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Excubitor - Action Tower Defense Game

Started by February 08, 2014 11:17 AM
3 comments, last by musicbender 10 years, 2 months ago

Hi everyone,

My name is Ivan Ivanovski, aka BigGiantHead, and I am the co-founder of Tesseract Interactive. I would like to present to you Excubitor, a game I am working on for some time. An action game at it’s core, it harks back to the days of the Strike Series and Raptor: Call of The Shadows.

While those games served as the initial inspiration, in the later stages of development our focus shifted to not just invoke the gameplay of old school shoot-em-ups, but also provide the player with a loot system and different upgrades, as well as the core mechanics of the tower defense genre. By fusing all of these pieces in addition to our own ideas and gameplay innovations we believe Excubitor has developed it’s own identity, something that will differentiate our game from the ones that came before it.

We are already in closed alpha testing of the core gameplay elements and soon we are going to have a public demo. I am encouraging you to give us your sincere feedback, because this will be crucial to improve the game and take it to the next level.

Tech-demo video:

Gameplay video:

You can find more info on the following sites:

Official Website: http://excubitorgame.com/
IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/excubitor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ExcubitorGame

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TesseractGames/
Twitter: @TesseractGames

Or you can send me mail on teamtesseract@gmail.com

And again I encourage you to give us your honest feedback. Below you can read more about Excubitor and check some awesome screenshots we made. Enjoy!

STORY

In a militaristic future where mankind has conquered the farthest reaches of space, the crew of a lone research vessel called Antares lies dormant near an off-world mining colony until it receives a distress signal and executes a surveillance mission. Upon descent on the planet you discover that the colony is under attack. There you must battle the war machines of humanity, now controlled by a sentient entity of unknown origins. As the player, you are the pilot of a space fighter, the only one trained and capable to fend of the enemy forces and defend Antares.

FEATURES

* Explore different worlds, each one offering a unique feel and different gameplay elements
* Confront a vast array of enemy units, with the difficulty increasing as the game progresses
* Choose from different spacecraft upgrades
* A big selection of weapons that unlock as you progress through the game
* Plan your resources – unlock new strategic possibilities based on your play style using the resources you earn in-game
* Go on the offence, or bunker down defensively - upgrade your spacecraft and take the fight to the enemy, or build defensive turrets and turtle out the storm

SCREENSHOTS

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Co-Founder of Tesseract Interactive.

Check out our project Excubitor on http://excubitorgame.com and http://www.indiedb.com/games/excubitor

Hi everyone,

Excubitor is Tesseract's first game ever, and also mine, so I would like to share the challenges we face every day. Feel free to comment and correct us, it might be very helpful, considering that we are developing our first game. For sure some of you guys might find this useful.

This time I'm going to talk about the sound in Excubitor. While we won’t delve into the technical side of it too much (at least for the time being) we’ll show you the basic steps we take to “align” some sound effects with specific animations or events in the game.

For this purpose we desperately needed solid video capturing software. We tried FRAPS and Camtasia and while they do indeed capture video we encountered a variety of issues with them, from frame drops to low quality and so on and so forth.
That’s where Nvidia ShadowPlay proved its value. It’s important to note that it is exclusive to Nvidia video cards, and only the new ones at that. The requirements are a GTX 600 or higher GPU, core i3 or better and more than 4GB of RAM. Oh, and Windows 7 or 8. But if you indeed have the required hardware and software combo needed to run ShadowPlay than it’s by far the best video capturing software for games you’ll have the privilege to use. It’s always running in the background, so there’s no need to activate or deactivate it once it’s turned on and a simple combo of Alt + F9 will toggle recording on and off (and this is customizable, as well as all of the other recording options it offers).
ShadowPlay.png
So after that small passage of Nvidia promotion in hope we get them to sponsor our game let’s get back to the topic at hand biggrin.png
After we record the clip we give to our audio guru to create the specific sound effect. For simple effects like explosions, bullet sounds, energy beams and so on there is really no need to record videos, the effects are short and can be used in multiple scenarios. But for something that’s in the focus of the scene and it is long and complex than a custom sound clip is preferred. Here we will show you an example of a hangar door opening and the sound we later attached to it.
After he gets his hands on the clip the SFX wiz gets to start work on the magic. The software we use for audio editing in Excubitor, at least for now, is Cubase LE and for some cases Audacity.
As I said we won’t go in depth about the entire process of sound creation, which would be reserved for a future blog post, now we’ll just post this screenshot of how the process looks like on the monitor screen.
Cubase_Screenshot.png
And the final result after testing, re- testing, complaints and creative breakdowns is in this audio clip attached bellow.
We know this is barely scratching the surface of what is generally a pretty complex process, so If you have any specific question about the sound editing please feel free to ask here or PM, we’ll be happy to help. Until the next post stay frosty and good gaming.</p>

Co-Founder of Tesseract Interactive.

Check out our project Excubitor on http://excubitorgame.com and http://www.indiedb.com/games/excubitor

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We are proud to announce the beggining of a new chapter in the development of Excubitor. A closed Alpha testing of Excubitor is starting this Monday.

As a kick off, tomorrow at 19:00 CET, we are having a live session on Twitch.tv together with our friend and host Deni Zantevski. To participate click the following link


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A part of Excubitor’s team will be present to answer any questions you have and receive your feedback on the game.

Anyone who wants to help us improve Excubitor just send us an email onteamtesseract@gmail.com, write in our forum http://excubitor.freeforums.org or message us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ExcubitorGame.

Each week we will upload a new version of Excubitor, with a major update each two weeks. At the moment there is no NDA in place, so feel free to share screenshots, videos or whatever feels right.

Until the next post, stay frosty and good gaming.

Co-Founder of Tesseract Interactive.

Check out our project Excubitor on http://excubitorgame.com and http://www.indiedb.com/games/excubitor

Hi fellow gamers!

I'm happy to announce that we've just submitted Excubitor to Steam Greenlight and show your support by spreading the word to the people you feel might help us as well.

Thank you for your support, Tesseract Interactive is forever in your debt.

Co-Founder of Tesseract Interactive.

Check out our project Excubitor on http://excubitorgame.com and http://www.indiedb.com/games/excubitor

This looks awesome! I'll vote on Greenlight.

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