I’ve received hundreds of e-mails from people who want to volunteer and help out, so I’ve been spending most of my free time making sure to read every single one of them. Sorry if I can’t respond to all of you, but do know that I am very grateful for every single e-mail that I’ve gotten from you!

At the moment, I’m waiting for the current semester to end so that I can fully focus on this project and truly get the ball rolling. I’ve heard Kickstarter be mentioned over and over again by people, but I wish to clarify that I have no intention of making a Kickstarter project before I have a fully functional alpha build to show to everyone. I’d hate to be one of those guys that literally only has an idea to show and asks for money , I’d just feel guilty about doing that right now.

So once again, thanks for the interest and well wishing, I’ll make sure to not let you down. I’ll most likely be using this blog as my primary channel of communication, Twitter is to small and YouTube feels rather impractical having to make a new video every single update. Either way, stick around!

- Michael Chiniquy

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Feel free to tell me what you think of the gameplay ideas that I’ve come up with so far and ideas on how to improve. All feedback is appreciated!

Also, feel free to make requests for stuff, like tutorials and we’ll see if I have time to make one.

Genegrafter is a card & dice game that’s designed to be easy to pick up and play, but difficult to truly master. The game is created by Erik Dahlman and is currently searching for backers to fund this project at Kickstarter. My part of this project was to design the 4 different card templates that are used in the game, this included everything from characters to locations and skills.

The card templates.

If you wish to help us out by purchasing the game, click here!

Top-right corner!

The layout and overall look of the cards are all made by me, so feel free to help us both out by buying the game!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460165270/genegrafter

Click here to visit the photography section.

I’ve also been working on some brand new card templates for a client of mine at Dataspire Games that turned out quite well, in my opinion. Once I get permission to post them here, I will do just that.

To be entirely honest, I’m not entirely sure what direction I’m supposed to take with this blog, since limiting it strictly to my hobbies/work won’t be very content filled during weeks when school takes over my entire schedule. I’ve been thinking about stuff like tutorials and similar things, but I’m not too sure. Perhaps the readers could give me some tips?

I’ve been doing some serious thinking and planning with how the level design will work with Sound of Silence to make it as unique and fresh as possible. Some people have commented on my plans as being a “personalized horror game” which sounds unique enough to me. I really wish I had more time to develop some actual assets for this so that I could begin testing, but that’s sadly not the case these days.

Basically, the way it works so far is that the levels will be divided in to “components” as I call them, that are completely interchangeable and can be swapped at random depending on what fears the players experience. Imagine that you are incredibly afraid of spiders, for instance, and that the choices you make in this game tells the game that you want to avoid them as much as possible. The game will respond by altering level layouts to include rooms and areas that are specifically crafted to take advantage of this and instill as much fear in the players heart as possible. Each component will include between 3 – 5 fear events that can be anything from heights and darkness to snakes and spiders. These events, once the “insanity meter” is high enough, will manifest themselves by trapping the player in the room and start to shake you up until the insanity meter runs low.

Those are my preliminary plans so far. If you are a C# programmer interested in bringing this to life in Unity 3D, don’t hesitate to contact me!

EE News: Me and Cyclone are working together on a new contest system that allows teams to register themselves and manage team mates. Expect a contest fairly soon!

The film course started up today as well, looking quite promising. Gonna be utilizing everything from a 5000$ camera to Premiere Pro/After Effects so that’ll be quite fun. Let’s just hope that my team will be cooperative and not a bunch of slackers like the last couple of years. *cough*

Managed to write down a bunch of new gameplay elements on my train to school for Sound of Silence as well. I’m starting to have  a seriously good feeling about where this is going. To give everyone a quick overview about how it will play: It’s a survival horror game with much less focus on gore and blood like other horror titles (Resident Evil, Dead Space) and much more focus on story, ambience and sound, hence the name of the game. The game experience will be completely dependent on your choices ranging from which direction you choose to how fast you can complete a challenge, meaning that the game will analyze your worst fears and bring them to life in the most realistic ways possible.

I will most likely make a much more detailed blog post about this later once I’ve managed to hook some more people in to this project. Still gonna need C# programmers and 3D artists/animators…