Void, a game about time-travel from DigiPen Singapore. Oh and I made it.

[Kroakie]

UPDATE: WE WON!!! Lol wtf?!! Update in new post.

Ahem.

I thought I posted this before, but a search reveals otherwise. Anyway, last year I took a course at DigiPen Singapore, and during the Production phase, my team made the game Void, which is now a student finalist at IGF China (!!!) It's a Source engine mod, so will require the Source SDK to run, which you can get if you own any Source engine game..

Anyway, go play it, then come back here and tell me how much you love it (or hate it, or that I should go fuck myself)

[Jeshibu]

Alright. I did. I do.

The past-bubbles are fun to use as well as technically impressive. I'm not sure about the glasses taking up the whole middle of the screen when in use, but the alternatives I came up with are worse (using a quarter of the screen in a corner or the whole thing).

The boulder got me.

I did feel like I was missing a backstory, with the treasures already there in the chest and the main character's name being prefixed in subtitles (like other characters were going to talk at some point), but I actually liked that too.

Fuckin' 5/6 pieces of art, though. Collectables always pull this shit on me. I may have another go to find it.

[Kroakie]

Regarding the story, the original design actually has a tragic, heartrending storyline that deals with loss, regrets and shattered dreams, but that ended up taking our attention away and our game mechanics suffered greatly. In the end, about 2 month before the deadline (the production phase was 5 months), we decided to scrap everything and reboot. With the limited time, we threw out the story and concentrated mostly on the mechanic and level design. There's still a backstory, but it's mostly in our design docs.

Glad to hear you like the bubbles. That was all me

[demagogue]

I think you made the right decision on that, cutting the story & distilling the mechanics & gameplay, since the gameplay has a natural tightness to it and builds on itself in a logical way. Has an Amnesia vibe to it. I like the artistic style a lot. Yes the bubbles are very cool, basically the heart of the whole mechanic.

I haven't finished it; does it have AI later on? (Or I guess I'll find out) That would be a mindbending addition, having AI doing their thing in the past that you can coattail on now, maybe even having a story going on in the past you see snippets of looking back... But I can understand if that's going too far.

Anyway I liked it.

[Kroakie]

We threw the AI and a bunch of other stuffs, out along with the story

[Al_B]

I like it - I felt like an art thief robbing an old museum for its paintings (found four - but I might have missed some). However, I seem to have hit a problem. I've reached void security and avoided the boulder but when I step into the white light the game crashes and throws me out. Is this something that you've seen before and if not is there some debugging information I can turn on to track down the problem?

[Kroakie]

Huh, that is weird. Don't think we've seen that before. BTW that is the end of the game, so all you're missing is the credits. You can try watching the credits from the main menu, and see if there's any problems there too. If there is, maybe some files in the credits is corrupted or something.

It's been over a year since I last worked on the game. You can enable developer's console from the menu, and press "~" to activate it. I doubt there's gonna be much info there though. Seems like you can run the game with the command line argument "-condebug" and it will log the output in console.log in the game directory, but we've never used that.

I like it - I felt like an art thief robbing an old museum for its paintings

spoiler:

Lol that's exactly who you're supposed to be. The backstory (the one that remains mainly in our design docs) goes that you're a thief trying to rob the museum of the lorgnette glass and gloves you used in the game, not knowing its magical properties. Something went wrong and there was a rift in time and the whole world goes to shit and that's where the game begins.

[Al_B]

You can try watching the credits from the main menu, and see if there's any problems there too.

Credits play fine so it's good to know I'm not missing anything (other than two paintings... ). Good work and it must have been fun to develop.

[gunsmoke]

Sweet. As soon as I get back around a PC, I'll be all over this. Will it run on a MacBook Pro w/ a 2.2GHz i7? I don't game on laptops much.

[Kroakie]

Never tried it on a Mac before, but if it can run Source mods, there shouldn't be any problems

[Kroakie]

UPDATE: So VOID won both Best Student Game and Excellence in Technology at IGF China, which is being held over the weekend in Shanghai. No one is more surprised than I am. If only they knew what our "technology" really is all about...

But more importantly, FREE MONEY!!!

Here's the Gamasutra article

[gunsmoke]

Awesome sauce, kroak! Congrats to the crew.

[Subjective Effect]

Awesome. Well done. I guess I should give this a go then.

Edit: DLing now.

[Matthew]

Nice one, Kroakie!

[Subjective Effect]

Done.

Enjoyed it.

Great concept, but it's been kind of done in other games, no? Whatever, the atmosphere was nice and I especially liked the graphics of the right hand. The only gripe I have is there is one bit in the sewers where it looks like you can escape by doing what you've just learnt. However the water won't take you any further and in fact you have to go into the past to activate a switch. Shouldn't have made that opening so inviting!

[demagogue]

Congratulations Kroakie.
First we take Shanghai, then we take Berlin ... no wait, wrong song.

[Kroakie]

Great concept, but it's been kind of done in other games, no?

Well if you were talking about Quantum Conundrum, Parallax, or Bioshock Infinite, they were announced after VOID was done. There's this UDK game in development and a Flash game which both names I can't recall that had a similar concept, which was announced/released while we were in development. In fact, the team were quite surprised at how similar all those games were, and we joked that they were ripping off us. Other than that, I can't really recall any game with similar concept.

[Subjective Effect]

No dema, that's the RIGHT song

[reizak]

Void got posted on RPS. John Walker thinks you should get hired by Valve!

[SD]

What a splendid concept for a game. Congratulations, Kroakie.

[Kroakie]

And it's on Kotaku too! I knew RPS was the right place to pimp the game.

Void got posted on RPS. John Walker thinks you should get hired by Valve!

Ahh I guess that was you who posted the TTLG link?

[Bakerman]

This looks so damn cool. Great work! Not sure why it didn't strike me to comment before, but I'm glad I checked out the video in the RPS link... very, very impressive.

[Subjective Effect]

Well done in getting so much publicity. It is a great idea and I hope you get to make more of it.

[N'Al]

Finally played through this as well. Really enjoyed it, pretty damn excellent.

Can't seem to get rid of the game from my Steam list of installed games, though?

[Kroakie]

Why would you want to remove it? Jokes aside, I don't think you can remove mods from within Steam, but you can remove it manually by deleting the Void folder from (steampath)\steamapps\sourcemods\