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So, it begins…

… officially.

Well, hi there, my name is Milenko Tunjic

As John has mentioned in his previous post, I have officially joined the Strange Loop Games and took a role of visualy directing the Vessel experience and honestly, I can not wait to start putting it all together.

I will be sharing bits and pieces of the art process as we go along with making the game.

I am also very excited to get together and work, once again, with Mr Mark Filipelli , an excellent artist and a dear colleague from the good old days.

In the first post, I will take it easy, and just share a few bits of preliminary art and hints of intended and currently proposed visual style of this unique experience. For the time being, it will be images only but in the upcoming posts I will talk more about the world, the characters and other relevant art thingies.

Kind regards to all,

Milenko

Vessel signed with publisher Zoo, artists join team

The big-huge news today – Vessel has been signed with publisher Zoo Games and will be coming to console and PC!

This deal gives us the time and resources to make this game exactly how we envision it without taking any shortcuts, and partners us with Zoo Games who shown a real commitment to Indie innovation, first with their 2Bees contest and now IndiePub.  Check out the official press release here.

We’re incredibly excited to have this support, and as first order of business we’ll be bringing two long-overdue members officially into the Strange Loop Team:

Milenko Tunjic is our new art director and will be in charge of building the visuals of the unique universe of Vessel.  Milenko brings 19 years of professional artistic experience to the table across all forms, from traditional painting to 3d modeling to animation.

Mark Filippelli is new lead artist and will be designing and building the unique visual appearance of Vessel.  Mark has an extensive background at several large studios including EA, Brisbane.

With the combined talent of these two on board we will be seeing some incredible improvements on the visual side – the first steps are already done in fact, and Milenko will be making a blog post debuting them in the next few days, so stay tuned for that!

GDC 2010

Back from GDC this week, which had to be one of the best weeks ever.  So great to meet the rest of the indie community, and play all these awesome games I’ve been hearing about.  We got to demo Vessel to gamers, publishers, and other indies which was a lot of fun (and motivating to see the reaction it’s getting).  Nothing but game talk  all day, every day for a week, it’s a lot to absorb!   Now it’s time to take all the ideas I’ve collected and put them into the game.

Check out some pictures from our trip:

Can’t wait until next year…

Let there be multithreading

It’s been a fascinating odyssey/nightmare, but the Vessel engine is finally multi-threaded! What does this mean? Much larger volumes of fluid, much larger fluid creatures, and generally just a lot more splashing about.

Martin had already done his share with rendering being multithreaded ages ago, but it wasn’t until after the IGF/IGC builds that I decided to bite the bullet and pull apart the physics and gameplay code into separate threads. This caused a seemingly never-ending stream of issues because the gameplay and the physics are so tightly coupled in Vessel, but luckily they proved to be a finite number and it’s working well now. We’ve got three threads running pretty solidly, and the stage is set to easily break the physics thread up into even smaller individual jobs which can then be scheduled from a thread pool (which will really speed things up when we make our way to PS3/XBox and have a lot more hardware threads to play with).

This was something I wanted to get out of the way ASAP because it will have such a dramatic effect on the design of the game – the design of the Fluros, the types of puzzles we create, etc. It also represents a direction we want to push the game in generally – more about interactions with the simulations on a grand scale.

So just for fun I dropped a tsunami in the workshop level:

Vessel makes the Indie Game Challenge, needs votes!

We’ve been announced as a finalist in the Indie Game Challenge! Congrats to the other finalists, and click through to vote for Vessel.

Awards will be given out at the DICE summit in Las Vegas, with separate prizes for student and professional, and an audience award depending on votes.  See you in Vegas!  If we win it’s all going on Red…