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Post-Mortem: Isle Of Spirits, a survival game designed for casual gamers

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Isle Of Spirits is a casual oriented survival game released on PC/Xbox One.I will tell you how I designed Isle of Spirits to offer a unique survival game experience to be played casually so that this kind of game is accessible to all players, mostly those who don't play games frequently.
How the idea emergedI was playing some survival games like Don’t Starve when I ended up to be a little frustrated because the games didn’t let me play peacefully and casually, and was so hard for me. I asked myself, is there any survival game for casual gamers ? I started thinking about how a survival game could reach an often forgotten public of this genre.The technical choicesBefore starting coding for months, I started to design the core gameplay and the different ambiances of the game.First, the 3C (camera / controller / character). I liked the view we get in some games like “The Sims” or “Animal Crossing”. Casual gamers are not often comfortable managing themselves the camera. I chose to allow…
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I finally shipped my first game as an indie developper

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Yesterday, I was releasing Isle Of Spirits, a casual survival game, on Steam and Xbox One.
The game is designed for casual gamers, who are not frequently playing video games. It was a challenge to bring the survival genre to casual gaming.
You can check out the Steam page or the Xbox page.


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Isle Of Spirits: devlog #1 - Building an island

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This is the first post of the dev log serie about Isle Of Spirits, a chill and casual survival game using voxel style.


Note: I will often speak about voxel here. This term can be quite wide, it can be used for landscape generation, image generation, or simply for minecraft like blocks. I will focus on the last example, as it is the core of world generation in Isle Of Spirits. I will not explain a generic or good solution for your game, just what I did on Isle Of Spirits. About the world The first thing to note is how is structured a world in voxel. You should see blocks as an ID in a 3D array. But the world is not directly made of blocks, there is an intermediate used to partition the space: the chunks.
Chunks are alike small worlds in the global world. They are very useful to manipulate world regions but mostly to rebuild mesh after some edit (player destructing or creating a block for instance).

I will not expand myself on the subject has so many people did it better than me, this is …
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Isle Of Spirits - First trailer

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Isle Of Spirits is a survival game in which your character has stranded on a mysterious uninhabited isle. Build your home, survive, and fight against microclimates or surnatural phenomenons. The isle will be your home and your enemy: it offers all resources to live, but it is also full of terrible dangers.
The first trailer of Isle Of Spirits is out. Stay tuned !
Official website: silverbulletgames.com Twitter: twitter.com/games_bullet
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Founding Silver Bullet Games

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Yeah, I decided to make and ship my own game, Isle Of Spirits.  That's why I founded Silver Bullet Games, my own company.

Stay tuned, I will probably later post some dev notes about Isle Of Spirits on this blog. Meanwhile, you can follow the game news on the silver bullet games website and twitter.

Official website: http://www.silverbulletgames.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/games_bullet
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[Unity][Arduino] The monitor

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A demo of an other game controller, based on an Arduino Mega 2560. It uses buzzer, servo motor, switches, pots, joystick, RFID, LCD screen and keypad.

The concept of the game is to help a character escaping rooms without controlling him. The player is behind a CRT like screen and have some controls on its board to interact with mechanisms in the rooms.


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[Unity][Arduino] Vroom Controller Mini

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This is a demo of the Vroom Controller mini, my new racing game controller based on an arduino uno.
The vehicle speed is controlled by a linear pot, the wheels direction by a standard pot (hidden by the wood disk), and the moving direction (forward/backward) by a switch. 4 face buttons have been added to navigate in menu, so the game is entirely playable with the controller.
A LCD screen has been added to display vehicle speed on the controller.


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