Planet of the Eyes Dev Blog

Cococucumber blogging about the making of Planet of the Eyes, an action-puzzle adventure game for Windows & Mac. Code: @ravklok Art: @caravandetta Words: @willoneill Music: @blizzack Press:vanessa(at)cococucumber.co

[cococucumberco]

2015 recap, in March (why not)

Launch year for Planet of the Eyes was massive for us, not only because it's like sending a bit of yourself into the world after months and months of intense work, but also for the response that we've had which has far exceeded our expectations, in a good way of course.

Pop the champagne!

Here are some highlights pre and post-launch:

A great review on Dorkshelf 

4/5 from Hardcore Gamer 

Launch Day Party with TheGreatGQ!

Showing Planet of the Eyes at the Indie MEGABOOTH, and getting an interview on Kotaku

Ep #1 of the Brewelist podcast, pairing indie games and craft beer (genius idea).

Started from the bottom

In November, Planet of the Eyes was a finalist for "Best Indie Game" at the Canadian Videogame Awards. We were firstly, pretty shocked, then excited, and then honoured to be nominated in this category. We really dove into the deep end with this game, having to navigate our way through the challenges of game development with a team of two, and really balance the whole production, bizdev and marketing process all at once. At the end of the night, Klei took the win with Invisible Inc. (congrats!) and we had a blast at the awards.

Designing the Robot

Our most popular post in 2015 was when we blogged about our process of creating the robot in Planet of the Eyes, one of the first to be featured on the Made with Unity website. Since we get a lot out of process posts from fellow devs, we thought it fair to share a bit of our own. Also, in case you missed it, here is another technical post by Martin about the 2.5 D process we took with level design and the audio implementation.

All in all, it was an immensely satisfying year for us at Cococucumber co. Though we're well into 2016 and have started production on our new (unannounced) game, it was a blast to share our game development journey with you on Planet of the Eyes.

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for more pics and posts!

[cococucumberco]

Steam Winter Sale - Only 3 days left!

We’ve been taking some time off for the holidays but here’s a reminder that Planet of the Eyes is still 40% off in the Steam Winter sale, which is on until Monday, 4th of January.

Planet of the Eyes steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/350970

And here’s a nice photo of us taken before the Canadian Videogame Awards to round up this post. Happy 2016!

[cococucumberco]

Planet of the Eyes at PAX Prime!

Thank you for supporting us so far for our Steam launch! We’ve been seeing some great reviews there so keep them coming.

It’s now time to take Planet of the Eyes on the road. We are going to PAX Prime in Seattle where we’ll be showcasing the game at booth #6903 on the 6th floor.

Press and media, please contact vanessa[at]cococucumber[dot]co or use this form to schedule an interview. You’ll be able to talk straight with the devs themselves. We’re indie like that!

PAX-goers, you’ll be able to buy the game from us at a special PAX discount! You should come by and pick up a copy or two for you and your friends.

Here’s a handy map for you if you need to find us. Shout out to booth buddies Rocket5 studios and Golden Gear Games.

If you’re in Seattle but not going to PAX, don’t fret. We’ll be showcasing Planet of the Eyes at the Toy Temp party on Friday, Aug 28. There will be lots of really cool games showing there as well, including upcoming and just released games from Toronto and Buffalo. Get your ticket here.

Finally, the best for last - here is a heartfelt review of Planet of the Eyes from Dorkshelf. The post really captures what we were trying to achieve through making the game and eloquently describes it here.

We are humbled that our game has the power to affect people and hope that you’ll give it a chance to see try it out. 

Support us on Steam or by visiting us at PAX. See you in Seattle!

-Cococucumber

[cococucumberco]

This is Planet of the Eyes

via GIPHY

Today’s a big day for us at Cococucumber HQ! Planet of the Eyes has just released on the Steam Store for Windows PC. We hope that you enjoy the game.

If you’d like to help us spread the word, here is our announcement tweet and facebook page. We thank you for sharing with your friends!

Press kit and screenshots available here. And now, the Press Release!

For Immediate Release

PLANET OF THE EYES: NOW AVAILABLE ON STEAM

Toronto, Ontario, August 24th - Cococucumber announces the release of their first PC title, Planet of the Eyes, available on Steam on August 24th, 2015.

Planet of the Eyes is an action-­puzzle platformer with a retro sci-­fi inspired aesthetic and a mystery driven storyline. At the outset of the game, the player­ an exploration robot starts his search for the source of a pulsing signal on the planet. Along the way, the robot negotiates multiple dangers, solves environment based puzzles, and uncovers the truth about the Planet of the Eyes through the audiologs of a surviving crew member.

The fate of both these survivors and the planet itself will hang in the balance as the player contemplates a destiny that was meant to be unavoidable.

Planet of the Eyes features original artwork by Vanessa Chia and is written by Will O’Neill, writer of the critically ­acclaimed ‘Actual Sunlight’. The developers are joined by veteran sound producer John Black of CypherAudio.

Creative Director and programmer Martin Gauvreau said, “Planet of the Eyes was inspired by the stories of Isaac Asimov and classic adventure games from the 90s, like Out of this World (Another World). It started as an idea for a feature film, and now it’s evolved into something a bit different ­ but still capturing the same spirit.”

In February 2015, Planet of the Eyes was greenlit on Steam in four days. Earlier in 2015, the game showcased at the Leftfield Collection at EGX Rezzed and at the Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East. The developers are set to exhibit next at PAX Prime, booth #6903 on the 6th Floor.

For further information and enquiries, please contact:  Vanessa Chia [email protected]

About Cococucumber Cococucumber is a Toronto based independent game studio co-­founded by Martin Gauvreau and Vanessa Chia to creates games with a unique visual style and original intellectual property.

Planet of the Eyes website: http://www.planetoftheeyes.com  Cococucumber website: h​ttp://www.cococucumber.co Press kit: h​ttp://planetoftheeyes.com/presskit/PlanetoftheEyes.html  Twitter: http://twitter.com/cococucumberco Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PlanetoftheEyes

###

[cococucumberco]

Policy on Youtube Videos

Cococucumber Inc. permits you to use free or ad-supported videos of Planet of the Eyes for on Youtube, Twitch.tv or any other video streaming sites. An examples of this would be a video review or a Let's Play video.

Should you decide to post a video with content from Planet of the Eyes, Cococucumber request that you provide a working URL link to the game’s website or the store page from which the game was obtained to create said content.

Planet of the Eyes game website: http://www.planetoftheeyes.com

Steam store page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/350970

All soundtrack music used in Planet of the Eyes is original. Specific permission is required for any soundtrack music use outside of captured gameplay.

If you have any further questions, please email vanessa[at]cococucumber[dot]co

Thank you video content creators!

-Cococucumber

[cococucumberco]

Steam Launch Date Announced!

We’re excited to announce that Planet of the Eyes will be coming to Steam for PC on Monday, August 24th! 

Please support us by adding Planet of the Eyes to your Wish List on Steam. To do this, visit our Steam store page and click on the Add to your Wishlist button.

For your viewing pleasure, we’ve also cut a release trailer that shows a sneak peak of new scenes and levels from the game:

If you’re from the games media and would like to review Planet of the Eyes, please email your request to vanessa[at]cococucumberco[dot]co or use the contact form.

And for further information on Planet of the Eyes, we have a press kit.

Hope that you are excited as we are about this release! As always, you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook for current updates.

[cococucumberco]

Alpha - Updates & Playtesting

We've been super busy at the Cococucumber HQ this summer. As we move into Alpha right now, there's been a lot tweaking and testing and adding all those final polish.

It's really great to see things come together after a one year plus of development.

Some updates!

Audiologs Recorded

On a sunny afternoon a couple of weeks ago, we recorded the final set of audio logs with talent Alex Lewis. You may have already heard his voice if you've played our demo, or if you've watched our first trailer.

We did this session with Will O'Neill taking the lead for the voice acting direction and Alex recording this out of his home studio. 

When we first started development and had the idea of using audiologs to convey the game narrative, we had some doubts on whether this would work. We're glad we stuck with it though, as having Zack the astronaut speak to you while you play really adds another level of quality to the game.

It also fits in with our theory of not interrupting user flow, which is something that we're very conscious of. With generous checkpoints, fast re-spawn times and audiologs that don't trigger cut scenes, we want the player to be fully immersed in the game. 

Final Animation

We've got a treat for you for the final animation. However, as we don't want to give away the masterly crafted story in Planet of the Eyes, instead, here is a teaser gif of our badass robot. 

If we've balanced the game right, we hope that most of you will be able to finish the game to see this animation! Playtesting

In the final stages of Planet of the Eyes development, we've been conducting testing twice a month at Games with Friends at Bento Miso. This has been really helpful for us in getting feedback from all sorts of players. 

Thank you to the play testers who have taken the time to give us their thoughts on the game. And to Henry, Jennie and Robby of Bento Miso for organizing and creating a space for this <3

We are looking for new playtesters, so if you are in Toronto or the GTA and have time on Monday evening, make your way to Bento Miso for Games with Friends. Next playtesting session is this Monday 27 July at 6:30pm.

Hope to see you there!

[cococucumberco]

Planet of the Eyes is coming to Xbox One!

We're excited to officially announce that Planet of the Eyes will be available soon on your super slick Xbox One. This is great news for us because we realized in the first few months of development that the game is best experience when played with a gamepad versus a mouse and keyboard. 

So since then, the Xbox gamepads have their permanent places at our workstations, and if you've tried our demos at PAX East or GDC, you'd probably have played it using one of these controllers.

As an small indie team it's really a bit of a dream to be working with Microsoft and the ID@Xbox team to bring the game out on the Xbox Store. We have a lot of respect for them to open up to working with folks like us to bring out more diversity in games on their platform.

With E3 coming up soon, we're looking forward to hearing more announcements about other indie and triple-A games. As for our game, we'll be posting more updates as they roll out in the coming weeks.

Click here for the official press release.

[cococucumberco]

GDC, PAX East & EGX Rezzed

In March, Planet of the Eyes took its first cross-continent tour to GDC, PAX East and EGX Rezzed. We wanted to say a THANK YOU to everyone who played, gave us feedback and dropped by for a chat or to say that they've voted for us on Steam Greenlight. It was incredibly motivating for us to get the demo playtested by hundreds of people, and to experience running booths at these larger-than-life video game expos.

How about some pictures:

The Planet of the Eyes booth at GDC Play

Intense play at the IndieMEGABOOTH at PAX East

Even Mario & Luigi stopped by :D

At PAX East, we maxed out at five demo stations: Tall monitor, low monitor and three sit down stations

A queue to play Planet of the Eyes! Photo credit IndieMEGABOOTH

Tyler Cooper and Garnett Lee from Amazon Fire TV with Martin Waltz and Will O’Neill from team Cococucumber

Live stream of Planet of the Eyes on the Amazon Fire TV from the Twitch booth at PAX East

Our video interview with Kotaku!

Thank you to everyone who volunteered their time with us at our booths: Emmy, Edric, Chris, Ben and the MEGABOOTH volunteers. Also, big thanks to the OMDC, Indie MEGABOOTH, and our lovely sponsors. And last but not least, thanks to writer Will O'Neill, for being a pro when it comes to interviews. We <3 you all!

[cococucumberco]

In the IndieMEGABOOTH @ PAX East

We're happy to announce that Planet of the Eyes has been selected to join the IndieMEGABOOTH at PAX East! The IndieMEGABOOTH is great collection of indie devs that pool resources and exhibit games together, taking over the largest section of the show floor.

Check out this video about the IndieMEGABOOTH at PAX Prime from the documentary Game Loading:

It's less than a week now until we take off for the Planet of the Eyes tour, where the team will be dividing and conquering both the east and west coast. 

Here's the full list of the Planet of the Eyes tour dates & venues:

4 - 6 March (Wed-Fri) @ GDC, San Francisco Moscone Center North Hall, GDC Play Booth PL500 - Cococucumber

4 March (Wed) @ GDC, San Francisco  Moscone Center North Hall, GDC Play Booth PL503 - OMDC at 2-4pm

6 - 8 March (Fri-Sun) @ PAX East Boston Convention Center, IndieMEGABOOTH booth #5155

6 March (Fri) @ Indie Games Live  Guilt Boston, 279 Tremont Street, 8-11pm 

If you need more information, here's the Planet of the Eyes presskit() and twitter. You can also email us: vanessa[at]cococucumber.co / martin[at]cococucumber.co

Hope to see you there!

[cococucumberco]

Level Creation, Player Control and Audio in Unity 5

2D, or not 2D? That is the question…

Hi! This is Martin, Lead Developer of Planet of the Eyes, and one half of Toronto indie studio Cococucumber. I’m here to share some details from our development process that we hope will help the #indiedev community! Today’s post is more on the technical side, and will briefly cover Level Creation, Player Controls and the Unity 5 Audio Module.

Before that, though, you should take a look at our latest trailer with lots of gameplay, just to get a better sense of what we’re making: http://youtu.be/rmVgwcqyBag

Level Creation

Since Planet of the Eyes is a physics-based puzzle-platformer, making it with the Unity game engine is a perfect fit. We use Unity2D physics (Box2D) and layer all assets in Z space. However, even though we’re using 2D physics, the ability to work in a 3D editor proves to be really useful. Laying out the assets in each level feels natural; very much like building a mini stage set.

Also, as the 2D colliders will ignore the Z axis, we don’t run into issues such as the player not being able to properly interact with an object because it is not aligned on the same plane. Another common problem of using 3D colliders is that they can spin on the wrong axis when the simulation starts, so by using 2D colliders we avoid this issue altogether. In the Editor, we can just drag around points with the PolygonCollider tool and voila! Magic!

How the level looks within in the the Unity Editor (top) and how it looks in the game (bottom).

Player Controls

From the gif below, you’ll see that the rig for our robot is a simply a rotating wheel with two kinematic colliders on top: A square one for the body, and a circle on top of that for the head. When the player moves left or right, we apply the movement as a rotation on the bottom circle:

private Rigidbody2D wheel; public void MovePlayer() { float speed = Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"); wheel.MoveRotation(wheel.rotation + (speed * Time.deltaTime)); }

This technique has worked for us so far, and allows a lot of interaction with the environment with no problematic glitches (passing through the floor and falling into infinity, getting stuck in a wall, etc.)

The character colliders with the robot skin next to it.

Unity 5 Audio Module

One of the great features of the new Unity 5 update is the audio module, and I would highly recommend upgrading for this reason. Previously, we were using using Unity 4.6 and an asset store audio plugin that proved to be buggy. Since that plug-in is not yet supported in Unity 5, we took it as a sign to replace it with our own code!

The audio controls in Unity are surprisingly easy to work with, and it only took two days to get the game audio fully working, as well as allowing us to have even more control than before. In our game, one of the issues was having to lower all audio channels simultaneously when the Player picks up an Audiolog. We asked ourselves: What was the best way to do this?

In the audio module, we would first create a new snapshot in the Audio Mixer, and then simply transition to it when the AudioLog starts:

snapshotAudioLog.TransitionTo(0.5f);

Then, we would just keep watching in the update for when the audiolog has ended, and transition back to our default game snapshot.

public AudioMixerSnapshot snapshotGame; public AudioSource audioSource; private bool isAudioLogPlaying; public void PlayAudioLog() { audioSource.Play(); snapshotAudioLog.TransitionTo(0.5f); isAudioLogPlaying = true; } void Update() { if (!isAudioLogPlaying) return; float timeLeft = audioSource.clip.length - audioSource.time; if (timeLeft < 0.25f) { snapshotGame.TransitionTo(0.5f); isAudioLogPlaying = false; } }

I hope some of this information has given you some useful ideas for your own projects. Please feel free to make use of this code as you like and check out our game website at www.planetoftheeyes.com

[cococucumberco]

What's been brewing?

We've been full steam ahead on the latest demo build because Planet of the Eyes will be going on a demo tour in March! Look out for announcements on the where and when coming up in the next few weeks...

But first, more #ScreenshotSaturdays for your visual pleasure. This week, we take a peek at what's happening in the underground Cave Level of the game...

Also, Planet of the Eyes' Sound Designer John Black of Cypher Audio has been featured in an interview at Motionographer for 15 years of great audio work. We're really lucky to be working with such an amazing talent on Planet of the Eyes! You'll be able to hear more of his trademark deep, atmospheric sound on our upcoming trailer.

And finally, some brand new RGB coloured Planet of the Eyes buttons printed by the excellent Six Cent Press. Shiny!

[cococucumberco]

#ScreenshotSaturday

Recent screenshots + gifs of the 'Falling Rocks' level.

More at our imgur gallery!

[cococucumberco]

Bit Bazaar Winter Market Re-cap

On December 6th, we headed down to Bento Miso to set up for our first public demonstration of Planet of the Eyes at the Bit Bazaar Winter Market. With a our game demo, a bunch of throw pillows and some linocut prints in tow, we set up a somewhat festive looking booth for the day.

After seven plus hours of non-stop play, we were rather relieved to find that the Planet of the Eyes demo survived with no fatal crashes or unintentional melt downs. Well... there was a bug that warped the robot in increasingly weird ways when the death count got really high but that was fine for the most part. We like to think that it added to the retro-weirdness. 

Highlight of the day was when a woman playing Planet of the Eyes wondered aloud about how great the voice acting was, only to find that talent Alex Lewis was standing next to her IN REAL LIFE. Having moments like this are really fun for us and makes us super happy that we're working with some amazing Toronto based artists like writer Will O'Neill and musician John Black who took time to drop by for support!

Thanks to Jennie, Henry, their crew and all the great volunteers of the Bit Bazaar. We feel really welcomed at Bento Miso and exhibiting there was such a great experience. Looking forward to checking out what's in store for the next Bit Bazaar in Spring 2015. 

[cococucumberco]

Robot Design

When coming up with the design for our robot, we drew inspiration from some vintage Polaroid cameras. As the robot functions an exploratory / rover-type character in the game, we thought it was fitting that his face reflected a camera design. 

Early robot sketch + Polaroid 650

Another thing that we wanted to get across with the character is to make him relatable.

So even though there's been a lot of great robots around that do not have humanoid features, we think that from an empathetic point of view, it was important that our robot has a head, arms and legs. Also this way, we think that his multiple, violent deaths will have a stronger effect on the player. Interesting stuff for contemplation.

Another result of of the robot design process is that we now have a file full of robot designs. This is, of course, TOP SECRET because we might use it for a future robot army game one day. ©©©

[cococucumberco]

Planet of the Eyes at Bit Bazaar No.4

We're happy to announce that we're taking part in the Bit Bazaar No. 4. Described as “kind of a cross between a creator-run arcade and an ETSY craft fair" this market will have a whole line-up of really impressive looking games on show, as well as comics and food vendors to check out. It is here that you'll be able to try the FIRST EVER demo of the Planet of the Eyes game!

And also buy a bunch of cool merch from us, like a signed and numbered limited edition linocut print of our robot. Here's a sneak peek of the linocut:

We're super excited to be part of the Bit Bazaar and support the indie game scene in Toronto! We'll also be available to talk and meet with everyone there, so come drop by and say hi to us.

Date: Saturday, 6th December 2014 Time: 11am - 7pm Location: Bento Miso, Toronto (map) More info on facebook & twitter.

[cococucumberco]

:: Begin transmission ::  One of the things we set out to do for Planet of the Eyes is to reveal the story of the survivor of the crash in story increments throughout the game. So at certain key points, you'll be able to pick up an audio log in the form of a retro cassette tape that auto-plays, where you (the robot) will hear the recoded message.

Our audio logs are on cassette tape, yo. Writer Will O'Neill has done a great job capturing the essence of each audio log and fine tuning it into something that conveys a sense of mystery and isolation.  As for what the messages say... you'll have to play the game to find out! :: Over and out ::