Check Out Our New Office Setup
Ready to do some serious damage. Yes, those are mushrooms. #MotherNature
Chris and Friends Win the Judge’s Choice for Their Horror Puzzler, Don’t Breathe!
Congratulations to Chris and his fellow teammates for knocking it out of the park at UC Davis’ month-long May Game Jam! The game jam was hosted by Modlab and sponsored by Unity.
Their game, temporarily called Don’t Breathe, is a psychological horror puzzler and is receiving some final touches before launching sometime later this year. We’ll show off screenshots and gif’s soon to show off some gameplay.
May Update: Game Jam!
Hey guys, sorry for the lack of posts. We’ve been kinda busy with other things, and we’ve put Ruin on delay till about September to focus on some events we got going on now. Chris here, just wanted to mention that I’ve been working on a month long Game Jam with two of my friends, and I wanted to show off some of the mechanics I’ve made for the game. The theme of the Game Jam was “I can’t breathe,” so we’re going with a kind of reality bending, creepy, psychotic journey of a mad man through a haunted mansion. The basic mechanic is weird stuff happens, and you “hold your breath” to make it all go normal, and you essentially use the world swapping mechanic to solve puzzles in this odd mansion. Lemme know what you guys think of the two gifs attached!
Edit: okay… I’m still new to blogging, and the gifs don’t seem to be working. Here’s an imugr link instead. http://imgur.com/a/NTdQI
Indie Games Exhibit @ EMP Museum
Besides the neat props, this exhibit was a blast. They had a booth for each indie game, which included Nidhogg, Monument Valley and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
LOOKBACK: Picnic Day @ UC Davis
Sarcasm aside, Picnic Day was an exhausting but really fun day. Having only slept 3 hours the night before after watching 4 episodes of Game of Thrones (GREYWORM NUUUUUUUU!!!!), I got my ass up early to meet my brother on campus. In fact, we got there so early all the booths were empty; so we set up right at the corner near the hallway where we could get the most attention.
Chris doing some last minute debugging.
Daqri
Oh man, this is awesome. Check out what my friend Mars made for me for fun. Download the app called Daqri, and point the camera at the image. You’ll see a 3D model show up right in front of you!
Unreal Engine 4 is free. What.
Yes, you know what that means: we’re movin’ over!
I know it sounds a little crazy but we’re fortunate that we’re so early in development that we can afford to discard some of our work. UE4 has capabilities we need that Unity doesn’t have, so this will be a worthwhile move in the long run.
LOOKBACK: How The Facebook Launch Performed
Welcome to the first post of our LOOKBACK series, where we examine recent marketing strategies and see what went well and what went wrong.
We launched our Facebook page on February 2nd at 1:30 pm. Admittedly, we didn’t expect much since we’re newbies to the industry and our game was only in an early development phase. We have no experience with Twitter and only got into Tumblr recently. Chris is relatively active in the reddit community. The question was: how can we take advantage of available resources and reach out to as many followers as possible and start building a fan base?
The Plan
Launch our social media pages with a shotgun approach and pray to all the gods of the world that we get a crapload of followers!
Just kidding. Well… partly just kidding…
The other part was to launch with high engagement content. The Early Development Prototype Teaser was extremely key to this launch. Photos are the most common post type, but videos generate significantly higher engagement, according to a study by Quintly. We wanted to have something cool and worthy of spending some time looking at–to show that we are committed and working hard.
Time of day was also important here. According to a million infographics, posting between 1pm and 4pm on a weekday results in the highest average click through rates. It’s a Monday. It’s right after lunch. Who doesn’t check Facebook during the afternoon slump?
Early Development Prototype Teaser + Website Launch
Check out our trailer showcasing early prototype footage of our game RUIN!
This video is the culmination of hard work by not only the Dissonance team but also the student volunteers who helped get us to where we are today. This video was produced by our friends at Friendship Club. Enjoy!!!
What better way to accompany this teaser than to launch our official website at dissonanceent.com!!
This past quarter (and currently) at UC Davis, we have had the immense pleasure of working with a group of passionate student volunteers, who consist primarily of programmers and artists. We also cannot dismiss our little cousin Rachel Chang from Canada, who flew here this past December and sacrificed her Winter break to help us out with concept art for 2 whole weeks. With this team, we were able to quickly pump out 3D Blender models for the character and Behemoth, draw their respective texture maps, animate their various behaviors, and begin coding the gameplay mechanics in Unity.
Behemoth & Character Concept Art by Rachel Chang
We are currently in the “proof of concept” stage of this game’s development. By the end of this Winter quarter, we will have a fully functional prototype ready for testing and debugging. Once the concept is approved to be fun and engaging, we will begin designing the official game levels next quarter.
Banner art by Taylor Zhou
What is RUIN?
Ruin is an action-adventure game where your connections to other people are what matter most. In a world where a mysterious curse takes away your memories as time passes, your only solace is in a legend that tells you how to end this curse and in the friends you make in your quest to do so.
In your journey you will come across twelve menacing Behemoths, guardians of a towering Spire which is said to perpetuate this curse. But as you attempt to take down these Behemoths, you soon realize their size and strength are the reasons why they have survived for eons.
Dissonance Entertainment 