Category: Chris Pope Diary Entries

Hey everyone! I thought you all might get a kick out of hearing some of the behind the scenes recordings from our Three Habeneros song.

Note that the solo versions of the songs haven’t gone through normalization. They are very raw, but we hoped you might get a kick out of hearing them anyway. 🙂

First up, here is the instrumental version(performed by James Mulvale) of the song without any vocals:

INSTRUMENTAL VERSION

Here is the completed version with all three vocalists, minus the robotic vocal effects:

COMPLETE SONG WITH VOCALS, NO ROBOTIC VOICE EFFECTS

This version just contains Rob Paulsen singing the parts with himself:

JUST ROB PAULSEN DOING ALL PARTS

This version just contains Jason Charles Miller singing the parts with himself:

JUST JASON CHARLES MILLER DOING ALL PARTS

This version just contain John Patrick Lowrie singing the parts with himself:

JUST JOHN PATRICK LOWRIE DOING ALL PARTS

And just for fun, here are all three singing all parts at the same time lol

ALL THREE VOCALISTS SINGING ALL THREE PARTS AT THE SAME TIME

Here are the lyrics to the song:

We’re Three habaneros
Three gay habaneros
We love to sing for you in our sombreros

We welcome you our winner
Free Breakfast, lunch, or dinner
And though your meal is free, does not include gratuity

Our tacos HOLY MOLE!
Much better than Chipotle
and you don’t have to worry ‘bout e-coli

Our spices are atomic
explosive, Gastronomic
our salsa is so potent it will make you hypersonic

Oh please try our chingadero
Deep fried in it’s own bowl,
made with our special dough
So crunchy and spicey
but not all that pricey,
it’s three times as nicey
When you get it to go.

We’re Three habaneros
Three gay habaneros
We love to sing for you in our sombreros

We’ll sing for you all day but to stop us you must pay.
Yes, here at Taco Nova it’s the customary wa-aay.

Hey everyone! Here is a quick video of me discussing some of the mechanics of making the sphere puzzle sequence work near the end of SpaceVenture. This will be part of our behind the scenes content once the game is released.

VIEW VIDEO HERE

As I’m sure you guys can guess, things don’t always go as planned in the development of certain scenes within the game creation process. Here is a small video planned for the blooper reel. It’s titled, “Rooter Has Worms”.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO

Hey guys, to go along with our most recent project update, I wanted to throw out another small treat. Here is our original design concept for how players will utilize the SpaceVenture navigation system. The Space navigation system will help you get to the different locations in the game that happen to be extremely distant from one another.

In SpaceVenture, we want to simulate piloting your own craft through the SV galaxy as much as possible, giving the player a feeling of freedom to explore and choose their destination. The goal is to do something visually exciting and interactive that takes advantage of 3D. The game navigation will use a 3D jumpgate system where players actually pilot their ship around small planetary systems  connected by a web of jumpgate corridors to a Hyperspace Expressway (a track with turn points). the galaxy *road map* might look something like this:

ORIGINAL CONCEPT:

The turn points (or nodes) represent highway on/off ramps where the player can turn to access planetary systems or alter their course on the track map.

Piloting down the Hyperspace Expressway and turning off correct exits:
When in Hyperspace (track) mode, Ace appears to be speeding through a wormhole at warp speed along with other ships. This should feel like being on a busy freeway (or a pod race). vehicles can bump into each other.

Piloting through planetary system to approach desired destination:
After taking an exit off the Hyperspace expressway, the player is now piloting at sub light speed through a small planetary system in free flight mode. The player pilots the ship to a waypoint indicator to their desired destination.

I hope you all have enjoyed this small peek into the original concept behind our SpaceVenture ship navigation 🙂

As previously mentioned, the Cluck Yegger portion of SpaceVenture has been planned since the beginning. In the beginning however, we didn’t have a clear idea of how we were going to make this sequence fun. We ended up deciding on a Five Nights At Freddy’s style game play parody because the game mechanics seemed to work well with what we hoped to accomplish with the Cluck Yegger sequence. Not to mention, what would a Two Guys From Andromeda game be without parodies! 🙂

With various team members being tied up, and Scott having to deal with some major personal set backs, Mark and I decided to tackle design, programming, and artwork between the two of us. We were able to put a prototype together within a week that had four rooms and some mutant chickens(actually the Chickens were generic objects) that could move between scenes. Perhaps in a later post, I’ll publish the prototype out for everyone to have a look at. It wasn’t much, but will show how far things have come at least.

The decision was eventually made that there would be two locations that the player could monitor, the BFC Facilities, and Cluck’s ship. Originally, we wanted to allow Cluck to actually be able to travel from the Cockpit of Cluck’s ship, then outside and enter the BFC Facilities, but after awhile we decided not to go that route due to the amount of time and coding it was going to take. That feature ultimately wasn’t going to add much more to the game, considering we could potentially achieve the same results using cameras.

After mapping out what each scene would be, and how they were all connected, I had to begin writing the code for the Chicken AI. I had a basic Chicken AI script written that I had created for the prototype, but at that time, I didn’t know what all the scenes would be. Eventually, we sat down talked about the paths each Chicken would take throughout the game. Mark created a flow chart that we could use to keep things straight. I rewrote all the Chicken AI code based on the flow chart you see below.

 

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been assigned (or more like somehow managed to assign  myself) the task of wiring up a pretty crazy puzzle in SpaceVenture. It has been lovingly dubbed by the team as “The Pipes Puzzle”. Spoiler alert! The puzzle itself will have you turning valves in order to get water flowing in a certain direction, all while trying to get a tricky alien creature to follow the flow of the pipe system. I have had the honor of putting some pretty cool stuff into the game, but this by far has been the most challenging due to all the mechanics that have to be in place in order to make it all work.

The below image gives you a small taste of the scene, but mainly focuses on certain things happening in the background. All of the red and green objects you see in the scene are actually all behind the scenes items that won’t be present (at least visually) in the real game. In the full game, you’ll also get to see the beautiful background artwork that Mark has created for it. In the below image, most of the artwork is turned off, except for what I need in order to wire up the puzzle. The different red cubes that you see in the image are all triggers that get tripped off whenever one of the green cubes touch it. The green bars move along with the valves you will be adjusting in the scene.

The crazy alien creature in the image will only move if the water is flowing in the right direction, so all the valves have to be manipulated a certain way in order to solve the puzzle. At the moment of this writing, I’m about 60% of the way through it, and hope to have it completed by tomorrow sometime. It’s been a long drawn out process setting up all the objects, scripts, and events to make it work properly, and I’m excited about being finally near the finish line on it. Can’t wait to see what you all think when you get to play with it in the real game!

-Chris Pope a.k.a your humble local intergalactic SpacePope

PS- Be sure to check out the latest episode of the Space Quest Historian podcast to hear a little bit more about what’s been going on with the project, including some more input about this puzzle. The episode should be posted later tonight.

So for the last few days, Mark, Scott and I have been camped out in South Carolina spending time with our senior programmer, Tyler Drinkard. Pushing 16 hour days have been exhausting but well worth it! We have made major head way towards the finish line. One thing that happened today that was really exciting was going through the brain storm process with Mark and Scott. There is a portion of the game near the end that has never felt quite fleshed out in terms of puzzle and story.

Essentially, without spoiling anything major, Ace lands on a planet and there is a small puzzle that needs to be figured out to progress. The issue that we had there was trying to work out the comedy and make the portion of the game worth while. A lot of ideas went back and forth as to what would workout and what wouldn’t. And of course, there must be some good parodies involved! Well let me just say, you won’t be disappointing in the least. I nearly spit soda all over my laptop a few times.

Anyway, the below picture isn’t meant to show any of the comedy, and it is very vague, but Mark drew this up while we were discussing everything. I figured I’d share it here. It shows Ace in a very tight spot that he will be in during this portion of the game..

-Chris Pope

 

 

Hey everyone! As mentioned in our previous Kickstarter Update, we are wanting to start showing more on this site. In a small push off to make that happen, I wanted to share a commentary I put together demonstrating the July 2013 demo of SpaceVenture. I hope you all enjoy it! 🙂

So for those that missed it, we announced that we’ve been working with Unity as the official engine for SpaceVenture. This was a bit of a gamble in the beginning because we wanted to have Linux support, yet Unity 3 doesn’t support it. We knew that Unity 4 was supposed to have Linux support, so it wasn’t a huge gamble, but luckily, everything paid off! Unity 4 came out a few days ago and seems to be functioning for us great! Our senior programmer Tyler has nothing but good things to say about Unity 4 so far.

We aren’t quite ready to show demo scenes just yet, but  I think you guys are gonna love what we’ve got cooking up! Mark as always has really out done himself with working out solutions to art related problems that could really cause some issues in the direction we’re taking! In the earlier stages of making 3D work right in a 2D adventure game seemed a bit of a reach, but break through after break through has changed my originally nervous mind on this. Seems Unity really does a much better job than a lot of people realize in dealing with 2D stuff in conjunction with 3D. A lot of what has been put into the framework for SpaceVenture will also be easily re-used in future games, which will save time and money.  The framework should also make things easy to improve upon as well!

Another thing that is meshing well in all this is the story line that Mark and Scott have put together. Without spoilers, let me just say that you’ll feel right at home with all the crazy space slang and ridiculous humor that only the Two Guys from Andromeda could bring to the table!

Chris Pope
http://facebook.com/thechrispope
http://twitter.com/thechrispope

PS- I’ve had a blast chatting back and forth with a lot of you on Twitter and Facebook! If you haven’t already, shoot me a follow on Twitter and/or a friend request on Facebook! 🙂

Picture is from the filming of Professor Shyguys “Guilded Love” video