The bulk of our team was raised on classic action-style shooters from the mid- to late-90’s.  Naturally, we were gushing over weapons from classic franchises like Unreal Tournament, Quake and Tribes.  We created our first weapon sets with these basic archetypal functions, but found we wanted to be a bit more creative.

While discussing weapons one night, our team started talking about more emergent weapon experiences.  We all enjoyed games like Portal and Magicka, which work more by giving players toolkits and not just more grandiose firepower.  Both of those games get a lot of mileage out of their mechanics because players enjoy experimenting with the weapons almost as much as they love solving puzzles or frying enemies with them.  From that discussion on, we knew we wanted to make Retrovirus into a game that gave players classic shooter firepower alongside a toolbox of tricks that would be suitable for player experimentation.

Retrovirus started with a set of weapons inspired directly by Unreal Tournament.  Our weapon set included basics like miniguns, missiles and railguns.  We wanted to make sure they followed archetypal rules, so players would be able to step in and instantly understand their function.  Keeping the weapons intuitive is especially important for Retrovirus, as we want the player’s focus to be on movement in a six degrees of freedom setting above all else.

With those archetypal weapons in place, we decided we wanted to bring the “toolkit” aspect into play using one of our game’s central themes: anti-viral scanning.  Because all of the action of Retrovirus is taking place inside a computer’s software, it makes sense that “killing” an enemy would be akin to deletion.  We decided that the player’s weapons would fire projectiles that would effectively be “flagging” enemies for deletion.  In Retrovirus, this is represented by weapons leaving behind “residuals” with each shot.  The residuals themselves continue to cause an effect, like a movement slow or a minor damage-over-time effect.

To tie in the scanner, we added effects which are triggered when players scan these residual shots, whether they exist in the world, or better yet, on an enemy.  This gives every weapon a “one-two” punch, where players set down residual shots and trigger them to control their enemy and their environment.  Our minigun has residual shots which can trigger a knockback originating from the residuals themselves.  Need a quick boost?  Shoot the wall and scan the residuals to do something akin to the Team Fortress “rocket jump.”  Enemies rushing in?  Pepper them with the minigun and shove them back by scanning the residuals.  The possibilities are numerous, and most importantly, fun to experiment with!

We’re really enjoying the weapon mechanics in house, and we look forward to showing them off.  If this blog has piqued your interest, you should check out our livestream, set to begin on January 25th, 2012 on own3d.tv.  We’ll be posting more details on that shortly, and our first episode will show off our weapons system in more depth than we can do with the written word.

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To start, Retrovirus is being developed in a wholly new editor, Paragon.  In Paragon, we create spaces by spawning in basic shapes, and then manipulating them in chunks.  The end effect is that working in our editor is a lot like playing Minecraft, where we push and place blocks to create or restrict space.  Unfortunately, with each block measuring 4m by 4m, individual blocks were too large to be used for fine level detailing.  Any level where we used blocks like one might in Minecraft to create structures or level details ended up so large that the player felt slow and small by comparison.  Obviously, this was not good design!

Correcting this meant turning to a more scientific approach to level design.  We created a version of the classic Counter-Strike map de_dust in Paragon.  Dust was a setting that all of our potential testers would instinctively know.  Critically, it was also one where where our playtesters would be more likely to notice problems by comparing our version to their decade-long experience within that space.

Shortly after a test flight through dust, it became clear that specific parts of the level were out of scale.  Ledges in Counter-Strike that come up to thigh height were upwards of 12 feet high in Retrovirus, despite the player moving at a speed similar to that of CS.  The hall connecting the Terrorist spawn with Bomb Site A was too wide and too long because we’d used a 4m by 4m by 8m column to simulate the crates that normally provide cover in that space.  It took an examination of Retrovirus through the lens of prior game experiences to properly expose the scaling issue to the whole team.

Experimentation with de_dust revealed the problem, but we still needed a practical way to ground our level designs while we started principal production on the environments for Retrovirus.  We created a scale test level, built to put slices of various environments side-by-side as a sort of level design primer.  With our scale test level, we soon had a clear basis for comparison between environments, helping the player to feel appropriately nimble in the world.  We’ve since used that experience to set the tone for all of our future levels, and it feels like we’re moving toward something more like the game we all want to play.

Only now do we have more levels we intend to keep than levels we’ve thrown away, and that’s after a solid month of two full-time team members cranking away.  It’s important to fight the urge to call that time wasted.  Every level scrapped has been a step toward finding what’s fun about Retrovirus, as we rise to the challenge of designing levels for six degrees of freedom.

Retrovirus’ theme is simple: give the player a take on what it might be like to be an anti-virus program fighting against a system full of viruses.  We’re working to deliver that experience on many fronts.  Mechanically, we’ve focused on the idea of what an anti-virus program actually does, that is, scanning the system for anomalies.  Scanning is core to what a real life anti-virus program does, and so too is it core to the gameplay of Retrovirus.

Scanning is the primary way that the player asks questions of the game world, doing so by casting a pulse out into the world that highlights objects of interest.  One of the core functions of the scanner is to glean information from those objects, whether it be plot-related or directly related to progression.  Our goal is to encourage players to probe their world, exploring each space to find objects that will help them discover the origins of the virus and how they might defeat it.  If we do our job right, when players get stumped on how to progress, their first instinct will be to use the scanner to look for nearby clues.  We’re using the metaphor of a police station to represent the anti-virus’ base on the system, and in a way, we’re also asking the player to play detective.

We also want to make sure that, when combat heats up, players don’t just forget about scanning.  All of the weapons in Retrovirus interact with the scanner in their own unique way, whether it’s allowing the player to create temporary obstructions in the world or to help guide projectiles to their target.  Scanning in combat helps players unlock the extra potential of their weapons, and even helps them track enemies and assess combat scenarios before running in head first. This helps to reinforce the theme by constantly remind the player that they’re an anti-virus program, and that scanning is what they do.

Some of the specific weapon interactions are pretty cool so far, and we can’t wait to show them off.  Keep following us for more details as we share them, and thanks for reading!

Cadenza Interactive, the studio that brought you Sol Survivor, is proud to announce Retrovirus, a six degrees of freedom first-person shooter set within the depths of a virus-infected computer.  In Retrovirus, the player takes on the role of an anti-virus program, searching out and destroying a viral threat.

Players will explore tunnels, buildings and cities inside the inner workings of a computer, battle a host of viral enemies, and solve puzzles within the machine environment.  Influenced by the classic Descent, Retrovirus will bring a modern six degrees of freedom shooter to the PC.  Retrovirus will also launch with competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes, which will be discussed in depth on our site over the coming months.

Retrovirus has been in production for a while now, and as a team, we’re ready to open up our development process and show the world what the game is all about.  We’ll be sharing our progress via design blogs and other media, all of which will be available via our website, http://www.cadenzainteractive.com.

Join us on our journey by following us across our web presence:

Facebook: Cadenza Interactive
Twitter: @cadenzagames
RSS: cadenzainteractive.com/feed

Thanks for your support, and stay tuned!

A lot has changed since the release of Sol Survivor, and the Cadenza team has been hard at work on a second project.  We're in the midst of preparing its announcement to the world, and the team is excited to share the new game with the fans who have supported us in doing what we love to do.

If this is your first time here, welcome!  Check out our first game Sol Survivor, and get involved with the game's community on our forums.  For the latest in news on our second project, as well as sporadic updates from the team, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and via RSS.

Thanks again for your support, and we look forward to sharing the journey of Project 2 with all of you!

Sol Survivor is being featured in massive sale bundle, along with a handful of Steam’s top indie strategy games, from September 20th until September 22nd!

Included in the package are…

Sol Survivor
Anomaly: Warzone Earth
Defense Grid
Revenge of the Titans
Sanctum

If you’re interested in a feast of indie strategy, you can head on over to Steam and pick this 5-game bundle up for only $9.99.  Jump on Sol Survivor and play some multi-player while you’re at it!

Also, you've probably noticed our new website layout.  The old Sol Survivor stand-alone site has been folded under, and the new cadenzainteractive.com will stand for all of Cadenza's games.  This, of course, includes Sol Survivor, and also our unannounced second project.  We're gearing up for the announcement, and soon enough we'll have a lot going on here on our new-look site.

For now, make sure to subscribe to our Twitter and Facebook pages, and also our Cadenza News RSS for all of the latest details.

Thanks as always for your support!

Being an indie developer meant we'd be without a large budget, but the make-up of our team also meant we'd be almost completely without experience.  Our two main programmers have worked in (non-game related) technical fields, but everyone else was at best a hobbyist in their chosen role.  New techniques and processes had to be integrated to make the team flow, but also to make sure we were producing something of quality.  From graphics programming to game design, and animation to indie games marketing, every day of production on Sol Survivor was worth four or five languid college Mondays.

Our processes were developed by actively researching those used by current industry professionals, as well as other talkative indie game developers.  When the game's shadows needed work, there was white paper on the implementation of shadows written by professionals elsewhere.  When it came time to learn how to animate our creeps, there was Google and a lot of trial and error.  Points would be introduced to us through research, and sometimes they'd do nothing but to reinforce the decisions we'd already made.  Either way, it gave us confidence and a way of centering ourselves as we set out as a new studio.

Getting into indie development, it's important to realize that the majority of developers want to talk at length about what they're doing.  Game development is a labor of love, and many teams will talk openly about their work.  This is a resource to tap in to.  Getting to know other indie developers both from observation and from direct conversation let us get a feeling for what we could expect with regards to distributor relationships, community response and even sales figures.  This extends to the media as well; we introduced ourselves to them early and often.  Making friends with developers and media is easy because they're genuinely as excited about games as you are, if not more so.

Resources like IndieGames.com and the related Gamasutra are invaluable, as is an RSS reader chock full of gaming media.  Social media let us listen to and make contact with people who were already established in games.  We read enough while making Sol Survivor to make LeVar Burton proud, and it paid off in nearly every facet of the game.  I can't suggest any ratio of time that should be devoted to this sort of research, but the end goal is to be saturated with knowledge on any given topic as quickly as possible.  This is something to which the internet is highly conducive!

This zealous information gathering helped us as we tried to find a place within the vast cultural knowledge that is gaming.  The culture is pervasive and unspoken.  It touches everything from a collective sense of humor, to opinions on what the "escape" key ought to do on a menu.  The design process of Sol Survivor was a balancing act between our collective knowledge of precedent in games and our original ideas we'd been brainstorming.  We wanted to make something that was unique enough to get attention, but familiar enough to be approachable and intuitive.  We leave the judgment to the players as to whether or not we've succeeded, but regardless of the verdict we've learned enough to justify the entirety of our development process.

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Whether it was on the code side or the design side, the biggest advantage we have over larger teams is the ability to be experimental.  Knowing that we could scrap work that didn't pan out set us free to test features that showed some potential but seemed risky.  Our code team intentionally selected C# with the XNA framework as our basis for development to support rapid prototyping, and it let us get our hands dirty with ideas we otherwise may have put aside.  With this basis in mind, the core team set out to make a turret defense game that would encapsulate our best experiences within the genre and hopefully leave the genre better than we found it.  The concept of orbital support was formed early enough that we knew this was where our great experiment was to start, and also where we hoped we'd be able to make Sol Survivor stand out in the genre.  Still, our first versions were prototypes with flat landscapes, no buildings or "doodads," and a single creep and turret type.  As you might expect, there was much work to be done.

Each week our three full-time team members would get together on the weekend and host a meeting for the part-time contributors.  Through these meetings, we expressed our likes and dislikes with the current build of the game, and sent everyone away with a clear goal and workload for the week to come.  With every weekly meeting our opinions came out into the open and, through debate, we selected the strongest designs to be incorporated into the game's next build.  It was through this averaging of opinions that our design came together.  Each iteration of the game gave us one more thing to think about, and one more improvement that seemed natural after the last one had been made.  Philosophically, we were ready for that kind of discovery process, and that kind of mobility seems essential to the process.

As the game started to evolve, we expanded the scope of the team to include designers, artists and a musician.  To harness the free time of these part-time contributors, and to ensure that they never sat idle waiting for someone else, our code team provided a design tool (Improv) that they actively maintained throughout development.  When a map needed work, the designers could find an hour here or there to do it without adding more work to the code team's bottleneck.  While creating something like Improv seems elementary to an industry veteran, it may seem like a lengthy task for a smaller studio.  It was worth every hour put into it, and to this day Improv has facilitated rapid content generation for testing that was every bit as nimble as the code and design processes behind it.

Having our weekend meetings let each member of the team, regardless of their hourly contribution, feel like they had a stake in the design of Sol Survivor.  We were able to harness the opinions of a group of friends by playing the game and talking about what worked and what didn't.  Decisions we made early on about wanting to be flexible, with code and with design, let us stay true to our iterative model.  We still look at the game and see things we'd like to change.  We talk a lot with players, and in a way our release feels like a larger weekend meeting, with a lot more opinions.  Our big response to those opinions?  Co-op campaign mode, coming in a patch in the weeks to come.
 

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After our six week crunch getting to release, we stepped back and saw a game we actually want to play.  We'd planned on having a LAN party to celebrate the release and to relax after what has been the hardest six weeks for our team.  We took a road trip up the coast and LANned it up, with Sol Survivor featuring heavily in the mix of games.  Some of you may have played online with us over the weekend, and it was great to meet all of you.  Even when we intend to take a break, we always end up talking shop, and we hope our passion for the game we've made shows through.

About four hours from our base in Orange County, we're going to be getting in late and cranking up on a patch to be announced in the coming days.  A poll we took on the Steam forums suggested you guys want to see some blogs about our development process as an independent team, so this week I'll be putting together a feature about our process.  Get involved and let us know what you want to hear about!  See you in game!

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Much thanks to everyone who participated in the beta – you guys made all the difference in tracking down bugs and tuning the game for an international audience. Soon, the game will be available for purchase, and a whole host of new players will join the online community.

Enjoy the game, keep playing, and let us know what you think!

 Comment in the forums.