This is just to let you know that we’re working hard with Transgaming on making The Path work on Mac, through Cider. Sadly it is not as straightforward as we hoped for. A lot of elements in the game need to be hand-tuned to make them work on Mac. The biggest problems we’re having are graphic errors. Some things don’t show up or are rendered wrong. Some shaders don’t work properly.
But we’re solving these issues one by one. And the transatlantic collaboration is going well, despite of the big difference in time zone (Transgaming is based in Canada and we are in Belgium).
This conversion has our primary focus at the moment and we won’t stop until the Mac version of The Path is ready for release.
Tale of Tales publishes launch trailer of soon-to-be-released indie
horror game
Gent, Belgium, 11 March 2009
One more week and then The Path will be released. To ease the pain
and whet the appetite, Tale of Tales has released a video trailer
that clearly sets the tone for an unusual experience.
“At first we were going to make a traditional launch trailer.”
explain creators Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn, “You know, a little
movie that explains the narrative premise of the game, shows some
gameplay and then serves some kind of challenge. And our first
sketches were just fine. But then we started cutting things up and
working with the recordings of [composer] Jarboe reading the
original fairy tale. The end result much more clearly reflects the
experience of the game: strange, disjointed and completely open for
interpretation while simultaneously feeling very comfortable and
intimate.”
Working on Sunday may be against the Third Commandment (or the Fourth depending on your local flavour of Christianity), but there’s something nice about it. It’s very quiet outside. Ghent sleeps on Sunday. And all the work we do seems like something extra, so there’s no pressure, everything we get done is good. At the same time we get zero emails that we need to respond to. So we can concentrate better.
Maybe in the future we should organize a project that we only work on on Sundays while we take the rest of the week off.
These are the last days of bugfixing. On Wednesday we will build the first release candidate. Then bugtesting is really over and the only thing left to do is make sure nothing is wrong with the application before we send it to the distributors.
While there’s a lot of nervousness around here because of all the things that need to be taken care of, we’re not really in a crunch period. We’ve had lots of that leading up to achieving beta status. Now it’s just a matter of making the software run as well as possible. We have a long list of bugs and issues. We know we can’t fix them all anyway. So we do what we can. We’ve prioritized them and are going down the list. The further we get the better. But there’s no extremely problematic things that need to be fixed. Just details, really.
Fixing bugs in software is like playing a game. It gives a real rush when you track a problem from its symptom to its cause and then remove the cause*. Pity I’m not a great fan of playing games.
* Like tracking a bullet to the barrel that fired it and placing some lead between the eyes of the evil alien wielding the gun. No wonder boys love this stuff.
Our bug tracker says that we have fixed 69 bugs and that there’s 56 new ones to deal with. Another 24 issues are in an undetermined state. So that’s 80 that haven’t really been resolved yet. I’m sure not all of these will be resolved as most of those bugs or rather minor and more serious ones will no doubt be found before we get around to fixing them. It’s a funny process.
The most serious bug that is still unresolved manifests itself only on the computer of the one person whom we need to feel happy with the game at this point because he can help the Path reach many many people. Luckily he’s very friendly and understanding. But it was a big O O P S ! when it happened nonetheless.
So we play the game and make the list of bugs longer and then we open the editor and make the list shorter again. Etcetera. Endlessly. It’s easy. You know exactly what needs to be done. None of that vague artistic stuff that is never really finished anyway. No. Now it’s about finding the error and correcting it. It’s binary. It’s either solved or not.
I never cared much for perfection. I’m more interested in potential, in places where things can happen. Rationally I know that The Path should be as bug-free and stable as possible. But emotionally I can’t say I care much. I don’t mind when things go wrong once in a while. As long as the broad strokes are strong. But I’m afraid not everybody enjoys the aesthetics of the unfinished.
So far beta-testing has been easy. We’re continuously finding new errors, some rather serious but all fairly easy to solve. But we are still waiting for the final version of the Quest3D game engine before we can invite other people to test the game on their machine. Running the game on different machines operated by different people will probably introduce a whole new string of bugs. Not looking forward to it, but we are determined to make this game as stable as it can be.
We are thrilled to today unveil our brand new logomark, hand-crafted by celebrated graphic designer Marian Bantjes. It was fabulous to have the opportunity to work with her and we’re still surprised she said she’d work with us. The end result is something we’re very proud of. In our opinion the new look says more about what The Path is and meshes beautifully with the overall aesthetic of the game.
This journal chronicles the making of The Path, a single player horror game being developed by Tale of Tales, scheduled for release in spring 2009. Contributors to this journal are the game’s main creators Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn.
We hope you will enjoy our candid revelations about the work process. But we do want to warn you that if you truly want to experience The Path fresh, you might want to avoid reading these pages. We cannot garantee spoiler-free content!
