Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The Road Behind and how we got here... (Part 1)

Sept 2015 - We've been developing Organic Panic for 7 years, here's part 1 of the recap on how we got here...

Early Years Xbox 360 > 2008 - 2013

Back in the early days we were developing Organic Panic on the Xbox 360 - this is where Organic Panic started and at this point we had no way for anyone to play test the game outside of the room it was being developed in, for a long while nobody knew about our little game development setup. 



Click here for our early Trailer this was from way back in 2009 and shows where the game came from.

For the first 5 years or so Organic Panic was purely Xbox 360 developed, and completely secret! we wanted to keep the physics tech (DAFT engine) under wraps until we were closer to launching.

Check out some of our big changes in this earlier blog post here - This shows many of the core development changes that were made over the first years.
Core mechanics and game art style were established by early 2013 there was still a ton of work to do and the game was in alpha at this point on the Xbox 360, definitely not content complete, but the game's core identity was established.

Indiecade - Feb 17th 2013 Organic Panic goes public

These blog posts were made but not live until Feb 17th 2013 when we officially came out of the shadows and showed the world Organic Panic at the NYC Indiecade.

We had intended to launch on the 360 but then we got the bright idea of running a Kickstarter campaign and porting it to the PC and various platforms.

Kickstarter - Aug 2013

We had taken 5 years to get this far, we had the core game basically finished, but we needed a ton of artwork, music, more animation, and the final boss levels, as well as bonus levels and Coop and Vs gameplay, it was taking a long time, we didn't have the resources to pay for assets and there is only so much you can get in favors and IOU's and we really needed a injection of cash to finish the game, so we decided to run a Organic Panic Kickstarter campaign.

The campaign was actually really tough, we aimed to raise 40k which was the bare minimum we needed, (actually closer to 60k) and getting attention on our Kickstarter was just a huge huge task, it was probably the most stressful month of our lives (almost!) - We had a game that didn't look at all like your regular indie Kickstarter game, it was more a cute and playful, more console looking for sure, and it didn't look like a game with a ton of advanced tech behind it, it looked deceptively simple! - it suffered from looking casual, cute and fun while actually being quite a deep game. 

We successfully completed our Kickstarter campaign in August of 2013, through a massive intensive last ditch dash across the finish line, basically we doubled our backers and almost our pledges in the last 48 hours.

Some of this was due to some great shoutout love we got from some other successful Kickstarter game developers, some was due to Damon doing a overnight AMA on reddit and some was due to just massive hard work and reaching out. Have to give special thanks to Anne for her awesome contribution, time and dedication (without pay) - she was a superhero and really helped make the Kickstarter happen.

We also want to send a big thanks to all our backers, their support made this Kickstarter happen, and helped propel Organic Panic to the next stage of it's development.



Check out our Organic Panic Kickstarter blog update here - you can see our last minutes video!

Pax Prime and Midnight City - Sept 2013

That September we went to Pax Prime in Seattle with Midnight City (a Majesco Entertainment offshoot), a new indie publisher, with the premise of helping to market and launch indie titles without controlling the dev process. We weren't on the main Pax floor but we did get to show Organic Panic at the Midnight City launch party and to press in a private Midnight City gaming bus!


 

- Check out the update for Pax Prime.

Steam Greenlit - Dec 2013



Much to our surprise Organic Panic got Greenlit on Steam in December 2013, we couldn't have been happier and we were so excited to be apart of the Steam community, and Steam games.

Port to OpenGL


From the Kickstarter we decided to port to Open GL which was to take longer than initially expected, the port from 360 Direct X to Windows Direct X would have been a much simpler affair, and on retrospect is the direction we should have taken. We had been advised that Open GL was the way to go, it would prove the best code base for all further ports, this was not the case, and each port we did required the same amount of time rewriting the code libraries.

Steam Greenlit and OpenGL port update page.


Pax East 2014 - April


By this time Organic Panic had been ported to OpenGL and running on a regular PC, it was still a beta, but we had a fully functioning PC game, we decided to jump in and get a booth at Pax East 2014.
Here is our update from Pax East 2014

The reception we got was just incredible, the booth was none stop packed for 3 days, we had lines leading out of our booth into the main walkway, the attention the game got was more than we could have hoped for, to be honest it was overwhelming and humbling!

Here are some of the key moments -

Setting up the booth

The coming storm!




Damon has no idea how to stop them :-)

More and more and more


Freedom from crowds!

More and more and more


The press seemed to really enjoy Organic Panic as well, we got some of the best coverage and excellent previews, here are just a few examples of what they said about Organic Panic...

Raymond Porreca of Entertainment Buddha wrote:

"This kind of intuitive gameplay is what makes Organic Panic stand out, giving the player the ability to take control of their powers and have them overcome the challenges presented in the game is one of the most enjoyable experiences I had at PAX."

Lee Cooper of Hardcoregamer wrote:

“It wasn’t hard to conclude that Organic Panic is one of the smoothest, most enjoyable platformers in recent years. It’s smart, fun, and most certainly my game of the show.”

“Organic Panic also features a co-op mode which, without an ounce of exaggeration, is the most fun I had while at PAX East.”

David Leavitt of Examiner wrote:
“what makes Organic Panic stand apart from the crowd of other platformers is the physics engine.”

“With its funky characters, vibrantly colored stages, and some awesome devastation to reap, we’re looking forward to play Organic Panic for an extended period of time and you should too.”

Check out Part 2 Next...

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Steam Early Access Release date May 14th

Quick post, Organic Panic is going to be on the Steam Store page (Early Access) on May 14th!!!

After working on Organic Panic for 6 years, we're finally at the point of actually being able to share our game with everyone - just so happy to be able to bring it out into the world finally....May 14th you can join the fun, build levels, share them, rate them and play Organic Panic to your fingers are blue.


PAX East (2014) and New Artwork

PAX East 2014

We went to PAX East and had our first booth ever for Organic Panic, the reception we got was just incredible, the booth was none stop packed for 3 days, just amazing to watch, we had lines leading out of our booth into the main walkway! the reception the game got was just more than we could have hoped for, to be honest it was a little humbling!

Here are some of the key moments -

Setting up the booth

The coming storm!


Organic Panic booth starting

I already look tired!



Alex with a huge Elf

Boothtastic!


Damon has no idea how to stop them :-)

More and more and more


Freedom from crowds!

More and more and more


Lines!

More Lines


Fliers

80,000 Gamers!


Ground crew

From a distance


Chillin!

Someone actually playing Organic Panic!


Branch Bro's (very tired!)


More lines - 3x days - you get the idea


Artwork

I worked closely with our character concept artist Chris to create a whole new set of character art, full color action shots, logos in preparation for the games release.

 Kiwi making waves

Carrot 'I'm a Twisted firestarter'


Coconut gettin hot 'n bothered

Don't mess with Cherry!



All Together Now

New Logo



Bad Guys and Logo

Bad Meats 'n Cheese





Moving Mountains (or going through them!), Opening the Seas, and burning the house down!

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Steam Greenlight - New Artwork and Port

Sorry for the delay in updating our blog - so much has happened since the last post - I'll try and update you with all the core details, some of this will be copy 'n pasted from our kickstarter update (which just has a ton of cool info, images, and details) - to you know save me some time!

We have had one hell of a ride since PAX Prime and our Kickstarter, delays, new implementations, new plans, new artwork and some great steam related news...


ORGANIC PANIC GOT THE GREENLIGHT!

In December we got our best Christmas present ever! we got accepted and Greenlit on Steam, after working on this game for so long and really pouring our hearts, minds and soul into it, for it to be accepted into the huge world of Steam (75 Million Gamers!) is just a completely AWESOME!



Alpha - Porting


More porting, Damon tells me we have half a million lines of code (the game) ported - but it's not really all that as it's the same language C++. So we've Ported the libraries and all the specific code to Open GL - SDL (simple directmedia layer), which is going to be be our base, from their we can make ports to each console and OS.

Damon has ported the liquids physics engine, it took about 3 weeks + but it's a major porting hurdle - now working.

He has also been putting in all assets and most of the backgrounds are now working, with parallax and animations. Most of the new textures and the normal maps are now in and working. And many of the new music tracks are in.


Also Damon and Bradley have been working hard on getting the Steam server tech working and implemented, so when the beta is up players can save and share their creations via the Steam servers.

So at this stage with all features in and working, content is mostly complete, we think it's safe to call this our first Alpha version of Organic Panic (that will be on Steam!) - don't get me wrong there are many bugs, but most of the bugs are related to translating the code, and we now have a working functional game.


Console Approval

We've been approved for the 3 main consoles, Xbox, PS3 and Nintendo Wii U - which means we're accepted as official developers and will be getting access to development kits, SDK's and documentation, we are really happy to have got these. 

In February the last major hurdle - characters, has been implemented. All characters are now in and animations are working, there are still a few bugs but it's great to see characters running, jumping and flying around.



Materials

We've got a ton of new assets to show off, thanks to the hard work of one of our artist Patt, we got some excellent new Materials, these are more than just visual as each material has real world properties and will expand the types of gameplay that is possible. 



Rock Skulls
Rock Skulls
Rock Grass layers
Dark Crystals
Metal Glass
Rock Bricks
Molten Rock

Comic

Brad has finished over 100 panes of the full color comic, this help propel the single player adventure story, and also for the full color paper comic book.
A crooked crowd reunite

Apple and Asparagus

Kiwi Target locked

Background Art

Sylvia has completed the background art for each environmental set - each one is layered with parallax scrolling, and each element is animated. 
Beach

Jail Island


The Lab

Underground


A New Cheese Wedge 'El Bandido'

We decided that Cheese Wedge was a little plain in the character department and so we gave him more personality!