Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by erik 4439 days ago
Life Goes On!

A game, built in Unity, about sacrificing knights and using their dead bodies to solve puzzles.

http://i.imgur.com/qeuo84C.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/g1oFM31.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/7PoX6th.jpg

This game started at a game jam two years ago. It became an evening and weekends hobby, then it became a full commercial release, and we just launched on steam. (http://store.steampowered.com/app/250050/)

I thought that after the game launched I would have some time to relax. But support, bug fixes, responding to media requests, and planning next steps has kept me very busy.

http://www.LifeGoesOnGame.com

10 comments

Congrats for the awesome game! :D It's really fun — and I also had lots of fun watching the playthrough on Game Grumps. (where I originally found out about it).

One thing I wondered: do you have a random Knight name generator based on something like markov chains, or do you just have a very, very long list of knight names?

Also mad props on the visual effect of the lava heating up the rocks, it looks super realistic. Did you write a custom shader for that?

I also picked this up after seeing it on Game Grumps. The combination of the game looking pretty interesting and them being really bad at it convinced me to just pick it up and finish it myself.
Thanks!

Knight names are a mix of a list of names, and a random name generator that pulls from a pool of first names, surnames, titles, etc.

The lava heat on the rocks is indeed a custom shader, put together by our artist.

The style of that very strongly reminds me of that David vs. Goliath top-down shooter game: https://icreviews.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/giving_goliath...

Any connection to that, by any chance?

EDIT: Hmm, HN doesn't do Markdown?

No, that one is new to me. I'll check it out.
I saw your game on reddit a long time back, I really enjoyed it! Thanks for the reminder to go pick it up (I got the mailing list updates but ignored them)

Do you think you will be releasing another game under the same name?

I hope you enjoy the game!

It's really hard to say what's next. There will probably be more work to do on Life Goes On first.

Just checked out the game trailer and it looks really good! The concept seems fun and the graphics are amazing. However I have to admit that I feel the title is not appropriate and a better one should have been chosen.
Any advice on getting started with Unity? I've always tried to start a weekend project and get inevitably get bogged down in the details of Unity/Mono.
We started by hacking up the 2d platform sample game project that Unity bundles. Getting started was a bit rough, and the results from the first weekend were pretty buggy. Once we got to know Unity we were pretty happy with the decision though.

I'm sure that there are good resources for getting up to speed quickly, but unfortunately I don't have any recommendations for how to do it.

One suggestion that I can make is to stick to C#. Unity offers "Javascript", but Unityscript isn't really Javascript, and is more headaches than it is worth in my experience.

I was at that game jam! Glad to see this released :)
Amazing concept! :) Good luck with the game.
Thanks!
Congratulations on the release, the game looks awesome. I hope it does well.
That looks impressive, addictive, and fun. Congratulations!
This looks nice!