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Kymera Dev Diary #1

Monday, April 30th, 2012

This has been an exciting week for us! Coming fresh off the heels of a much needed two week vacation, we set our sites to wrap up some major milestones over the last few days. The bulk of our time has been spent wrapping our Dialog system prototype as well as designing and implementing our unique form of 'depth perception', which is used in all 'Real-world' scenes within the game. Usually, a Dialog system is not something especially amazing in and of itself, but since the story and interaction with characters in Kymera is such a pivotal part of the gameplay, we decided early on that the conversation system needed to be sexy, responsive, and last but not least: sensitive to the amount of screen-space (or lack thereof) that is available on smartphones. In a similar way, Kymera's spin on depth perception makes otherwise unremarkable scenes really "pop", with very limited resource usage, achieving a 3d 'feel' that would be purely painful to render with a smartphone's GPU - not to mention: the insane amount of time it would take to fully design and render each scene in 3d (there are lots and lots of different environments in the game as the player progresses thru the narrative, it's one of the things we pride ourselves on). We really feel good about what we've come up with, and think the players will agree.

With these major achievements now past us, and having spent the last 2 or so months collecting and creating visual and audio assets, we've moved onto building the scenes in ACT 1 of the game (HOORAY!). Pacing is our largest concern at this point, simply due to the two-fold nature of the story. Determining at what point in the timeline the player starts their journey has been...well...challenging. The one thing keeping us up some nights has been how to balance the two different 'modes' of gameplay. If you don't know anything about Kymera, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about... in a nutshell: Kymera is two different species of games, usually having nothing to do with one-another, that have been combined into one. (Hence the name: Kymera / Chimera). It is both a fast-action flight-sim (in the Spirit of Star Fox) as well as in interactive visual novel (in the Spirit of Katawa Shoujo). Our main goal from the onset of the project has been to create an experience that really engages you emotionally, tells a great story and makes the player feel like the choices they make really have an impact on the direction of the narrative while at the same time giving you the instant gratification of fast-action flying, shooting, and generally blowing things the hell up. Some of our inspiration for this game came from titles such as Mass Effect 1, the aforementioned Katawa Shoujo, Persona 4 FES, the aforementioned Star Fox 64, Space Cowboy, Space Wars (1980's DOS Game), Earthbound for SNES, DCS-A10 Warthog and the much lauded Wing Commander Series. Now maybe you see why we chose the name we did for this game, and while we recognize that making such a bastard conglomeration is a risk, the future of the gaming industry simply won't survive without developers willing to take some chances. We feel in this case, the risk is warranted. We hope you will agree.

#Kymera #Developer Diary #Dev Diary #Indy games #flight-simulator #visual novel #interactive story

A seedy alleyway... keep your hands on your wallet.

PROJECT: KYMERA

Second Flight Test - added explosion engine and weapon prototypes.

It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop.

– Wisdom of Confucius

First Flight Test - Pre-Alpha

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