I told you it would not be long!
We have been discussing the main character of the game, which will be an adventurer exploring/raiding pyramids.
Mathieu (the art guy) tried four different styles. We are still not sure which one will end up in the game. There is still time to influence our choice! Let us know in the comments which one you prefer.
A wild blog post appears!
It's funny how each time I post I am tempted to begin my post with "Long time no see". This definitely means that I need to post more often.
In our last blog post, we've shown you some visual concepts for our next game (Pyramid Quest). Sadly, our artist (Jean-Philippe Gagné) cannot finish the game with us anymore. So, we've equipped ourselves with a couple of traps and masterballs before heading down to the hunt, the artist's hunt.
We found one! Mathieu Lockquell Pinsonnault will work on Pyramid Quest from now on. He does know his art-fu so brace yourselves! We also hope that Jean-Philippe will be back working with us soon, but it will probably take a couple of months.
It is not sure anymore if the game will be pre-rendered 3D since we are back to the drawing board. In fact, it probably won't. Here is a concept shot:
I don't really like posting text-only-post, so I had to sit on my hands for the last couple of months (we had no artist), but still, I didn't rest! The engine is starting to look really great. More on this soon, and also more concept for Pyramid Quest.
Stay tuned fellow interactive media aficionados!
Hi, long time no see!
We would like to announce the game we are currently working on; it is called it Pyramid Quest. We wanted a simple game we could make and polish rapidly, so we didn't try to design a whole new genre or anything where we could run into too much problems. We prefer to concentrate on polishing the fun factor and aesthetic factor.
The story isn't really relevant here. It's a simple puzzle game that will take place in the rooms of an Egyptian pyramid. Your goal will be to find treasures and escape.
The game is a sokoban-like puzzle with a couple of twist.
Here are some models that our "guy who is good at art and bacon" (Jean-Philippe Gagné), just sent me.
The game is a 2d game, but he decided to try something with pre-rendered 3D model. Not unlike Rare did on the SNES with the Donkey Kong Country games.
We'll keep you posted!
The Bivouac Urbain 2011 just ended. It's a game jam/prototyping competition in the middle of a park in Québec City. The energy and atmosphere is simply awesome. It's more than your usual prototyping competition; it's a festival, an exposition, and a prototyping competition! You have to be there to feel the vibe!
We didn't win, but we have learned a lot. It was a good test-drive for our engine and we had a chance to talk with other independent developers from Québec City; Berzerk Studio and Juicy Beast Studio. The word "awesome" is not powerful enough to describe their work!
This year's thematic was (in french) "La fuite en avant" which can roughly mean two things in english since "fuite" can mean leak or escape. Either "The front leak" or "Escaping forward". We decided to go the "The front leak" meaning with parts of "Escaping forward", which results in the pee version of paperboy. With a bit of absurd humor, of course!
Here's a link with various photos from a professionnal
http://ml-photographe.com/galeries/bivouac-urbain/
And here are our photos of the event
http://www.flickr.com/photos/anherostudios/sets/72157627286759901/
You also can see them on our facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Anhero/142736309120579
The goal is to run away from Mr. Gashunk (whom is a shark with a monocle and a top hat) because you urinated on his porch. Since you are scared as hell, you have to stop and pee on the bushes or you'll pee yourself. Don't stop for too long though or Mr. Gashunk will eat you!
The game is far from release quality, but we can say that it was better than our first engine demo, which took 1 month of work. This time, we did better in 48 hours. I call that a success!
You can download the game here:
And here's some more screenshots of the game:
Here it is! A release of the RedBox engine that does not require a master in engineering! The last release was a bit complicated to install, but now we have pre-compiled libraries and project template.
All you have to do is download the package at redboxengine.com/download for your OS, unzip/untar it, open an IDE project in the IDE folder and start coding!
We also started a tutorial, you can check it on the engine's website at: redboxengine.com/tutorials/list
On another note, we probably won't make an update per month like we planned, it would keep us from doing bigger chunk of work which will greatly improve the engine in quality and features. It will also keep us from making games which gives us the possibility to continue our work on the engine.
Though, we will keep the packages/repo updated and functional as we update the engine for our needs.
Currently we support the 3 main PC operating system (Windows/OSX/Linux).
We also partially support iOS.
Full iOS and Android support is coming soon.
We got ourselves a new design and new image, thanks to our intern that came in spring. We applied ourselves to update the look of the RedBox Engine website, which was atrocious (friends don't let developers design). Once this was done, we could update the look of this website to an entirely custom one.
There are still things to do about the redesign, once they're each done, we'll update them. There's, at first, the mobile design of this website and the RedBox Engine website, then there's integrating the forum software.
This was a brief update, but we have plans to make this place a bit more lively. We will start blogging soon about what we're doing with either RedBox or related projects. These blog posts will be syndicated from our respective blogs, once everything is set up properly for everyone.
Ludum Dare 20 is over, more than 350 games have been done in a single weekend! For us, it was more really an engine jam than a game jam, but we managed to ship two games. One was more a joke from madbranch rather than a game (he shipped a sprite emitter test). The other was done in 8 hours the last day (the first two days were spent working on the engine).
You can play those games here :
This Ludum Dare has been really useful, we tested the engine in a competition/jam environment and enhanced it a lot. We were able to make a multi-platform "mini-games" game (which, in our experience, is a bad move for a prototyping competition) in less than 8 hours, with no graphic artist. We are therefore confident that the engine is mostly ready for the 0.1 release. We are a bit behind schedule, but we should release the promised features really soon with a documentation and dependencies installation packages.
We still haven't posted about the features for the next month release, but we're planning to add a test suite (which will result in less features 
), but we we will try hard to add something more than only tests!
See ya!
It was about time! The RedBox engine is out! There is some rough edges to flesh out, but we should get to them really quickly.
It still a beta, it's not ready for the big deal, though we should release the 0.1 RC by the end of the month. We are planning to use the engine for the ludum dare contest.
You can download the engine, and get every related news at http://redboxengine.com.
There is also our forum if you need any help http://anhero.net/forum/ (We are here to help you, you should get a response really quickly, so don't be shy! 
) You can chat on IRC on freenode, on the channel #redboxengine.
We will release a new version with new features and bug fix almost every month(hopefully quicker!) You can also download the latest development version at code.anhero.net
We will keep you posted with this blog about the features we are currently working on for the next releases.
If you would like to see a feature in the next releases or if you find a bug, post it on the forums or on our bug tracker (bugs.anhero.net), we will respond quickly and see what we can do about it.
There are some features we did not have time to re-implement from the prototype we made in 2009-2010, those should be back soon.
Currently it runs on Linux/OS X (with Qt) and on iOS devices (iPod Touch and iPhone). It will work on windows, BUT after 5 second it will lock-up the system (it takes all the CPU, we're searching why, since there is no problem on Linux, OS X and iPhone).
Native and/or SDL support for Windows/Linux/OS X (not Qt-backed) and Android support should come later. Qt is not really optimal for games (there is a problem with click event and qmake makes it WAY longer to compile), it is a temporary backend. We plan to use Qt for the editor, but not in actual games.
Music works on iPhone, but it won't work elsewhere, it should be done by the end of the month. No problem for sound effects though.
Everything is in C++, but we will integrate a scripting engine soon, we need it too.
Keep in mind that it's still a beta, an early one. There are lot of things we don't like. We will release the "real" 0.1 by the end of the month.
If we are able to stay on track with the schedule those are the feature we will implement before the end of the month:
While you wait for a "Package system and/or better instructions", you can still get a look at the sources at code.anhero.net. If you feel adventurous and want to compile it, we have the website (in construction), the forums and the irc channel at freenode.net channel #redboxengine.
Keep in mind that we are there to help you! Just post in the forum and you should get a response in less than an hour on work days (probably on non-work days too in fact....thanks to you smart phones...)
Totally unrelated, I added a photos section so if you want to see who is Anhero Studios, now you can
http://anhero.net/forum/
Edit: This blog post will also serves as a temporary description for the engine.
Yup technical post ahead, but if you are into making game, you should stick with us!
RedBox is a 2D engine (well for now ) designed to run on every major platform. We were greatly inspired by the well known Flixel and unity3d engines. We wanted to mix the cool stuff that both engines had and of course, add our own grain of salt... I mean, flood it with salt, we got tons and tons of ideas for this engine!
We want our engine to be usable by the widest array of persons. This mean: free and easy to use, without sacrificing its usability for pro/commercial games. I think it's pretty clear now that a 2D game can be really profitable *HUM HUM ANGRY BIRD HUM HUM*.
Our engine WILL be open-source and free to use as soon as we judge it ready, but for now, there's still a lot to do. Our schedule says we should get it up and ready around June 2011, but we are getting delayed a bit since we are a small studio. Also, we don't like the idea of releasing it before we made a game or two with it, you know, to test drive it.
This summer, there will be the third edition of a prototyping competition in Québec City (Bivouac Urbain), which will give us the opportunity to test it in a "global game jam-like" condition. (Crunch time!)
We also have a "bigger" game (let's say a game that isn't made in 48 hours without sleeping...) we wanted to release on smart phones (the gameplay is kinda weird, it won't be playable on PC without joysticks or multitouch, but more details on this in a later post 
).
When those two games will have been made, we should have worked on it enough for it to be usable in a commercial and/or competition workflow. (If that mean anything anyway...)
We really liked the state system of flixel, so we wanted one. It is in fact greatly inspired by flixel on this regard.
We wanted one, no matter what! I would really like it if my grandma was able to make games or my artist was able to balance the game without asking me to make changes in the code every 10 minutes. A graphic editor, that is the solution. We have a lot on our mind about this one. For the first release, it probably won't do much; tilemaping, creating shapes, texture mapping, lot of asset pipeline goodies and other stuff I can't put a name on it at the moment.
As soon as we can, we want to add a graphic script editor. Something like kismet for the UDK (not the wifi kismet). It will give you the ability to prototype a game without even writing a line of code, but we really need to work on something else before we attack this behemoth, which leads me to my next point.
Currently, everything is in C++ (except the backend platform dependent code, which is in Objective-c on iOS and Java on Android). It is not likely that my grandma will learn C++. We are looking to add a script interpreter before the end of the year. We are not sure which one we will add first, but we are interested in Javascript, LUA and Actionscript. Those won't remove the possibility to write your classes in C++.
We want to push it even further. We want to make those scripts compilable into native code (by native code I mean native code, not bytecode) and we are looking into making the engine work from other native languages than C++. That would kick ass! But don't wait for this awesomeness this year (blame the fact that I still need to eat/sleep).
If you you don't understand what the last paragraph was about, let's resume it this way: write in whatever language you want for whatever platform you want.... yup, I know...
Currently, the engine runs on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, Linux and we are working on Flash support (we also want to add JS/Canvas/HTML5 at a later date.)
We are also looking for more "commercial" platform if you know what I mean , but I can't really tell much at the moment.
The editor is developed with Qt, which means it will be able to run on Windows, OS X and Linux.
I'll keep you posted about the dev!
I got ideas for some less technical posts as well
It's been two years now that we are making games and related stuff, but we did not give much detail about what we were doing. And I know that from the exterior, it looks like we were doing nothing at all T_T. But we were! And now more than ever we are near some great release! It's why we gave ourselves a simple new year's resolution which is to blog about what we are doing!
In 2009, we had a game in mind, an idea. You know when you are thinking about a game which does not exist, but you so badly want to play? Yup, that kind of idea. The concept was not that great in itself, nothing new, but we wanted to play this game and the only way to play it, was to create it.
So, as we started thinking about how to make this game, we finally agreed on the first step, making an engine. Why write an engine instead of using an existing one? Because it seemed cool.... Yeah I know it's not that much a reason, but as we continued to think about it , we told ourselves it was time to build ourselves a portfolio and that it would teach us many thing about how to make games.
So we started reading on OpenGl and game related stuff. A couple of week later, we were crafting the engine.
While we were programming it, I bought an iPod touch, and gain interest in developing for it, without knowing what was coming, I was doing my OpenGL prototype on the iPod while samueldr was on linux and the others on windows. As we always had been a little bit maniac about our code (we wanted it perfect and mutlti-platform because we were developing on different operating system), we were building the engine in a way that that allowed the same game code to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and iPhone. Then comes the idea: "We need to open-source it!". There is not so much free/great/open-souce 2D engines around, those I think about are cool, but are usually not cheap, stuck on a single platform (flash, iPhone, etc.) or require way too much low level programming.
We continued to work on the engine with a new mindset: we were making an open source 2D engine. We wanted it easy to pickup, developer friendly on the entire workflow, multi-platform and packed with tools.
In 2010, we decide to attend the E3 expo. We wanted to have a demo for the engine, so we could show people what we were doing. We rushed a little game and the last detail of the engine.
That was a mistake, the engine was poorly coded and the game not fun at all. We simply could not release this version.
So we scrapped it all and started from scratch (almost) with strict policy on code review, documentation and code standard.
A couple of months later (now), it's almost working. We got our event system, rendering system, sound system, etc. but we still got a LOT of work ahead before we can make a release. We also think we need to give it a test run (make a game with it) before we can say it's up and ready. We are still a couple of months ahead the release, but I am sure that you're gonna love it!
I will make a blog post about the engine sometimes next week if we keep up with our schedule.
