Far from sight... even farther from the heart...

It has really been a long time. And it has been busy, which is one of the main reasons why I haven't written. Don't know if this makes a lot of sense as we have a forum now, but I guess its worthwhile keeping up and seeing if it leads to somewhere and its a good to have one place with the complete summary. Anyway we hope to finish Ultra Tubes (official name now is PyroBlazer) by April 2008. We have two finished mainstream/family PC projects for an English publisher. I promise more info about this soon. We are soon starting a Xbox 360 Live Arcade project and that should be a great experience and great fun, and also the projects look really promising at the planning stage, but as I said more about this soon. We are doing quite a bit of art outsourcing for Nintendo DS and Xbox 360 projects, and are even discussing making a DS title our selves. All in all things are going forward and soon major update to our website will cover all of these...

As our partners from UK would say cheers mates :)

FORUM

Official Eipix forum (for game/ game dev/ art lovers) has been opened at the following address: www.eipixuniverse.com . Please stop by when you have the time and share your views and ideas... In the mean time we finished one outsourcing project (more on this later) and are starting another one while trying to get Ultra Tubes back in development.

Eclosion and stuff

Eclosion (which actually means something if you research carefully) is the official name (I hope) for the "Eclipse" project. Here is a wallpaper that will be available on our site after we have the first screen shots and I hope that will be soon. We are working on the mentioned outsourcing project and depending on the outcome of that we will know our future way.
We have some new coders who are working on optimizing Ultra Tubes code which is one of the major issues at the moment, when that is done we will import the new levels which are almost complete for some time and are just waiting for their time to come. I guess now we wait and see what happens...

Long time no see

OK, I admit I am lazy, well not as much lazy as I am really busy at the moment. I have been negotiating some outsourcing work for our dev team, so we might expect some serious work soon. Ultra Tubes is going slow as always. I registered us at the Great Games Experiment (http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/game/ultratubes), we will see if this brings us any good :) . Anyway we are almost ready to release the forums at www.eipixuniverse.com (still doing some testing), and our "Eclipse" project (renamed to Eclosion of late) is on its way, here is the player ship pic in development.

Weapons

I am bit busy so I don't have enough time to prepare these posts. For some time these will still have to be informative only, but I hope to think of a way to include some useful technical data on the way games are made. Anyway the weapons are finally finished (the graphics part) and I have included a pic of our nuke rocket here. As I mentioned level creation time has been greatly reduced so I expect several new levels soon.

Level editor

Finally after some time the breakthrough we have been waiting for. Ultra Tubes level editor has been upgraded and now it is (almost) ridiculously easy to create levels. It is so easy that even I can create them. I gave it a shot and here are the screen shots from my first Ultra Tubes level. Yes it is a dark level, but I like it :) Expect more levels from me in this cyber punk style, as soon as I master some of the more difficult stuff like using dynamic (physics) objects, transparency, cubic maps, animated textures etc. I hope our lead level designer Nenad doesn't freak out from my constant questions :)

Eclipse preproduction

Still working on Eclipse [working title] preproduction. It is possible that the actual name will be "Eclosion". We are thinking about using OGRE as a graphical engine. Here is an additional shot of the turret model. Still resolving some issues on the light baker for Ultra Tubes, additional unexpected problems are being resolved. At this point its hard to say unexpected as it seems to me the most unexpected thing about game programming is when everything is going as planned. However the level design is going pretty well and the weapon textures are almost finished so I guess that by Monday I can post a shot of our new level.

Eclipse [working title]

Things are going a bit slower than anticipated, but I guess it'll be worth it. Still waiting for the weapon textures, the concept guy did nothing as expected, but there are several others waiting in line so we will check them out too. Today we are starting a production of a smaller top down shooter title "Eclipse"[working title]. Here is a working model of an enemy from the game. We are also thinking about opening the official Ultra Tubes community site with forums in February.

First Blog

Today is the first day of the Eipix game development blog. Here you will be able to find all the information concerning the rise and (lets hope it doesn't come to) fall of our independent game development company. We are currently working on our first game, a racing game called Ultra Tubes. More info is available at www.ultratubes.com.
We are currently working on implementing new weapons (yeah, I forgot to mention its a race and shoot futuristic racer), models are finished but we are still working on the textures. We are also working on the fourth level of game-play called "The lair of ancient giants". Ill post an in development shot soon. Its a "Star Gate" like environment of ancient architecture combined with the remains of super modern technology. We also have an additional guy on probation for concept art, if he does something good I'll upload that too.
I hope to add to this blog on a weekly basis and hope to add a bit of technical data for those who like it. Yes, and I almost forgot more info on the company is available at www.eipix.com.