J.Lowther: September 2007 Archives

Gravitronix is an action/battle game for 1-4 players (possibly 8, and possibly online). You'll be defending your territory from enemy players while trying to assault theirs by using the four different projectiles pictured in the Gravitronix logo.

The short answer? We're afraid of having it ripped off. We're a small team so the concept will take some time for us to create, but if we put the idea out there in totality, it would take a larger development house less than a month to create their own version of it.

Are we being too paranoid? Possibly, but it's also better that players are introduced to it a month before it releases with our full video presentation of Gravitronix than hear small pieces of the game and misunderstand how it actually plays.

That's a question I can't answer right now, and it's best that I don't answer it right now, either. The launch of WiiWare is still months off so getting people excited now is rather pointless.

We have something planned to gradually reveal more about Gravitronix, and I'll let you know about that soon.

We have a plethora of game ideas, some more for WiiWare and some others which will work as retail titles. Aside from occasionally writing random ideas down for those games, we're focusing entirely on Gravitronix. We're going to actually release a game before we focus on future games.

Medaverse was three guys who ran a gaming fan site who toyed with the idea of making a game but never moved toward it until the Wii remote pushed us over the edge. We saw it back in Oct. 2005 and we knew we wanted to develop for it. Since then, we've grown to 8 people and are in the middle of working on our first WiiWare game.

You don't.

I'll have another update for you soon...

Watching a group of programmers performing their art is something that I find fascinating. They speak of incomprehensible variables and other bits of computer subtext. Then something is compiled and something is on the screen which wasn't previously there. It's magic, and I suddenly feel less like a project coordinator directing individuals to tasks and more like a feudal lord enlisting summoners. It's as though I've employed them to bring something mighty and massive through an interplanar portal and into reality where it previously only existed in imagination.

"I need it to breathe fire," I say.

"No," one says, shaking a finger laden with mystic rings, "we haven't the proper components for that!"

"Hold," says another, "we do have the emberstryfe talisman."

"But..." says yet another, "does that talisman have a BSD license?"

I'm telling you, it's almost like that.

Overhearing the discussion of world states, vertices and classes awes me at the fact that so much of importance is being said and I'm mostly oblivious to it. I say "mostly" because sometimes the discussion will dip to the level where I can understand it and I'll put in some input or recall a technical document which might aid the situation. Then the train leaves the station without me as they're off again.

I'm going to be able to show off the work done by my artists (possibly sooner than later) and that gives me a chance to push their work into the foreground where it belongs. But the same is just not possible with programmers. Obviously, the entire game and its structure are testaments to their abilities, but the grim truth remains that seldom do players stop to think about the hours of labor, toil and coordination that went into bringing these games to fruition. I'm a gamer of 20+ years and I don't think I've ever caught myself pondering the labors of the codesmiths responsible for my hobby.

We admire the painting for its artfulness but seldom the workmanship of the frame.

Maybe I'll figure out a solid means to give the framemakers their due credit (and no, I don't think watching their names scroll by in a credit roll suffices)...

Then again, if it weren't THE console to be developing for, there wouldn't be an abundance of excellent games for it.

Still, seeing online for SSBB confirmed and knowing I'll likely be in the middle of crunch time when it launches makes me cringe...

It can be found here.

I gave one other to Cubed3 recently, but that's the end of my interview spree, I swear. I was actually supposed to give a fourth but opted to hold off until a later time when we have more to say/show.

Again, sorry if you're starting to get sick of seeing my name out there, but I used to run a gaming news site and I know how hard it is to get anything exclusive for a site, especially one as small as ours was. If we can give a few more hits to some folks who want them, so be it.

But no more for a while, I promise.

No, seriously, there's no easy way to describe what it's like to want to do something for such a length of time and then suddenly find you're doing it. It actually sinks in every once in a while that we're doing what we're doing and the voices in my head have a good long scream.

As you probably now know, Medaverse Studios, as a development house, is a brand-spankin' new, but the team who sits beyond the name is anything but. I went to high school with two of the most talented people I've ever met in my life, an artist and a programmer, and the three of us comprise what can be called the "core team" of Meda. We're joined by five other immensely talented people who are helping to make Gravitronix a reality.

I know it's my job as a creative/lead designer to make it seem as though I'm somehow the driving force behind everything that happens here (an impression I've had of other creative leads), but nothing could be further from the truth. These are people driven by personal desire to not only excel at their art, but to push themselves further at it than they ever have before, and this is what I admire more than anything. You're going to be seeing and hearing a lot out of me personally as the "voice" of Meda, but I just wanted to start this blog by giving credit to the strength and talent behind the scenes. No matter how I come across, I am nothing without them.

That said, the matter of Medaverse's public/press relations will be something of a curiosity. I've been a gamer my entire life and a business man for at least half of it (I started working at 12). The one aspect of this or any other industry which I've always disliked is the tendency for any company or corporation to behave as though it is one single entity, identifying the people who work there only as cogs in a machine rather than individuals with a passion for their craft. In addition, it has been my observation that the very essence of "public relations" ironically involves relating to the pubic as little as possible.

In both cases, I feel that Medaverse's affairs should be handled in a different manner. For one, items like this blog and our forums are intended to connect us with the gaming community. Beyond that, I intend to report everything feasibly possible as it happens. This includes news about our games and our future plans. Naturally, we won't reveal works in progress because they tend to look god-awful, but I'll do my best to deliver content from time to time (maybe even once per post, but we'll see).

That's us in a nutshell. I acknowledge that we might wind up regretting some of the decisions regarding PR, but this wouldn't be an adventure unless we shook things up a bit, right?

I'll have more to talk about soon...