As many indie developers (and a lot of talented ones) did this year, we entered the 13th Independant Games Festival with Seasons and a trailer :

That’s it, Seasons now has a full title : Seasons after Fall.
We think it represents what the game is in term of both gameplay and “universe”. Hope you’ll like it !

Last time we talked about a game we love it was about Saira, ten months ago. But we love a lot of games !

Super Meat Boy is now available on Xbox Live Arcade (800 MS points for a limited time then 1200 MS points) and it’s a bloody good game !
SMB will also be released on Wii, PC and Mac soon.

You probably already know what is Super Meat Boy if you read indie games news. Maybe you’ve already played Meat Boy, a flash game created by Edmund McMillen and Jonathan McEntee that can be seen as a prototype of Super Meat Boy now. Or maybe you’ve seen this trailer made like a 90′s commercial :

Hi everybody!

Last week I tried to make rendering code optimisation in order to speed up the frametime.

>> Context

Until now, I didn’t bother too much about optimising stuff; some optimisation techniques were implemented but were very somewhat buggy.
The main reason for such bugged code is that we switched from pure 2D/orthographic to 3D/perspective way of thinking the rendering and the game.

>> Frustum

The main thing to do when optimizing rendering is trying to render only what will be visible on screen. It seems logical but it’s not automatically done by a graphic card… you have to do it by yourself on CPU side and only send minimum stuff to the drawing. The process is called culling.

To achieve such an optimisation, you can rely on the frustum. Frustum is a truncated pyramid shape which defines what the camera will actually project on screen. Objects partially or entirely contained in the frustum will be potentially visible on screen (potentially because some other objects may occlude other ones).

Camera frustum

Guillaume has developped new tools so I can integrate sound effects now, helped by our sound designer (we will introduce to you soon).

In the same time, I have to improve the level design of few game sequences because we saw players having some difficulties when playing the demo at the Festival du Jeu Video. Here is a concrete example :