chained, and I wanted to get everyone caught up on what we have been up to for the past week.

What do I do?

My official job on the game is to act as the director, essentially to make sure the team and the game is following a strong vision that will really make the game feel unified as a whole. I spend a lot of time talking to Decker, the Art Director, Brandon, the Lead Level Designer, and Keith, the Producer, in order to answer any questions about what this game is and isn’t and how we can best achieve the goals we have set for this game, which, at times, involves reworking the vision to fit better within our scope.

Updates about what I do:

Initially, I spent most of my time laying down the foundations for this project, which included prototyping mechanics, or researching and implementing various aspects of the game, like the Mecanim animation system Unity provides us with. Now that we have David and Adrian on as full time programmers (more on their work latter), I have been able to step away from the nitty-gritty aspects of the game, and truly focus on what this game is, and how to best achieve the emotional arc the game is trying to accomplish.

When we started this semester, Brandon and I had to take a long look at what the team had created for first playable, and we realized that while we hit our goals, our goals were misaligned and therefore we did not create a game that was as engaging as the project needs to be. So, we ran in the opposite direction. We developed a new mechanic that would have added way too many new animations, but we thought it was the answer to our design problems. It wasn’t. After exploring, we came to the conclusion, that through a few new mechanics (that we prototyped within a week) and some smarter level design, we could create levels that would engage the player, without increasing our scope. Now, we are full steam ahead, creating levels that combine our slower/atmospheric design with a new goal of creating more to do in the game and its beautiful, surreal world.

Updates about the Game:

Everyone has been incredibly busy as there isn’t much time until alpha on February 4th.

Adam and Hojun have been creating models like mad. They each have a large list, but we are confident they will get them done.

Decker has been examining and working with the FX and Lighting in the game, as well as concepting out our story beats and environment art.

Anne, unfortunately, ran into some issues with her work. It has put us back a bit, but the problems between Unity and her animation skinning have been fixed, so she is unblocked in order to continue working on our new animations.

Brandon has re-redone the Intro level again, and has already begun to art it up.

David is in charge of our creating our levels that are intended to create a player dependency on the Ball. They are looking really good, and we can’t wait to put it all together.

David Fenton has, within two weeks, almost entirely rebuilt our Player Controller. And it is so much smoother and better. I’ve got the chance to play with it, and it is really good.

Adrian has finished up his work on creating us a volumetric fog system. It is also super cool and Decker is beyond excited to start seeing what it is capable of.

Hans has been working tirelessly on our WISP Behavior system and has been putting together a Path Finding system for them. It is really coming together.

I went ahead and did the ending levels for the game and will be putting the game together from beginning to end for the first time, before alpha.

See you guys next week,
Jonathan Gregoire