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Full Speed Ahead!

Another fortnight, another update! Here's what's been going on in the imaginary offices of the redMatter development team for the past two weeks:

In our previous Spotlight/Development blog entry and news post, we unveiled IA!'s first pieces of concept art and an audio style test, giving you a taste of what to expect when you finally get your hands on a playable build. The stack of concepts, showcased in our Gallery, were just the first step in the art creation process for IA!.

In a follow-up blog entry posted just a few hours ago, IA!'s art lead explores the process our artists follow while creating the many assets for IA!'s first level. In it, he details our choice of art style, describes the modular nature of the assets we're building (and how useful they'll be to content creators in our community), explains the creation process for the many 3D objects we'll be using in-game, and also talks about the texture maps that are applied to those models.

To show you how it all comes together, and as promised in our last communiqué, he's also included IA!'s very first in-game screenshots, giving you a very early look at our work so far!

→ Read: Spotlight: Designing Art for IA!'s First Environment (Part Two)

In addition to 2D/3D assets (and sounds/music), we've still been hard at work on IA!'s core functionality and gameplay. In fact, with approximately 200 tickets on our task manager and 250 updates to our code and assets in January alone (compared to 80 tickets and 125 updates in all previous months combined), we've been making tons of progress!

Some of the features we've implemented so far include:

• General
  
  • Main menu
    
  • Spawning (GPs and OP units)
    
  • Team system (currently 1 OP, multiple GPs) + friendly fire
    
  • OP opt-in system + automatic OP selection
    
  • Round system + basic victory conditions (OP wins, GPs win, draw)
    
  • Weapons
• Overhead Players (OPs)
  
  • Top-down view
    
  • Navigation (by moving the cursor to the edges of the window, holding down a button and moving the mouse around, or even using the WASD keys)
    
  • Dynamic occlusion (allowing the OP to see through walls)
    
  • Unit spawning + HUD button
    
  • Unit selection (including box-selection)
    
  • Unit commands (move, attack, stop) + HUD buttons
    
  • Unit world markers (including health indicators and selection circles/effects)
    
  • GP world markers (glow that can be seen through walls, targeting effects)
    
  • Minimap (including markers for both GPs and OP units)
    
  • Ability to issue move/attack orders on the Minimap to selected units
    
  • Ability to navigate around the level by clicking on the Minimap
• Ground Players (GPs)
  
  • First-person and third-person views
• We're also currently prototyping objectives, roles, traps and dynamic music!

We've given plenty of control over much of the above functionality to our level designers via Kismet actors, nodes and objects, which will also be very useful to community content creators.

It's worth noting that most of these features still need a few iterations before they can be considered "complete", but we're definitely close to having enough implemented to be able to give you all early access to the game. Be sure to stop by our IRC channel to track our progress LIVE!

In the coming weeks, we'll be posting a few threads in the Feedback Requests section of the IA! forums, where we'll be asking for your input on some of the discussions we've been having internally regarding upcoming features. You can also contribute by posting your very own ideas and suggestions in the aptly-named Ideas & Suggestions forum. Help us make IA! the most kick-ass game it can be!


We're all anxiously counting down the days to our first public release. We hope you are as excited as we are and we look forward to seeing you all in-game very, very soon!

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All Is Not What It Seems!

After breaking our silence and announcing Intruder Alert! to the world just over a month ago, and with development pushing forward at blazing speeds, we can now turn our attention to you, our growing community!


As we've mentioned time and time again, we pride ourselves in our efforts to keep IA!'s development as open as possible, sharing progress with you as we make it (you can actually track our progress LIVE by joining our IRC channel).

One of the main ways we'll be doing so is through IA!'s Development Blog in the form of Spotlights, Progress Reports and other miscellaneous entries. The blog's media-packed inaugural post, written just a few hours ago, describes the process we followed to design the art for IA!'s very first environment: a secret lair hidden deep inside a volcano, a perfect fit for the theme and art style we chose for the game!

→ Read: Spotlight: Designing Art for IA!'s First Environment

Completing that lair will bring us one step closer to reaching our next major milestone and finally being able to release IA!'s first public build to the world.


You've probably noticed our brand new Gallery by now. We'll be filling it with all kinds of concepts and screenshots throughout development, so be sure to keep an eye on it! And now that you've had a chance to take a look at the first pieces of artwork that we've posted in it, your imagination must be going wild.

Want more? Of course you do. Hit play on the track below, close your eyes, and let your imagination do the rest!

This is just a small taste of what's to come. We'll be putting your imagination to work by sharing with you similar stacks of images, audio tracks and videos, every two weeks and for the foreseeable future! So be sure to check back every so often as we'll have tons to share with you, more and more as we get closer and closer to that first release.


Remember: Your feedback is paramount to IA!'s success in becoming the best game it possibly can be, so we're counting on you to post as much of it as you can. And be sure to let your friends know about it too; you'll be playing with them soon enough!

We hope you're all as anxious to play as we are. In our next post, we'll be shedding some light on some of the features we've implemented so far, and will be sharing with you IA!'s first ever in-game screenshots!

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Planned Theme & Art Style

Two weeks ago, we unveiled Intruder Alert! to the world in this announcement and included tons of additional information on this page. We had intentionally left out any mention of IA!'s planned theme and art style as we felt it best to post about them separately.


⇒ Strategy
Before we begin, I'd like to go off on a small tangent and talk about two of the most important decisions we made early in Overwatch's development (IA! is the spiritual successor to Overwatch, our previous project), and the similar decisions we've made this time around with IA!:

• Release Early, Release Often, Gather Feedback: We've no doubt in our minds that Overwatch is the game it is today thanks to its amazing community and the tons of valuable feedback we've received since the initial announcement and first release back in the Summer of 2010. Having such a tight-knit relationship with our fanbase during development was also a huge source of motivation for our team.
  
  Those are two of the main reasons why we're aiming for a similar approach with IA!, even taking it a step further and announcing/releasing sooner than we did with OW. As we've mentioned in the announcement, our target for an initial (pre-alpha) public build is Q1 2012 (which is a mere few months away!). IA! will still be pretty raw at first but will definitely grow with each subsequent release, and we'll again be counting on your uncensored feedback to help us build the best game possible!
  
  
• Gameplay Above All Else: No matter how stunning a game looks, you'll likely not want to play it for very long if it isn't a lot of fun, which is one of the main reasons why we'd restricted ourselves to only using Half-Life² assets during Overwatch's development. We focused our entire effort on designing and prototyping various features and gameplay mechanics and figuring out what works and what doesn't in an asymmetric RTSS, information that is also invaluable to us as we build IA!.
  
  But IA! isn't an OW remake; while its core gameplay is similar, it's a brand new title with much bigger goals, which means we still have quite a bit to figure out. Our top priority will always be gameplay (which is why it's been our main focus since we kicked off IA!'s development), but as our plans are to produce a complete game worth your hard-earned cash, looks will also be playing a pretty big role (and don't forget that, in addition to our own art style, we'll be building assets from scratch specifically for IA!, which means you can expect some darn cool stuff!).

And that brings us to the main topic of this post: IA!'s planned art style and theme. You'll notice that the following information is very raw; it's only meant to give you a small taste of what to expect. Over the coming weeks, we'll be describing each aspect in more detail with the help of a few renders and pieces of jaw-dropping concept art!

⇒ Theme
One of the key features we have planned for IA! is to offer tons of character personalization options for both the GP and OP sides, so when we set off to look for an appropriate theme, our primary goal was to find one that would allow for tons of different locations, environments, characters, weapons, gadgets, items (etc..), all within the same world.

And we did: a 60s Spy Film Parody (à la Austin Powers), with the GPs playing the good guys and the OPs playing the forces of evil. The possibilities for content are endless!

⇒ Art Style
Our search for the perfect art style was a bit simpler. We needed one that would fit the above theme while also allowing us to produce assets quickly (to offer a wide variety of content for players to choose from). We found that an illustrative/NPR style (similar to TF2 or BF Heroes) would be a great fit: nothing too realistic or too detailed, but still great-looking!

⇒ Music!
As I mentioned earlier, it'll still be a few weeks before we can unveil the first pieces of concept art from IA!, but rather than leaving you empty-handed, we've attached one of the prototype tracks our amazing composer (the same one from Overwatch!) has recently put together. Just close your eyes and put your imagination to work!

Enjoy!

⇒ Closing
Some of you might have already guessed our choices, which would be a great sign! In fact, one of you did just a few days ago: View attachment: Comment.png
It's great to know that the relationship we have with our community is so tight-knit that we've apparently developed some form of telepathy!



2011 Best Upcoming Indie of the Year Award!
In closing, I'd like to point out that thanks to you, IA! made it to IndieDB's Top 100 list this year, just like Overwatch did last year! If you like our plans for IA!, please put a huge smile on our faces by helping Intruder Alert! make the Best Upcoming Indie list of 2011 (click the image below and scroll to the bottom of the page, then click on the Vote button to the left of the IA! image):





Happy Holidays and see you in 2012!

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Big News for 2012!

Overwatch is still alive and kicking, with huge plans for the upcoming year and beyond!


We've been so insanely pleased with Overwatch's popularity: so far, it's been downloaded over 90,000 times and is still played every week by fans from all over the world. These facts, combined with the amazing feedback we've received from our community, have kept us highly motivated to keep pushing forward with our plans.

We've hit a few bumps in the road in the last year but, bumpy road or not, we never even considered giving up. Instead, we made a few tough decisions, decisions that allow us to keep moving forward with our plans. The biggest one, explained below, is our switch to the Unreal Engine.


Why switch to the Unreal Engine?
Source is a fantastic engine and we definitely had a blast working with it and being a part of its community; however (and unfortunately), it wasn't designed to handle everything we were throwing at it (like the RTS aspects, numerous complex entity systems, etc..). It would have taken quite a bit of effort (and lots of code) to fix those issues, which would have been time taken away from developing the game itself. After a quick bit of prototyping in the UDK, it became obvious to us that UE3 is much better suited to handle our needs.

Our community has also come to expect a great deal from us (timely/frequent releases, for example), and many of you have also voiced your concerns that Overwatch's potential wasn't being fully explored (not enough maps and lack of custom assets built specifically for OW's type of gameplay, to name a few). Switching to UE3 gives us the opportunity to work on an Overwatch-like game as a commercial project which, even with a minimum amount of income, would allow us to dedicated more than just our free time to its development, producing more content at a faster pace (honestly, if we didn't have to eat and feed our families, we'd all be putting in every minute we have - and some of us already put in more than what is considered a sane amount).

The bottom line is, even though we've made a few big changes, we're working harder than ever to reach our goal of producing a fun and unique game that people can enjoy for years to come. That said, allow me to introduce:


Intruder Alert!
Intruder Alert! (or IA! for short) is a cooperative asymmetric multiplayer Real-Time Strategy Shooter and the spiritual successor to Overwatch.

Like Overwatch, IA! pits a team of GPs (Ground Players, playing cooperatively in first-person or third-person view) against one or more OPs (Overhead Players, commanding AI-controlled units and manipulating the environment around them from a top-down perspective).

We've taken all the valuable lessons we've learned while developing Overwatch and are using them to build a bigger, better and more complete game of the same genre, this time powered by Epic's amazing UE3 (using the UDK).

We've also gotten rid of the restrictions we'd set on ourselves during Overwatch's development. This time around, we're aiming for a complete gaming experience: bigger and better features, with levels, models and textures built entirely from scratch around a fun theme and an awesome art style.

Our plan is still to RERO and to get our community intricately involved in IA!'s development process every step of the way. In our minds, your feedback and suggestions are invaluable to IA!'s success, as they were to Overwatch's.

There's plenty more to say about our plans for IA! and we've organized it all in an easy-to-read format and posted it on this Details page. You can also read the official announcement here.


Is this the end for Overwatch as a Half-Life² mod?
Not quite. While getting that first build of IA! in our community's hands as soon as possible is our top priority, we still have at least one big release planned for Overwatch.

Targeted for early Q1 2012, the update will contain all of the content found in the development build (which includes textured Breach, updated Crossroads and Canals, tons of other tweaks and bug fixes, and some awesome community-made levels) as well as a few new surprises like Breach II: the long-awaited second part of the Breach level (hint: STRIDERS!!), enough to keep you busy until you can play IA!.

Be sure to keep a close eye on our site as we'll soon be posting a complete list of changes that will be included in the upcoming release.


2011 Best Upcoming Indie of the Year Award!
In closing, I'd like to point out that thanks to you, IA! made it to IndieDB's Top 100 list this year, just like Overwatch did last year! If you love Overwatch as much as we do and like our plans for the future, please put a huge smile on our faces by helping Intruder Alert! make the Best Upcoming Indie list of 2011 (click the image below and scroll to the bottom of the page, then click on the Vote button to the left of the IA! image):





Happy Holidays and see you in 2012!

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Intruder Alert!

It gives us great pleasure to finally be able to announce the project we've been working on for the last few months: our first standalone large-scale independent title for Windows and Mac!

Intruder Alert! (or IA! for short) is a cooperative asymmetric multiplayer Real-Time Strategy Shooter (powered by Unreal Engine 3) and the spiritual successor to Overwatch: a Half-Life² modification we developed and released in 2010 (which has been downloaded over 90,000 times in the last year, given a rating of 9.3/10 by its community and nominated to ModDB's Top 100 Mods of 2010!).

Like Overwatch, IA! pits a team of GPs (Ground Players, playing cooperatively in first-person or third-person view) against one or more OPs (Overhead Players, commanding AI-controlled units and manipulating the environment around them from a top-down perspective). As such, you'll be playing a very different game based on what side you choose!

IA! comes with many big new features and is also being built from the ground up to offer plenty of customization options and a unique playing experience each and every round. From the way we are designing our levels to the vast variety of units and abilities available, players won't be able to predict how a round will play out.



Following the amazing feedback we have received from Overwatch fans across the globe, we kicked off development of IA! mid-2011 and have been working hard on it ever since. We've taken all the valuable lessons we've learned while developing Overwatch and are using them to build a bigger, better and more complete game of the same genre, this time powered by Epic's amazing UE3 (using the UDK).

We've also gotten rid of the restrictions we'd set on ourselves during Overwatch's development. This time around, we're aiming for a complete gaming experience: bigger and better features, with levels, models and textures built entirely from scratch around a fun theme and an awesome art style.

Our plan is still to RERO and to get our community intricately involved in IA!'s development process every step of the way. In our minds, your feedback and suggestions are invaluable to IA!'s success, so help us by joining our community today!

There's plenty more to say about our plans for IA!, but rather than filling the announcement with a huge block of text, we've organized relevant information in an easy-to-read format and posted it on the IndieDB Details page, where you'll find answers to questions such as "What makes IA! fun and unique?", "When will I be able to play IA!?" and "Will IA! be utterly awesome?". As we're still in the very early stages of development, expect much more information (and media!) to be posted progressively in the coming weeks (we also plan on having an early build ready for you to play within a few short months!).

In the meantime, we encourage you to take a look at (and even play!) Overwatch, as it'll give you a taste of the kind of gameplay you'll find in IA!. Here's a small promotional trailer to get you started:




We hope you are all as thrilled about this new project as we are. If so, support us by voting for Intruder Alert! in this year's IOTY Awards! Making the Best Upcoming Indie list would put a huge smile on our faces!




The fun has just begun and we have quite a long and exciting road ahead of us. We are looking forward to interacting with our community and to soon be playing IA! with all of you online!

If you have any questions about IA!, you can contact us directly by posting on our Community Forums (we're always on there, come say hi!), through WebChat or by emailing us at: info -AT- redmatter -DOT- ca


-- Your favourite sleep-deprived development team, redMatter

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Brand New Community Site is Live!

Hello everyone!

After tons of work and sleepless nights, the new site is finally here!

It's not quite perfect just yet, but we're getting there. If you encounter any bugs/issues, please report them in this topic. If you have any other kind of feedback (both positive and negative), feel free to post them in here.


We hope you enjoy our brand new home, and expect plenty more surprises coming soon!

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Get Ready for the Future!

Hello!

It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, you'll be happy to know (if you didn't already) that we haven't been tanning on a beach in the Caribbean for the past year (and let's face it, no one wants to see us half-naked on a beach anyway); instead, we've been hard at work on many surprises that we'll be unveiling slowly over the next little while.

To kick it all off, we have a slew of site and server upgrades that we'll be applying soon, and I figured I'd give you all a quick rundown of what to expect (I'll be updating this thread whenever new information is available):


⇒ Server Upgrades

• Our public sites (http://overwatchmod.com and http://community.overwatchmod.com + the pages you see in-game) will be moved from our partner's server to our very own VPS. This will give us much more control over the hosting environment and will allow us to make specific changes to it to improve site response time and speed. In short, you'll get a much snappier experience navigating our online content.
  
• Before we move anything to our VPS, we'll be taking it offline and performing some maintenance/running some software updates on it. There will be a bit of downtime that'll only affect our IRC network (+ the WebChat page) and our public SVN repositories (so you won't be able to check for updates on the Dev build). The downtime will be minimal (~a few hours).

⇒ Site Upgrades

• All of our sites are getting a huge face-lift. The current design is nice, but it's a bit too monochromatic (and is getting old). The new design is much more modern, will incorporate different colours and will (eventually) be spiced up with some art! You'll find a preview of the new design at the bottom of this post. Note that it's still a work in progress (it'll very likely go through a few more iterations before we settle on a final design/colour scheme), and I'll try to update the image every now and then to show you the changes.
  
• The software that powers our community will be upgraded to the brand new 3.2.x branch (see below for details).

⇒ Community Site: What's New?

• As mentioned above, the software that powers our community will be upgraded to its latest version. All the changes listed in this thread + a few others added in subsequent updates will be included.
  
• Our entire URL scheme will change. I'll add more details over the coming weeks, but as an example: http://community.overwatchmod.com will change to http://community.redmatter.ca (we're basically going to be grouping all of our projects under a single community).
  
• The 3.2.x branch of the community software we use removed some features you might have grown accustomed to. Here are some examples (off the top of my head):
  
  • Topic Descriptions
    
  • Manage Notes (in your UserCP > Settings)
    
  • Online Status (can no longer see the status of a member when viewing a thread)
    
  • Profile Picture/Avatar (now merged into one)
    
  • Post Icons (they were terrible anyway -- the new Tags feature is much better)
    
  • ...

⇒ Images

View attachment: Site111017.png View attachment: Site111017_2.png View attachment: Site111017_3.png View attachment: Site111017_4.png


⇒ Final Comments & Revision History

I'll be adding much more information to this thread over the coming weeks, so keep an eye on it!

As always, you're more than welcome to post any thoughts/feedback you have on all of this. There's still some time before we roll out the upgrades, so we can still make changes if needed.

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