GDC is One Week away and we have One Hundred things to do! Wish us luck!

Getting Ready for GDC Play

With GDC one week away and all the preparations for the booth, demo and (possibly?) new short trailer, we have a lot to do - and not a lot of time to do it in!

Lucky for us, we pretty much have no lives outside of XING currently, so this should somehow work out...

We will have 2 Demos to show at our booth this year, both of which we might send out to YouTube reviewers after the conference. If those work out, then we can send out the first "beta" build of a specific environment to our Kickstarter Beta-Tier backers! Woohoo! It shall begin!

Here is our Banner set for our Booth!
Note to other Devs: Vistaprint sales will save you tons of $ on promotional items! Seriously, check them out if you haven't already.

The Demos

So I know you are all anxious to find out what we will be demoing (other than our Volcano Oculus Mine cart ride of course!) Well, you may be happy to hear that the environment we chose to focus on was none other than the Kickstarter stretch goal:

The Rainforest.

Yes, that's right. The full build of the Rainforest is an hour + of tropical goodness: ponds, trails, rain, rivers, lily pads, fire, drums, canopy trees, Mayan/Aztec styled architecture and DURIANS!

What are Durians you might ask? Wikipedia has that answer for you. All I can say is the resemblance between XING durians and real durians is uncanny!

Real Durians

XING Durians. You can grab them!

A Little About How We Develop

We work a little backwards from how most developers might work - and that is by tons of final assets and setting up scenes before we clean up all gameplay and even some story elements. This might just be the way our brains work, but it helps us set the tone of an area, and fully integrate the story, environment, game play and music together in a happy cohesive bundle. Of course, that is not to say that this is the order in which we value these game elements, just the way in which we approach them when setting up final maps.

This method of "art and scenes" first makes our development schedule a little strange, but somehow it all comes together in the end. We craft moments and scenes we want, and thoughtfully fill in the rest!

This is also the reason why sometimes we can show off "finished" looking environments in our updates - and then spend the next week or two on that same level!

New Company Website!

Huzzah! We finally bought the domain www.whitelotusinteractive.com - because, well, WE are White Lotus Interactive (at least that's what we like to call ourselves). Check it out!