And so ends my first Dare. I had a great time, never imagined it would be so exciting or stressful.If you’d like to go play my game you can get it in all different flavours on my site : www.benswinden.com/beyond. It’s got two resolutions for the web version, as well Windows and Mac versions for download. I’d love to hear what you think, please leave a comment here, or email me at me@benswinden.com or twitter at me on twitter @benswinden.

Beyond is a first-person exploration game. I tried to create a interesting sensory experience with a few challenges, though i had very little time for testing so i can’t say whether it’s easy or hard. There are golden orbs strewn around the level for you to collect. By stepping into one of the blue tubes you create a waypoint for yourself and will respawn there in the event you fall into the endless void.

Hey guys, here’s some stuff i’ve made so far for my game Beyond Balnibarbi. The screenshot is some place holder terrain i modeled to test the controls. The game will have some simple 3-d platforming and exploration.

You can play it in it’s current state here : www.benswinden.com

My first two hours were quite productive. I knocked off some concept sketches which finalized my plans. It also lead to some light narrative development and a title: Beyond Balnibarbi. I then designed a quick title screen and went to bed.

Unfortunately that only yielded  3 quick hours of sleep before waking up and lying restlessly in bed for two hours thinking about my game and trying without any luck to go back to sleep. I couldn’t really get up and start working since my bed is right next to my computer and my mechanical keyboard would make it shitty for my girlfriend sleeping there.

Ill get back to it soon though, and I’ll post my concepts.

This is going to be my first game jam. It will also be the first solo game i’ll have released. I’ll be using Unity, going to focus on a web build and possibly make executables. Modeling will be done in Maya and sound design will be done in Mixcraft and Audacity. Some other tools i may end up using are Photoshop, Illustrator, SoundForge, Reason.

Getting excited, but i’m really wary of what the theme is going to be. It seems to be the majority of final round themes are things people voted for just because they make a quick and easy game.  Minimalism, Tiny world, one room all seem pretty boring. Other than Castles in the Sky., nothing really inspires my imagination so the other ones i voted for are the really open ended ones like exploration and growth.

-ben