Today is Picnic Day at UC Davis, and we’ll be demoing our game with the Game Dev and Arts Club at Kemper Hall. Come by and play!
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We’re on our way home from Davis! We got ourselves a nice hot cup of Cocomo (dazzling chocolate, coconut infusion) from Dutch Bros Coffee. Yea, say that once without saliva coming out of your mouth.
Aside from the terrible, waking-up-ever-hour sleep with plastic bedsheets at Motel 6 and the mentally draining Epic MegaJam that literally just finished the day before yesterday, the game jam was a lot of fun. It was hosted by the UC Davis Gamedev & Arts Club as a fun ice-breaker event for all the new members to start learning how to use Unity and work in groups. The more experienced members, including ourselves, spent the day mixing between making our own game, answering questions and mentoring the students. You can imagine the excitement on their faces when they won more than half of the award categories! They had ridiculously creative concepts.
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.
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.
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.
First Game Dev Club Meeting!
Woohoo! Just got back from the first meeting of the quarter of the Game Dev at Davis club. We were supposed to do pitches to recruit people at the third week, but today, we pretty much did pitches anyway. Ended up getting a handful of new volunteers to help out over the quarter with the nitty-gritty work. This quarter’s already looking a lot better than the last one.
In Progress: Prototype Video Teaser!
Hey Everyone,
Today is an exciting day. We’re working on our first Ruin prototype trailer with our friends from the videography studio, Friendship Club. The trailer will be used only for the opening pitch during the UC Davis Winter quarter Game Devs club meeting to promote the game and to engage more student involvement.
This time around, especially after 3 months of hard work from the Dissonance team and our Fall quarter student volunteers, we want to show off a new face of the company that really demonstrates the seriousness we have for finishing this game.
The trailer will be released around the second or third week of January.
GEET EXCITEDDDD
Business Perspective:
For those interested in why we’re doing this from a business perspective, this is a marketing tactic to experiment how much more engagement we’ll get using a purely visual-audio presentation. We assume the sample size and distribution (what major, undergrad vs. grad) of students is roughly the same each quarter.
Last quarter, we presented a PowerPoint and our game concept alone was able to carry us into second place in terms of number of students interested in working with us (2 programmers, 4 artists, some floaters). I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to see a Journey + Shadow of the Colossus combo?!
A well-rehearsed speech and clean colorful slides unfortunately were not powerful enough to beat out the first place team, who had an entire PowerPoint designed to mimic an in-game UI. It had “buttons” that you could press to simulate a character selection screen. It was beyond jaw-droppingly awesome.
If this video teaser deems successful in grabbing more top notch talent or social media followers, then we’ll invest in more video productions throughout the game’s development lifecycle.
Dissonance Entertainment 