#madsoft

of course, my dear!! here is some of my soft boy stash :

i hope you’re feeling a little bit better! smile for these boys, and smile even brighter for yourself! love you lots, and wishing you all the best xx

Here’s a very short video ad we created for advertising VRNinja on YouTube! It’s the kind that is short enough that YouTube makes it unskippable, so we tried to make it as fast-paced and exciting as possible.

Enter your zen. Listen to the silence, the flow of your breath, the hum of an infinite universe. There is always a calm before the storm… and in VRNinja, you are the storm. VRNinja, the fast-paced, virtual reality party game from OutOfBounds Software Solutions Inc., has launched on Steam for the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift! Train to become a ninja warrior or challenge your friends and family to dodge the ninja’s deadly onslaught! The choice is yours.

As the summer days speed past us, we are rapidly approaching the release of VRNinja on Steam and the Oculus Store. We are now less than a month away from unleashing the art of dodge and virtual ninjutsu upon the world!

With so little time left, we’ve officially launched VRNinja’s Steam store page. Check it out here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/509170/

Now, you can add VRNinja to your wishlist on Steam, so you’ll be notified the moment the game becomes available for purchase! Remember to check out the specs and be sure you have either an HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift to play!

We also encourage you to reach out to any Youtubers, streamers, or reviewers you’d like to see cover the game. We have Steam keys available for reviewers who need them! Just send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll do our best to respond ASAP.

Finally, we’re running a Thunderclap campaign to raise awareness for the game’s launch. Support VRNinja by joining the campaign with the social media account of your choosing to send out a tweet or post on September 14th! Every bit of support helps!

The countdown to dodge begins in 3… 2… 1…

After spending close to a month on Steam Greenlight, we are pleased to announce that VRNinja, the upcoming virtual reality game developed by OutOfBounds Software Solutions, has been greenlit!

We always knew it would be a struggle to pass a VR game through the Greenlight vetting process. After all, the vast majority of Steam users do not own a VR headset and since Steam Greenlight asks voters whether they would buy the game (and not whether they like the game or think it’s worthy of being of Steam), this puts VR games at an obvious disadvantage. We realize that many VR games choose to bypass Steam Greenlight entirely and submit directly through the current HTC Vive game, but we felt confident in VRNinja and wanted to use the Greenlight campaign to raise awareness about its upcoming release. Fortunately, that gamble paid off!

So let’s take a quick look at the final stats at the 29 day mark:

As with our experience greenlighting Me And My Dinosaur, VRNinja had not cracked the top 100 (the apparent benchmark for getting your game greenlit) before getting the go-ahead from Steam. The yes/no ratio was actually quite impressive considering the low vote count and the natural skew caused by the VR headset requirement. We aren’t entirely sure what pushed over the edge, but it may have been the slight uptick in votes we garnered during K-Days when we demoed the game to the general public. One thing is for certain: we are incredibly grateful for everyone who showed their support during the campaign. We couldn’t have done it without you and we cannot wait to get VRNinja into your heads (and in front of your eyes).

If you want to try out VRNinja for yourself before its official release, be sure to stop by Animethon at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton this weekend! We’ll be demoing the game alongside other upcoming MADSOFT Games Publishing Program titles in the Indie Game Room on the second floor!

This week, we explore the trials and tribulations of building a game that needs to run forwards and backwards through time. We caught up with developer and skateboarding enthusiast Jeremy Burns to ask him how he tackled the issue while developing the puzzle-platformer Bound Against Time.

Bound Against Time, as its name might suggest, is a game about time. Players must use the mysterious rifts that have sprung up across the world to travel back in time, restoring order to the timeline. One of the central mechanics of the game is the manipulation of objects and parts of the environment in “forward-time” (i.e. the natural flow of time) and then having those movements and manipulations replicated rigidly in “reverse-time”.

Initially, developing an engine that worked in reverse-time didn’t seem particularly challenging. Developer Jeremy Burns started by recording the position of objects at each frame in forward-time and placing those objects at the appropriate locus in reverse-time. It worked fantastically well — until he introduced physics to the world. Physics added a layer of confusion to the basic record-and-replay functionality. Something as simple as a crate falling would look lovely and solid until Jeremy attempted to replay it in reverse-time, at which point it would start behaving very strangely.

After a bit of digging, he realized he wasn’t recording enough data; positional data was not enough. Looking at the example of the crate falling, the crate operates according to the laws of physics when moving in forward-time. It has velocity, indicating its direction and speed of travel. Moving into reverse-time, the physics would lock out to allow the crate to follow the path it had traced in forward-time. But then, if the player entered forward-time again, the physics would kickstart up once more, this time using the velocity that the crate had just had in reverse-time to launch the crate into the air. To fix this issue, Jeremy started recording the velocity of the initial movement of the crate in forward-time. This allowed the crate to resume its natural path when going from reverse-time to forward-time, by calling up that original velocity rather than relying on the movement from the reverse-time.

It wasn’t as easy as simply adding this additional layer of recording however. Each new puzzle element introduced in the game needed to be evaluated for its optimal data recording. Each puzzle reacted differently when exposed to the transition between reverse-time and forward-time. Rope puzzles required a different set of data than crate puzzles which in turn required a different data set than destructible object puzzles.

Now, all this sounds like it could be rather cumbersome on the engine (and your computer). However, Bound Against Time runs at a tick rate of 30 frame per second (fps), extrapolating positional data between the frames to create a smooth 60 fps on most modern computers. This means the game logic only runs every other frame, significantly reducing the need for memory. In fact, hundreds of objects can move on the screen for up to a minute without any noticeable performance issues.

To further streamline the game's system requirements, Jeremy also developed a series of non-physics based objects and environmental obstacles that follow fixed paths in both forward-time and reverse-time. The floating leaves at the beginning of the Forest area use this fixed-track technique to create the appearance of travelling back through time.

We are in the last few hours of our Kickstarter campaign to bring Me And My Dinosaur to the Playstation 4, PC, and Mac. It’s been a long month and we want to thank you all for your support! If you haven’t backed us yet, this is your very last chance!

Stretch goals are a tricky thing. Announce them too soon and you end up looking cocky. Announce them too late and people might think you aren’t planning for all eventualities. As a company, we decided to hold off on discussing stretch goals until we were closer to our initial ask, but being that the Me And My Dinosaur Kickstarter has had some trouble gaining traction, we thought it might be time to talk stretch goals.

We've received a lot of messages asking about other platforms, including the PS Vita, Xbox One, Wii U, and 3DS, and whether we had plans to bring the game over to those other systems. Simply put? Yes. More specifically, we are hoping to bring the game to Wii U.

MADSOFT Games is a licensed Nintendo developer and publisher, so developing for the platform is entirely possible for us, but being that Me And My Dinosaur is our first console game, we didn’t think it wise to include the Wii U development in the initial ask. Hence, the stretch goal. If we can raise $75,000 CAD, a Wii U version of Me And My Dinosaur will be a reality.

Hopefully, this announcement answers the questions we've been receiving from Nintendo fans! :)