Hey, kid, you’ve got Class(es)

You can read the full post on the Kickstarter page here, including larger concept art of each class and some details about their default weapon and special abilities. In short, the classes are from left-to-right: Bard, Templar, Beastkeeper, Huntsman, Assassin, Elementalist. Each of these occupies a special place in our hearts, and it will be really interesting to see which three the community decides should be included. Additionally, we’ll soon be posting an update about the Kickstarter-specific class and the bonus class that was unlocked by a $2k backer. Stay tuned!

The Forums, they live!

We unveiled the Pixelscopic / Delver’s Drop forums roughly 36 hours ago, and in that time we’ve had over 450 members register and almost 500 posts… crikey! We’re tickled with indescribable joy that even in their short lifespan the forums already have become home to interesting and insightful conversation. We’ve taken particular interest in the Introduce Yourself thread and getting to know a little bit more about our backers and their real-life hobbies and interests. We’ve also been keeping an eye on several other threads with some very interesting speculation and intelligent conversation about game mechanic ideas. We’ve even setup a spot for some fan art submissions. While we will be setting up restricted access to certain boards when the Alpha and Beta sessions roll around, everything else is open to the public — stop by and visit, we’d love to chat with you there!

Bonus: Devlogs

You may not know, but our lead (and currently only) programmer Coby has a more technically-oriented devlog that he updates over on the TIG Source forums. We’ll be back-porting these to our blog here for archival reasons in the future, but in the meantime you can check out some of the more prototypical progress that has been made on Delver’s Drop since it’s initial creation.

Until next time!

The post Classes for Voting Announced / The Forums appeared first on Pixelscopic.

Delver’s Drop Kickstarter:

If you’re reading this you’re probably up-to-date on recent events, but just in case: the Delver’s Drop Kickstarter ended on March 12th after having raised an amazing $150,745 — over 200% more than our baseline goal! To say that we are amazed, humbled, and incredibly thankful would be an understatement. As if that wasn’t enough, we put up a PayPal donation method for fans who couldn’t back through Kickstarter and raised another $5,051!

Because of the massive amount of support we reached the following stretch goals:

• Linux at launch!
• Content Expansion: +1 playable class, +1 zone
• local 4-Player Co-op Horde Mode
• local 4-Player Competitive Deatchmatch
• local 2-Player Co-op “Companion” Mode
• 100-Room Puzzle Labyrinth

PAX East 2013:

All set up before Day 1, taking a short break before the insanity begins.

Immediately after the whirlwind awesomeness of Kickstarter, we packed our bags and headed to Boston for PAX East 2013. We were again proud to be a part of the ever-growing Indie Megabooth and enjoyed a premo spot along one of the main show floor thoroughfares.

We showed off an early demo of the Endless Drop gameplay mode to the hungry masses and it was universally well-received. We had a chance to hang out with fellow devs we’ve met previously and make some new friends in the community. We gave out around ~5k pins. We ate some fresh seafood. It was good.

So many buttons!

As always it was incredibly awesome to meet new people; we even got a few pieces of fan art which were then carefully packaged and brought back with us to Springfield. Chatting with PAXers about our game is exhilarating - we were definitely hoarse by the end.

It was a great time, and we’re looking forward to Prime in Seattle. And now that we’ve survived PAX with only a minor case of the PAX Pox, we’re now on to…

Moving Forward

Our nose is to the grindstone on Delver’s Drop! We’re incredibly excited about working on this game full-time for the first time in its brief history of existence. As many of you know all development on the project has been bootstrapped during our extra time and as spare change allows. Now thanks to all of your support through Kickstarter we get to work 100% full steam ahead. Expect progress to be made much more rapidly, and we’re committing to the following:

• Weekly devlog update on TIGSource
• Bi-weekly (once every two weeks) Kickstarter and blog post updates
• Monthly live stream Q&As near the end of the month
• Monthly newsletter updates (sign up here!)
• Forums will be live soon and we’ll be posting a special announcement about this
• And as always we love chatting on Twitter and Facebook!

Additionally, we hope to post more musings on games and entertainment as time allows — don’t hold us to that though :) Stay tuned for more soon!

The post Recap: Kickstarter, PAX East, and the Road Ahead appeared first on Pixelscopic.

If you are liking the looks of the game, please consider giving us an upvote on Greenlight and even backing us on Kickstarter. Every upvote and pledge helps and we are very grateful for you support.

The future is exciting!

The post Delver’s Drop: Website, Greenlight, Trailer, and Kickstarter appeared first on Pixelscopic.

It happened about a week ago, but I have to admit that going into it, I was pretty apprehensive. Not necessarily negative but definitely very nervous. This was to be my first time at PAX, my first time at a video game convention, and my first time presenting something I’d worked on to the public.

We had a pretty awesome demo to show off, especially since it was a super early build. That said, we were working on the game every moment we had during the month prior to PAX. This included any time we could find on the plane on the way to Seattle, on the day before PAX while we were supposed to be setting up the booth, and literally all the way up to the moment that the PAX floor opened up to the public.

Thankfully, all that work paid off and the game itself was received much better than any of us would have ever expected. Maybe it’s because we’re all perfectionists who are dedicated to our craft, or maybe it’s because we were all just so very exhausted and couldn’t see the awesome in what we were creating. But the people that came to our booth definitely did — so many people came to us and wanted to play the game! Everyone was excited about what we were showing and they were asking so many amazing questions. They wanted to know who made all the pretty artwork, and how the intricate physics system worked, and how a game like this is designed, and what our process was to go from raw ideas to a fully functional game. And — most importantly — they wanted to know long we’d been working on it and when they could get their hands on it.

It was a much better response than we were expecting, and honestly, I think that’s the sort of response we as a team needed. All the PAX-goers that played our game validated to our exhausted and critical eyes that the game we are working on is both awesome and worth making because there were at least a thousand people we talked to who are anticipating the game as much as we are.

Looking back on it, it all feels like it was some drug induced, sleep deprived haze. Everything happened so fast, and it was all so much more exciting and so much more fun than I could have ever expected.

I can’t wait for the next one!

The post Post-PAX Report of Stupendous Proportions (Part 4) appeared first on Pixelscopic.

Ryan Baker (far left) talking to a handful of our several hundred booth-goers.

For all four of us on the team, there were moments leading up to the conference (perhaps quite a few) when we actually thought about bailing out of the Megabooth and not exhibiting, due to a lack of confidence in the game’s very early, incomplete state. This may surprise you if you’ve seen any of the several articles that have been posted on Delver’s Drop recently (like the ones here, here, and here), and the fact that Game Informer named it one of their 9 “Standout Titles of PAX’s Indie Mega Booth.” Out of over 30 games, that’s more than decent, considering that DDrop had only been in full development for just under a month. But knowing what we wanted the game to be, and the fact that the PAX build as it stood was nowhere near this in the days leading up to the show — even the day of the show — had put us all in one of the most dour states we had seen since we started Pixelscopic.

I’m just not the kind of person who cuts corners on anything. I know what a game announcement should look like — you have a nice trailer, send out press releases, hit the social media, hope you get something to go viral, increase mind-share, and all of the other PR buzz-word concepts. They form a pretty simple checklist of the things-you-should-do if you want people to know about your game. All we had was a quite honestly rushed demo and a couple of vague tweets. There just simply hadn’t been time to do everything we had wanted or even needed to do after wrapping up our previous obligations. We simply showed up the day before PAX, plugged in the laptop, which for all we knew could have been the only machine in the world that ran the game at full frame rate. Then we made sure it looked okay and ran in 1080p on the TV (kindly provided by Intel and Kelly Wallick’s efforts), discovered a UI bug that caused things to be cut off, and Coby, Ankur, and Burrell went back to the hotel to keep working. I finished setting up the booth, then went back to do the same. We were all either beyond the point of exhaustion where you no longer have the option of feeling stressed, or maybe in that moment even cursing the day we signed up for the Megabooth.

Coby and Ryan Burrell working at the hotel. We even moved in an extra table and chair(s) from the other room.

There were a lot of mistakes along the way, but perhaps the biggest was this consistent feeling that not only would we find ourselves fluctuating between obscurity and criticism when the expo opened the following day, but that we would be have actually embarrassed ourselves among our peers.

And our PAX experience proved us all wrong.

What we had was not a finished game, a polished version of a game, and in my often overly critical eyes, barely a prototype of what is to come in the future. But what we did have on our hands was a short demo exuding a flavor for which a large portion of our gaming audience seemed to be ravenous. If 2-D, top-down action games with more contemporary trappings in physics, graphics, and sheer speed were the recipe, the minuscule appetizer we brought to PAX left our patrons asking for the entrée. Sorry, but it’s still got about 8–9 months of development to go!

I say this not with pride, but with humility. One could also attribute our previous gloominess to the you-are-your-own-worst-critic phenomenon, which I will be the first to admit. But not only did we underestimate that people would like it; we were afraid no one would give it a second look. We severely underestimated what we had created, which is perhaps the worst kind of underestimation, since we knew every strength and weakness of the project. It could easily be chalked up to ignorance of the PAX dynamic, since even though we had attended, we had never run a booth anywhere. As Ryan Burrell mentioned, we even ran out of pins and postcards. Twice.

Our cards and pins ran out & we had to rush a new order… at 3pm the first day.

I also found out things about myself that I did not previously know; for instance, that despite being a pretty severe introvert, I actually enjoy talking to a couple hundred people a day about the project that I am most passionate about. I got more compliments on the art style (or Ankur directing people to me to talk about the art) than I even still feel like I deserved after only coming up with one character and one environment tile set. Maybe I got into a bit of a sales-pitch rut while talking about the game (sorry if you were one of the few hundred and found it annoying), but I didn’t realize how excited I was to tell everyone about our ideas for DDrop. After interacting with the first few people, I had gone from not wanting to acknowledge the roughness of the demo to proudly telling people that we had been working on it for less than a month. My favorite part of the running the booth was listening to Ankur have people guess how long we had been in development. “18 months?” they would ask. “No, Lower.” You get the idea.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Saying that PAX was unpredictably successful for us does not begin to describe the complete turnaround we experienced — from the short-sighted dev-grind negativity to our current state of refreshed energy and optimism, and reinvigorated determination to live up to the praise we received at PAX. Back when we talking about making this game and showing it at PAX this year (the details are now somewhat foggy), I told Coby, who is my business partner and co-founder of Pixelscopic, that we had to roll the dice this year. Meaning that if we were going to create the kind of studio we wanted, and create the kinds of games we wanted, we had to take some huge gambles. These were gambles both in the sense of risking our reputations and in the sense of dropping money on something like a PAX booth with no guarantee that it could take us anywhere. Other than the obvious possibility of taking us out of business. And while it did not immediately land us a pile of money or diehard fans (let’s hope for those in the near future), it did breath new life into our passion for what we do, and our goals for Delver’s Drop.

The night we got back from PAX, after flights back to humid Missouri, and a three hour drive back to Springfield, we were all pretty exhausted. I think it was about 10 pm, but it felt like 3 am even though we had jumped ahead two time zones. We unloaded the last of our conference gear from my car, and as he was leaving I shook Coby’s hand and said, “We rolled the dice.”

Pixelscopic Team Post-PAX. Left to Right: Coby, Ryan Burrell, Ankur, Ryan Baker.

The post Post-PAX Report (Part 3) appeared first on Pixelscopic.

PAX.

Wow.

It’s hard to figure out where to even begin talking about the experience. Perhaps this is the easy way out of that predicament, but it seems fitting to start with “thanks.” Thank you Kelly, Firehose Games, and the other developers in the MegaBooth who allowed us the opportunity to even be at PAX.  Thank you Ben for being The Solution. Thank you Bill at Reed Expo, Rita at GES, and mysterious gentleman from Intel for the logistics and equipment. Thank you to all the attendees who stopped by, played our game, talked to us, gave us invaluable feedback, and made the show a huge success for us. A double thank you to those who came back on multiple days and tried the new builds! Thank you to the press and media folks who thought our game worth the time to cover. Thank you to Penny Arcade for throwing such an awesome event in the first place.

Most of all, thank you to the seriously hard working dudes and dudettes who are my colleagues and the deep supporting cast that make the magic possible: Ryan 1, Ryan 2,  Ankur, Nathan 1, Nathan 2, Jarrett, Renee, Lorraine, and Chelsea. You all seriously, thunderously, rock. (Thank God this is the digital age where I can append names should I erroneously forget one here.)

With the formalities out of the way, I’ve only one thing to add: I’m stupendously excited that there are plenty of other folks out there who seem to enjoy and desire the same kinds of games that we enjoy and desire and want to make. PAX was a direct injection of optimism that we sorely needed after a few years of contract game development work and seemingly sputtering internal development. Delver’s Drop development is only just now beginning to really accelerate and we’ll be working to craft something exquisitely enjoyable. Glad to have you along for the ride!

The post Post-PAX Report of Stupendous Proportions (Part 2) appeared first on Pixelscopic.

Instead of trying to write out a succinct report, we’ve elected to post each of the team’s thoughts on here in no particular order or topical collation. We’ll have another, briefer post soon regarding some more media-related items of interest. But until then and without further adieu, here’s my account:

Point of View

In full truth and honesty, I went into PAX with less than an optimistic attitude. We worked our jolly rears off in the run-up to Labor Day weekend, but we just didn’t have enough time. As you may or may not know by now, we do contract work and that contract work is what has allowed us to bootstrap the development of Delver’s Drop to its current state.

This sums up our pre-PAX experience pretty well: a frantic struggle to finalize the demo fueled by cigarettes and Mountain Dew and energy drinks.

At the same time, contract work requires a huge time commitment and in the end I was worried that what we were able to put together in the time available didn’t do the game justice as a demo.

Don’t get me wrong, we had made huge leaps and bounds into the tech and had final-ish quality art. I spent a good deal of time writing up room layouts, floor plans, enemy assignments, etc *by hand* in XML to get us a playable demo. It was a stellar effort from all involved. And I just wasn’t satisfied.

So we’re on a plane to PAX *bam* we’re at the hotel *bam* it’s Thursday mornin’ and we’re setting up the booth *bam* OHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAP it’s Friday morning at 9am *BAM* the doors open and.…!

And people came in. And they wanted to play our game. They wanted to ask questions. They wanted to know about what we were making and we were ecstatically happy to indulge them. The game demo we showed was early, early, *early* alpha in its features and people loved it. It had an awesome character, sweet environment art, enemies you could hack at with a sword, and physics-based movement. That was enough to spark interest and then we got to talk about where we want to take it, and people were glad to hear it.

Most of the time a line existed of people waiting to try out the demo.

I think between the four of us we literally talked to nearly a thousand people — maybe more — which was just a small number of the ones that wandered by and watched. We gave out what we thought was a generous 3-day supply of info cards and buttons by the end of Day #1 and had to rush order reinforcements to make it through the weekend. We talked ourselves hoarse, and merrily repeated the same description over and over. Explaining our intended goals helped solidify what those goals were — at least in my mind.

I can’t say enough good things about our experience residing within the Megabooth perimeter. Our fellow indies were extremely helpful in offering advice in the run-up to PAX and also while we were there. Our fellow devs were also interested in what we were cooking up, just as we’ve been interested for some time now in what myriad mad ideas are set forth from their teams and released upon the world. Ben Rud, our PAX Enforcer liaison, was among the most helpful and chill people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I hope we have him again next year. Here’s to you, Solution (Ben).

Ok, final thoughts. Seattle is a great town, but we already knew that. PAX-goers are an amazing lot, keen to listen and eager to discuss; I think that anyone truly interested in honing their craft must value this with high priority. We tested the waters with our game idea and DDrop has passed the public interest test; full steam ahead is the next course of action. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has shown even the slightest interest in what we are working on.

The post Post-PAX Report of Stupendous Proportions (Part 1) appeared first on Pixelscopic.

First write-up from @indiegamemag ! indiegamemag.com/pax-prime-indi…

— Indie MEGABOOTH (@IndieMEGABOOTH) August 22, 2012

Thanks for passing it on Kirk! @kotaku picks up on the booth. kotaku.com/5936975/sweet-…

— Indie MEGABOOTH (@IndieMEGABOOTH) August 22, 2012

OMG MEGABOOTH

Now, I say “We” because Pixelscopic is extraordinarily honored and excited to be included in this powerhouse lineup. Yessiree we’re going to be packing our bags and flying our merry butts to Seattle in less than a week to show of our first wholly original game next to the likes of seasoned indie vets and relative newcomers like ourselves. We attended PAX Dev last year and the first day of Prime but only as observers — what a difference a year makes yah? To show our extreme level of organization I present our travel schedule:

The post PAX Prime, the MEGABOOTH, Delver’s Drop! Oh my! appeared first on Pixelscopic.

We are Pixelscopic.

We are — primarily — a game company, but one with a variety of talents that we apply to graphic design, websites, motion graphics, and application development.

We are relatively young, having been in existence a bit over two years at this point.

We are experienced, with a combined total of 19 years of knowledge and a hand in over 40 games. We’ve worked on a variety of platforms, including Wii, DS, GBA, XBLA, PC, Mac & iOS.

We’ve done a big thing or two, with more on their way. We have tons of concepts and ideas floating around — if only time and money were infinite!

We’re currently working on a 2D action RPG full of scoundrels and princesses and hearts and shifting dungeon mazes and some cool meta-gamey nonsense. Rooms that change based on your actions, puzzles, deceptions! All with some fun physics controls; we’ll post more on this soon.

In the coming weeks we’ll be writing here more regularly, about a variety of things. This will be our devlog and art showcase, a place to share things we find neat-o and gripe about stuff that really burns our biscuits, to comment on current events and speculate about the future. Stay tuned for more updates.

Weee, @pixelscopic actually has a blog now. Now if we can just find the time to *write* stuff in it…

— Ryan Burrell (@rcburrell) August 15, 2012

The post Wherein Our Heroes Start A Blog appeared first on Pixelscopic.