More Mass Effect woes!

Hi! It's Geril.

We're working hard in our jobs and learning a lot.

Other than that, we started playing Mass Effect 3. And because it's us, it's never easy.

We installed the game onto our Xbox One, bought the DLCs and downloaded them. But when it loads to the main menu, the initialization never ends. Checked it online, and it's a typical issue – what else? – and the solution is that you have to go offline.
But to play the game, since it's backward compatible, the console checks the disc and looks it up online and only then starts it. So we have to start it up while the console is online, then turn it offline just to get through the main menu.
But it plays.
Except when the disc is somehow unreadable. No real reason – it's not scratched or anything – it's just when we turn the Xbox back on, sometimes it doesn't read the disc and we have to restart the whole thing, sometimes more than once.

When I was little, I had pirated most of my video games. A lot of things I learned about workaround methods and basic software trickery comes from that time. Later, in some of my late teenage years, I went to make up for it by buying most of the games that I pirated back then, to zero-out my karma (because how can I ask anybody to pay for something that I made, when I rarely paid for the things I liked myself?). And it was always surprising how easy it was to install an official copy. No cracks or tacky and long workarounds, just put the disc in, type the serial number in, install it and boom, it's done, and works as intended (well, if I met the system requirements).
Console gaming is even easier. Put the original disc onto the tray, close it, and it plays.

But somehow, our experience with playing the Mass Effect series reminded me of those times when I had to check .NFO files and online boards about game cracking and copy protection workarounds. It's as if we have no right to play this game.
It's a bit nostalgic somehow.

The funniest thing about this whole painful experience is that playing Mass Effect 3 right after playing Mass Effect 2 is just disappointing. The second game was the peak of this series, and the third is missing the quality of the writing, and it's just very unpolished.
But we'll finish it, we're just not as enthusiastic about this game as we were about the second one.

Oh, and out "new" Xbox 360 Slim came. It came a bit late, and in retrospect, we should have waited for it before we started playing the 3rd game. Maybe on that console we would have fewer issues.

Other then this, I finally got my GPD Win 2.
It's the same old Win10 palmtop, but stronger than the first one. I like it, and will probably use it to play some games, and even for some of my work.
I may write about my experience with it next month.

Another Project Contrivance build!

It was a surprisingly hard month.
It started out slow, but at around the middle of it, we suddenly got a bunch of work to do. We'll talk about it more when it's relevant.

Also, we uploaded a new build of Project Contrivance!
You can download it here.

It has a new overworld, where you can choose the puzzle maps you want to play via warp pads, and you can also discover secrets (but it's mostly just WIP things for now).
Also, you can find a secret warp in each of the puzzle maps as well. They are pretty hard to find.
Other than that, there's a new puzzle map, too.

We hope you'll like it!

Contriving again!

Hi! Geril here. It was a quite mixed month.

Our friend Davy said something that made us think: we should concentrate on one single project until it's done.
Well, yeah, it sounds obvious, but because we make a living as developers working in outsourcing and such, it's hard to concentrate on just one thing, since we have to train ourselves in different parts of game development.
But he's right. If we want to be independent developers, not just regular developers, then we have to deliver a game. We've got a lot of Unreal projects just laying around, most of them are for paid commissions, but some of them are ours. So we started checking our projects, and their potentials:

– OLP is a bit too big in scale to be feasible with just two of us. It's an excellent project to practice animation, locomotion logic and such, but it's a game that we can't really finish by ourselves.

– Project Blind aka. Lemniscate. Oh Lemniscate, you grayscale mess, you... The main issue with this project is, we were inexperienced in Unreal, and what we made is very unstable. Last time I tried, it wasn't able to launch itself in the editor. So we'd have to remake the whole thing from scratch. And that game is so dark and uninspiring to begin with that we just don't have the spirit to work on it.
Maybe if we have something to shake up the visuals and gameplay, we'll take another look.

– Project BPM. We do have ideas as to where we could take this proof-of-concept project, but for now, it's just a Taiko clone. But that's fine, since it was only made to figure out if it was possible to develop an accurate rhythm game inside Unreal 4, and it was a success. We will work on it further once the concept becomes more solid.

– Project Contrivance aka Puzzle For Two. This project works surprisingly well. We checked it again, and wow, it still works fine and can be built on pretty easily. The design is basic, but it can be charming (the robots glow and make cute little noises when you pull the L or R triggers, we still like that part). The movement could be tighter and the camera needs a complete rework, but the game's logic is solid, and basic visual programming as a gameplay element is kinda fun.

So we started working on Contrivance again. In just a week, we made two playable maps (okay, we made one and touched up an older one) and added lots of features to them. We'll bake it this weekend and put it up for download later. We'll leave a link here too – if you have time and want to try something very unpolished and gimmicky, then you're free to download it. We are more than happy to hear your opinions and criticism on it. We have to improve ourselves somehow, after all.

Davy, if you guys are reading, our reply is coming soon! :)

EDIT: We have uploaded the project, here is a link.