Kickstarter

For those that saw my wife's belly in the kickstarter pitch; the baby is now 4 months old and is about the coolest little gal I have ever met :) 

 I did not get a wii u for christmas. 

 I have updated just about all of the animations the yall saw in the trailer, and the player feels much more fluid and natural now. 

 A new, very important, mechanic was added to the game since the trailer came out. 

 That's about it for now. Thanks for reading!

-Eric Provan

Hi all,

Before I get into all the update details, I do want to do a bit of cleanup. I know of a few people who have not received their physical rewards yet. If you happen to be one of these people, please message me here, or email me at ericprovan@gmail.com. I know it's a bit tacky to ask for help with this, but I have never been the most organized person, so tracking down who may still need something is becoming daunting.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I would like to start by thanking everyone who has left kind messages on Facebook and email concerning the loss of my father on christmas eve. It really means a lot. My dad was my hero, and he is greatly missed by myself and my family. He was actually the inspiration for Spates main character, and was also the person who begged me for years and years to do something involving rain. Which Spate does very much. I'm bummed he won't see the finished game, but I was able to tell him that I would be dedicating the game to him a few weeks ago. He thought that was awesome. 

 Anyway, enough of the bummer stuff. Today I finally accept a day job at Walt Disney Animation Studio, where I will be working as an artist. I should point out that this will not effect the production of Spate, as I have always been clear that Spate is my personal project, which gets all my attention at night. 

 Today marked about 3 weeks that I had not worked on Spate. By far the longest I've gone without working on the game. This was due to my fathers passing, as well as a few other personal things. Anyway, I got back to work on Spate tonight, and it really brought me a lot of joy. Because of my brief absence from Spate, I have moved around a bit of scheduling. My goal is to finish all assets in January. What this means is that I will create any models and textures that are left. I feel like its a good time to bust this stuff out, and the longer I wait, the harder it gets to go back to this stuff. I mostly just have to create secondary characters. This also means I will be stepping away from game design for a bit. I think this is good news because the game is running great right now, and a fresh take at the design in a month can only be helpful. 

 And lastly, before I move on to the random information part of the update, I just wanted to publicly thank my amazing wife Holly. Not only for her continued support for this project, but also for her strength, love, and caring since the passing of my father. I would be lost without her. 

Some other randoms bits of information. The games music is coming along wonderfully. It's beyond anything I could have ever imagined to be quite honest. 

 First episode of the show that I and Spate participated in, is going to air on Jan 22 on ign's site.  

Since I started Spate, my family has moved 5 times. Two of them being 3000 mile relocations. 

For those that saw my wife's belly in the kickstarter pitch; the baby is now 4 months old and is about the coolest little gal I have ever met :) 

 I did not get a wii u for christmas. 

 I have update just about all of the animations the yall saw in the trailer, and the player feels much more fluid and natural now. 

 A new, very important, mechanic was added to the game since the trailer came out. 

 That's about it for now. Thanks for reading!

Hey guys and gals, I teased a big announcement for Dec. and here it is. 

A short while ago IGN came to me with an offer to be on their reality/competition show "The Next Game Boss".  After watching season 1, I planed to decline. But, They told me the show would be very different this year. I should point out that I thought season 1 was great, but the format just would not have been worth it to me. They basically had teams create a small game on the show and then pitch it. 

 Anyway, for season 2, teams must bring a game with them (in my case, Spate), and the show would work like this. First, you pitch your game to the judges, then the judges play the game, give some feedback, and then teams would be given challenges to keep impressing the judges and stay on the show. 

 Once I found out that Spate would be a big part of the show, I felt that I couldn't turn it down. Last weekend we shot the show. Obviously, I cant give anything away (Episodes start airing in late Jan), but I will say that it was an amazing experience that even hinders on life changing. I feel confident that I represented myself, and Spate in a very good light.  

 Most surreal moment for me? Watching Jenova Chen (Journey, Flower) and David Jaffe (God of War, Twisted Metal) play Spate! 

 You can see lots of photos on Spate's Facebook page. I am the chubby one with the goofy smile =) http://www.facebook.com/Spatevideogame 

 Spate now has a twitter as well. I know, I know, but what's a boy to do? https://www.twitter.com/SpateTheGame 

 Feel free to ask questions. I will do my best to answer what I am aloud to. 

 And finally, I plan to release a new trailer this month. What do you want to see in it? Some notes I am addressing from the last trailer.....better music, narration, and shorter length. Thanks everyone! -Eric Provan

This is the update I have been dreading for quite a while now. I wish I could have updated everyone sooner, but I wanted to make sure to have a clear idea of what the related info would be. The game's release date is being pushed a bit. The reasoning is a combination of things. 

First, the loss of my day job has caused me to spend many hours pursuing a new day job. Not to mention having moved my family 4 times in 5 months, a newborn, and a 1 and a half yr old who broke her arm. 

 Second, being essentially a one man team has made it extremely hard to manage all the aspects of developing a game. In other words, I am spending much more time then expected on things like packaging/shipping, customer support, and programming. 

 Third, and what I view as the most important reason, is that I feel like this game is special and deserves to be made with respect to that. In my past projects, there was definitely a feeling toward the end were I felt like time was running out so I just crammed things together and called it done. Spate deserves the full treatment. I have put to much blood, sweat, and tears into this game to not make it the best game it can be. 

 Whats left? 

-Music (Being worked on now and sounding amazing!) 

 - Sound Effects 

 - Voice Over Narration (This one scares me a bit as I don't really have the funds to hire a professional VO guy) 

 - Creation of games ending cutscene 

 - Need to create 2 more characters who have small but impact-full parts. 

 - Also need to finish the narration scripts. The story is done, but I am still working on the narration to tell the story =) 

 - Play testing - Many many many bugs

 Things that I would like done before release but not promised 

 -Mac Support (highly likely) 

-Linux Support (highly likely as well. Unity3d, the game engine I am using, now supports linux!) 

Updated Schedule 

- December 2012 - New Trailer (With professional music, and more focus on the games story. I'm extremely excited about this because it will show off a lot of the things that the funding has gone towards!) 

 January 2013 - Steam Greenlight Campaign (Steams "Greenlight" is in many ways a lot like kickstarter. Basically, I put my game there and make a pitch for the game to be carried on Steam. This doesn't really effect kickstarter backers, but being on steam would bring a lot of attention and exposure to Spate.) 

 January 2013 - A huge announcement regarding Spate. I hate to be cryptic but I really can't say anything yet. The announcement doesn't directly effect kickstarter backers, but it will bring significant exposure to the game and myself.

 March 2013 - Beta 

 April 2013 - Full Game Release

 Additional Info  

- How long is the game? 2 -3 hours (It sounds short on paper, but the length is in line with many of the Indie games I have played, especially platformers. Also, as I said from the beginning, I want the game to have a cinematic feel to it, and the current length only helps that.). 

- Plans for a DLC? Never 

- Plans for a Spate 2? Yes, depending on how the first is received of course. 

- There are tons of easter eggs. Nods to other Indie games, favorite movies, Waldo, Kickstarter backers, etc! 

- Is Spate still the game that everyone backed? Absolutely! 

- There was a bit of an uprising after I listed some things that have been cut from the game in my last update. I want to make it very clear that everything I have cut is in the best interest of the game. A lot of research has gone into Spate, and for better or worse, I have a clear idea of what kind of experience I want to present. So, things that have been cut, where cut for that very = important reason. 

- Does the game have any crates? Nope! =)

- Does the game have any crepes? Nope! =(

- 90% of all physical rewards have been shipped.

 - What games have I been playing? I average about an hour a week of gaming, but I do have some recent favorites. PS3's Soundscapes was a blast. Its a simple platformer with a cool musical twist. There's also a huge community creating excellent levels for it. Also, The Unfinished Swam is an interesting game I have been playing. I'm not really sure what to think of it quite yet, but I recommend it just for the fresh take. 

- A couple new work in progress stills. These are of the game's ending tower environment. Just to put the size of the tower in perspective, the area shown in the close up is about 6% of it's length. http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/559598_444868582216932_802365933_n.jpg

Sincerely, 

-Eric Provan

The Story of Spate's Development Thus Far.

I should mention at the start that while Game Design and the videogame Spate came up basically by accident, I do have a past that is full of love for games. Ive said this many times, but one of my favorite memories, if not my favorite memory of being a little one, is playing The Legend of Zelda with my Mom. My Mom somehow saw the value of games very early on and made sure my brother, sister, and I always had the new cool game on our shelf. From Zelda, to Contra, to Super Mario, to Megaman, to Mario 64, to Fzero.

As I said, Spate happened very much by accident. I was developing my 3rd animated short film "Radicool", a love letter to eighties films, very much in the same vein as Goonies, Monster Squad, and The Gate. A friend of mine, Brad, who works at Northrup Grumman (Weapon design, defence electronics, etc) mentioned a cool piece of software that they were testing called Unity3d. So, we downloaded a demo, and played around with it for a while. I was instantly in love. While I mainly work in the film industry, I started out working in games. I was an environment artist and then a character artist at 2KSports. There, I learned how games are put together. At the time, it never really frustrated me, but there was a certain pain to the process of seeing my artwork in the game. Some times it would take hours for the game to build, just so I could see how 3rd base turned out in game. So, I think my instant love of Unity3d comes from the fact that its so artist friendly. It works very much like the software Maya, which I consider myself a master of at this point.

Getting back to the subject, I played around with unity that night and fell in love. For the next few weeks, I mostly just tested little things and introduced myself to programming. At this point, I still had no idea that I would be building an entire game, no less a huge game of such detail as Spate. Once I had a better idea of how things worked, I started imersing myself in gamedesign. When I say I purchased 10 different books on the subject, I mean I purchased 11. I was obsessed. As I often am with a new passion.

In learning about game design, I chose a platformer to be my learning piece. with very basic shapes I began to code a platformer. Unity3d comes with some already built things that really helped out. In a few weeks, I had something very simple. Running, jumping, and pushing/pulling. It was at this point that I started to develop the idea of Spate as a game. The story of Spate had been floating around in my head for a while as a short film. I knew I wanted the lead to be a detective. I knew it would be Steampunk, and that the world would often not make sense. I took a lot of inspiration from the movies Peeper, Stalker, and Dark City.

I had a couple rules and ideas from the start of development. First, I wanted the controls to be simple. Time and time again, and moreso recently, I have played platformers that were ruined with complex controls and stupid annoying gimmicks. Second, I wanted to make a game that I would like to play. Journey, Ico, Mario, Donkey Kong, Limbo, Braid, and most recently, Dear Esther are all games I like. Third, I wanted the game to play very much like a film. From 3 acts, to camera work, to atmosphere, I wanted it all to read cinematic.

Spate was slow going at first. I was designing the game, doing character and enviroment concepts, creating assets, animating, learning scripting, and developing the story. It was a lot. It is a lot. My workflow hasnt changed from the beginning. Basically, I put the wife and kids to bed at 9pm, then I jump into the world of Spate until about 1am-2am. Then I wake up at 7-8am with the little ones, go to my day job, and then do it all over. Spate doesn't leave my head all day though. I jot down ideas and sketches every second i get, I record story ideas on my drives to and from work, and I often dream of Spate.

It was slow going at first. It was when I met Temo through the Unity Forums that things really started to pick up. Temo lives in the country Georgia and I live in the states. We were 12 hours apart, yet we made it work. He would get on Teamviewer and Skype and walk me through the basics of scripting, all while working on Spate. Any advanced programming in Spate was no doubt done by Temo. He has wonderful skills and is amazing fast. Once things got to a nice point, I decided to put Spate on Kickstarter.

I did crowdfunding (unsuccessfully) for my past animated short, so I had an idea of the process, but to be honest, I thought Spate had no chance of getting funded. It wasn't until the trailer started getting carried by all the big gaming sites, that I thought it could be possible. It was through this process that I met composer Mike Raznick. I shuffled through over 40 composers who wanted to work on Spate, (another 40 since), and found Mike to be the best fit. Mike is as excited about Spate as I am. This shocked me. It also shocked me that a composer of his caliber would want to work on an independent game, with very little funding, and a game designer that has never designed a game. Mike somehow had faith in the game and me.

Once Mike joined, and kickstarter was going well, I began to think that Spate could be more than just another neat game. I started to think it could be something special. It is this belief that pushes me on.

At my day job, I watch either game design talks on youtube, or entire play throughs of my favorite games. It was in watching these playthroughs that I got what I believe to be a wonderful idea. Since the game recently got to the point of being entirely playable from start to finish, I have been recording the game from start to finish, and watching this video to pick up on many many things. Things like platform timing, story points, camera work, and visual changes. This has allowed me to edit the game very much like I would edit a film.

So, as Spate begins to approach its final months, this is where I am at. There is still a TON of work. The game has no sound, the narration is still being written, Voice Over has not been recorded, bugs and bugs and bugs, there are still vacant areas of the game's environments, the ending cut scene is not done, the scenes lost in a harddrive crash have to be recreated, and there are many many little tweaks left. But, I feel good about Spate. I still feel like it will be something special. Spate is different, and that scares the hell out of me, but I think its a good different. If I didnt, then I wouldnt. =)

What is Spate about really? A man drinking himself to death, and a world reflecting that.

I leave you with a list of things that have been tested and dropped from the game Spate. All good decisions hopefully.

In game journal entries. I felt this slowed things down to much. The more I study games, the more I adopt the idea of having the player create large parts of the games story in their own head.

Physics based puzzles a la Limbo. I was incredibly inspired by Limbo. I think its the best paced game i've ever played. I wanted Spate to have cool puzzles like Limbo. I quickly learned that puzzles take lots of unique coding to create. Something I am just not able to do in a timely fashion. I have a sketchbook with at least 50 puzzles I created for Spate that may be used in my next game =)

Ladders. I dunno why i killed them, I just did. F ladders. Who needs em.

Cutscenes. I never wanted a lot of cutscenes, but I did have the idea to use around 10 or so. The bottom line is I just don't have the time to create them. I also don't think they would add anything to the game and may even slow things down. In total, the game has 2 cutscenes.

Teleporting. Im still testing this one, but I just don't think it fits in the game. You can make some really cool puzzles with teleporting, but ultimately, does it add anything to the game?

Gravity changing. Lots of platformers do this well. I am also still testing this one. I think its a cool fit with the surreal storyline of the game. It all comes down to if it can be done in time with no bugs. we shall see.

There are more Im sure but I just can't think of them.

Thanks for reading!

-Eric Provan

http://www.facebook.com/Spatevideogame?ref=hl