Magnetic by Nature

Magnetic by Nature / MbN: A

I, along with 9 other wonderful people I met at the University of Utah, formed an LLC, named Team Tripleslash. We can be found on facebook, on twitter @TeamTripleslash and we also have our own website, teamtripleslash.com. We created two games as a company. Magnetic by Nature: Awakening, and a follow up bigger version of that title called Magnetic by Nature. Below, starting at the bottom, can be found a full game dev blog of my process and experiences creating these titles.

Magnetic by Nature Steam and Ouya Trailers found below.

Magnetic by Nature: Awakening trailer found below:

Magnetic featured in a bundle

By going to the link provided, Magnetic along with 9 other games, can be yours for just 5 dollars!
http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/fully-loaded-bundle/

Showing at Comic Con and PAX

We teamed up with Mount Olympus games and their game “Together”, at PAX to get a booth. We joined the Utah Games Arcade booth at Salt Lake comic con this year. We shared a booth with other awesome devs for games like, “Death of the Elder Star”, “Momentum”, and “We Must Go Deeper”. Ninja bee also joined and brought “World of Keflings” and “Nutjitsu”. We had a lot of fun talking with players and other devs, and getting more feedback on our game.

Going to conferences is extremely exhausting, but it is so rewarding. The team has had to make tough choices about what conferences are worth the time and effort. We get lots of great exposure and get to talk to lots of people about our game, but it does cause a great strain on the team and our time. I personally love going to conference and watching people play our game for the first time. It is really rewarding to me as a developer to watch people enjoy something I helped to make.

Best Game Design SLC

We are honored that we have been selected as “Best Game Design” of Salt Lake City by the city newspaper. You can find us on this link near the bottom of the page.

http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/artys-2014/Content?oid=2528461&storyPage=4

Release on Ouya/kick starter backers

Happy to announce that after nearly 2 years of development,

MbN is finally being released out to the world.

Exclusively on the Ouya first, and our kickstarter backers will

also get their copy today on PC, Mac, or Linux.

Our team has worked so hard and I’m so proud of our

first major release title. In honor of this release,

I’ve put together and infographic showcasing some important

stats and data about MbN and its development. Enjoy!

Interview with IGM

Last night myself, Dave and Paige from the team, had the pleasure of doing a live interview with two guys from Indie Game Magazine. They are two gamers who podcast under the name, Average Giants. We had a lot of fun talkign with them while they played the latest build of our game. They played for about an hour, asking us questions about development and the game itself. We were also joined by some live streamers who joined in asking us questions. We had a lot of fun chatting, and we were so happy the game didnt crash at all, even after an hour of streaming and playing. It was a great experience and we were happy to be on the show. You can find their streaming channel here:

http://www.hitbox.tv/team/AverageGiants

Rebranding “Team Tripleslash”

From the inception of the team, we have been calling ourselves Tripleslash Studios. We recent have decided we dont want to be like your average studio. We want to be more approachable and part of the community, we want to be part of a large team. Hence, we are now Team Tripleslash. Because of the name change, we decided to rebrand on our logo as well. I’ve been throwing around a couple concepts for new logos. What do you guys think?

New Business Cards

I designed some new business cards that we will be handing out at comic con next month. Going for a very art deco vibe with this one. What do you think?

Greenlit on Steam!

Before I could even get around to creating a post about this…our campaign reached 100%. We are so overwhelmed by the support the community gave us. We are so grateful for all the feedback and playtesting which has been sent our way. Everyone is amazing. Tripleslash is really excited to get finished and publish on steam. More info on that when its available.

Honored by Indie Statik

Out of over 1,000 IGF submissions, and 350ish making it into initial rounds, Indie Statik decided to take a look at that initial 350. They comprised a list of 31 eyecatching and intriguing entries, and we were honored to find our game on that list. You can see the full list here. http://indiestatik.com/2013/11/08/igf-student-entries/

Submitted to IGF!

We recently submitted to the student competition of IGF. Our team is pretty excited to see what happens. You can read about our game and see us on the website here.

http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2014.php?id=6973

Here’s hoping that in January, when the announce the winners, we’ll get some great news to share with you!

Modeling more Robots

We decided to make robots that represent each of the 5 zones in the game. I was asked to model the fire lizard robot that represents the fire zone. Becky did a great job concepting him out, and I was tasked to take her drawing and make it in 3D. I took some artistic liberties, which were necessary because of the drawings I was given, but I tried to stay pretty true to her design. I am pretty happy with how it turned out, and was able to keep the final model just under 4k tris.

Article from Game Sauce

Here is a great interview that the gaming site “game sauce” did on our team. The article talks about how it is difficult to do start up game companies (I wholeheartedly agree). It is a fun read, and a chance to learn more about our team.

http://gamesauce.org/news/2013/10/07/tripleslash-studios-pushing-your-passion-forward/

Awesome Article by the University of Utah

Here is a quick write up/interview that the U of U did on our team. You can see some of the new art assets and look at what we have been up to the last couple months.

http://eae.utah.edu/big-news-from-tripleslash-studios/

New Magnetic by Nature Business Cards

I designed some new business cards that our team has been handing out at our gatherings, have a look!

Magnetic by Nature T-shirts!

I have been working on some designs for our team…really pushing the PR, now that our kickstarter is up and running, more on that in another post. I have started designing some t-shirts, what do you guys think of the designs? and which ones are your favorite?

Tripleslash / Comic Con

We had a great week at comic con, and were able to make tons of awesome contacts. As well as put our game out in front of thousands of people. It was really exciting for me to watch people play and enjoy a game that has taken up the better part of the last year of my life. It is incredibly rewarding to be able to interact with the gaming community and see their reaction to something you’ve created. I enjoyed talking with the people that came to our booth and played the game. I was also interviewed by a local newspaper about our company. All and all it was a really great experience, and hope to do it again next year. These images shown here are what we used to make some pin on buttons that we were giving away at our booth.

Character Redesign, PC Gamer Magazine

We got a bit of exciting news this week as we were told that we will have a screenshot of our game in the November issue of PC Gamer Magazine. We are pretty excited. I put together the screenshot, and I also placed our new character in it with his full texture….so you get a small preview of how the new character looks in game! The game is starting to roll and we are really excited about getting our game into a new market.

Forward with a PC/Mac/Linux Release

Having received over 20k now from kickstarter and winning events, we have been able to push forward with our dream of making a bigger version of Magnetic by Nature. We dont want to just release the same game that we put out on xbox. We are going to add new features, story slides, a ton of new levels, and are even working on an iteration of our character design. I have been at the forefront of the new character design. What I have posted here is a silhouette front and side view of our character. Also a wireframe 3/4 view of the head to help our modeler be able to better imagine what this interesting shape looks like in 3d.

Winners of Utah Game Wars 2013

I posted on my main page about how we won utah game wars. I decided to also post it here because of how darn proud I am of my team. We have worked so hard, and taken this project well beyond what it needed to be for our senior project at the University of Utah. I am so humbled and amazed at the reception our game has gotten every time we put it out there at festivals events and reviewers. I am very grateful to all those who have encouraged me along the way and pushed me to pursue my dreams. Winning Utah Game Wars with Tripleslash Studios was a huge for me in the way of validation of my career path. Our small team is so grateful to all of those who made the event possible, and to the crowd who chose our game.

This is a picture of me holding the trophy we won at Utah Game Wars

EAE fest 2013

We had a great opportunity this week to show off our game to the whole campus at EAE fest. There were reporters from the local tv and newspapers there, and the whole community was invited. We had a great turnout including having people from Wahoo Studios, Ninja Bee, Eat Sleep Play, EA SLC, and more. We were able to make great contacts and had our game set up on about 7 or 8 computers for people to play on. Overall we got really great feedback about the game and we were able to create a lot of buzz for our kickstarter and game release by handing out the new business cards that I designed. It was another successful day for PR and helped to get our kickstarter off on the right foot.

Crazy weekend and first xbox submission

After a very long weekend, with many hours spent in the lab, we were able to polish off levels and the programmers did a fine job debugging the game. We submitted early Monday morning for peer review on XBLIG, and received a pass by early Tuesday afternoon. This is quite an accomplishment, to be able to be reviewed and passed so quickly. Some of our playtesters reportedly ran into some lag, so we have decided to wait on releasing our game, and will address these issues first. Our zone 3 still could use some polish we feel, so we will take this extra time that the programmers are using for fixing lag, and we will polish some art assets.

Level sorting and decorating!

Jon and I spent quite some time playing through every level that the team has built. We then made a spreadsheet making notes of changes we felt should be made, and the difficulty. After all changes were made, we assembled them all in the order we felt would give it a nice difficulty ramp up. After that we were able to determine how many levels would go in each zone, and be able to decorate them accordingly. It has been a crazy week sorting and getting everything where it needs to be.
Here are some screenshots of how our game is looking:

Treeeeeeees!

I had a really good meeting with our environment lead, Evan. Our style has changed quite a bit over the last month or so and we had a nice chat about its new direction and the doodads and flourishes that the game was needing. One of the zones, the underground city zone, was in dire need of some new unique doodads. Evan and I decided to revisit a tree asset that I had worked on previously, and do some new iterations on it. What we were left with were these. I really like how they turned out, and I think they are a nice touch to an already wonderful zone.

Back from GDC / New Trailer

We are back, hard at work after partying for a week and showing off our game at GDC. We also have a new trailer, made by Kyle, which shows up to date artwork for our game. We are getting closer to the release of our game, and we are getting pretty excited about it! We only have another month and we will be looking to release to XBOX. Here is a link to the new trailer, enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BU331uG0u_A

More Assets / XBOX playtest

We have been working feverishly on assets to try and get the art locked down for this past weekend. We wanted to get it all ready to go for our first xbox playtest submission. For the most part we were able to meet our goal and get a lot of good stuff pushed. We still need to work out a few little kinks and polish up a little bit of our art. The programmers are still trying to optimize their code and get it less laggy on the xbox. We have had a couple of people out in the community play our game already and we have gotten positive feedback from them. They seem to like our game and the controls, which we were a little worried about. I think that we finally got the controls working well and got them locked down which is great news. Bad controls can ruin an otherwise great game. As for us artists on the team, we need to hurry and finish up the little bit of art that we have left, then its onto building a bunch more levels for the game.

Industry game testing / More Assets

This week we had a really cool opportunity to have a few people from industry come and play test our games and give us feedback on our visual progress. Those in attendance included, 2 guys from EA Salt Lake, 3 guys from React Games, and a couple of guys from Eat Sleep Play. They had good things to say about our game which made us feel pretty good. The few suggestions that they did have were mostly things that we already had in mind that we wanted to change. The artist from EA also had great feedback for our visual style. He gave us some good suggestions on how to mesh our style together and make everything work more cohesively. As for me, I have made a few assets and “doodads” to try and assist the team members who have been making environment art. Also this week I have applied for an Art and Design internship at Disney Interactive. I am pretty excited, it is a great company and I would love to work for them.

Team meetings and pushing forward

Well, it turns out a lot of the team had my same feelings about the direction of the game. We had a good team meeting where everyone got out their frustrations and we talked about how the game should move forward. It was uncomfortable and awkward but in the end I think our team will be stronger and better for having talked through it. I will resume my responsibilities as Tech Artist and PR guy. Generally this will mean just gathering all of our art assets and making sure that they work in game and are the correct size/format for what we need. I will also be handling naming conventions and working with the programmers to make sure that it all works with our level editor and everything goes smooth from artists to programmers. I will also be creating art assets on the side and managing our social sites and community outreach. I feel good about the direction that our game is headed and feel like we have a strong team that will create a successful and fun game. When it is ready to release I am sure that I will be proud to have worked on and have my name attached to, this title.

Level Editor / More game testing

So or level editor has kinda had some issues lately, and the programmers are working furiously to fix the bugs. I’ve had a lot of trouble with the editor deleting my content or not being able to load properly. We are working together to find the bugs and get them fixed. This last week we had another open house at the university where more people came to play our game. This time we had a little more progress on the game and we got some really good feedback. Next thursday will be another really important day for us as we are going to be showing off our game to industry folk. We have also been building a full play through of our zone one. I have been kind of butting heads with our “art lead” who has taken it upon herself to do the entire game herself. I have been trying to be patient with her and work through the issues and make sure that everyone on our team gets to contribute. In industry I realize that sometimes my work will get thrown out or I could have a tough supervisor, but this isnt industry, its school. It makes me sad to think how awesome this opportunity is to have so much creative freedom on a game, and it might go to waste. Hopefully we can get things resolved and everyone on our team will come out of the game feeling it was a good experience.

Asset updates

More iterations on assets. I have been talking with our team lead about how we really need to just start locking stuff down today. It looks like that is going to happen, which might annoy some people but it really needs to be done. We cant just keep iterating and iterating these designs over and over. Eventually they need to be finalized and put into the game. I have revised our circle magnets several times as well as the triangle magnets. I also made a door which can be slid open by activating switches, that were made by another artist on our team.

Level Editor / Name change

Our level creation is starting to get into full swing. I’ve started creating some levels and the level editor haunts my dreams. I am constantly thinking about new fun ways to use our game mechanics that will keep the game fresh and exciting for our players. We are going through some major growing pains as we actually take the editor and put it to work but our programmers are doing a great job. I think they are getting tired of us artists constantly finding bugs and breaking things. I found a great article in game dev magazine that talks about good level design and I have kind of been using it as a reference. http://devmag.org.za/2011/07/04/how-to-design-levels-for-a-platformer/ We also posted a poll on facebook regarding a name change and the team came up with some names to be voted on. For now it looks like our game will be “Magnetic by Nature”.

Level Editor

We have the level editor running and functioning (mostly). I am currently working on building some puzzle ideas and levels with it. For the most part it is working, but it does have a few little bugs and hiccups in it that we will have to get worked out for us to really start pumping the levels out. Its a step in the right direction though, as now every member of our team has a level editor on their personal computer that they can start building levels with. Once we get it all fixed up, hopefully by next week, we’ll be able to just start churning out some really great puzzles to put into the game.

Kickstarter

We have filmed our kickstarter! It went awesome, we got almost all the team there and interviewed them in front of a green screen and we are going to put some gameplay and art in the background. We are excited to really get our game out in front of the public and create some buzz. We are also excited for the opportunities that come from having a kickstarter…it gives our audience a chance to connect with our game for the first time. They will have the chance to contribute and get a little something back in return. We are hoping to have it all up and running soon, I will provide a link when that happens. Here is a screenshot of me during my interview, like the bow-tie??

New Art Direction

Our team has taken sort of a 180 on art direction/story/style. Interesting that we already had an alpha in place yet now we are taking a completely new route. We decided that we do not want to have a somber game anymore and it will be more of a light hearted game. As such, we have chosen a new style and inspiration. That inspiration has come from a very weird place. Would you believe that you can design a video game by inspiration from a building? Well we are trying to do just that. We want our game to be Art Deco, and we are using a lot of visual cues from the Chrysler Building in New York City. It has a lot of really beautiful shape design and we hope to use it’s style in our own work.

Back at it

As you can see, I have not given any updates for a while. The semester ended, winter break started, and my brain turned off. I took the short break to try to regroup and recover what is sure to be a long and tough spring semester. I am looking to graduate with my Bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah this summer so I am needing to cram everything in to make sure that happens. Also today is my wife Stephanie’s B-day! Happy B-day Steph!…As of this week, Team Tripleslash is back to work. I have been working hard to update our team website, and getting everything up on there that we wanted our followers to see. For the past few months our website was kind of just a skeleton with placeholders and no real info on it. Now if you visit it you can finally see whats going on! So that has been my little project this last weekend, updating the website. We are also getting back on making more art. We are starting to design some functioning magnets in the game and further defining our art style. Thats it for now….but this weekend we are going to make our kickstarter video, more to come on that!

Celebrating Alpha

Alpha went great, the open house was awesome and we have been taking a small break for finals week and to celebrate our hard work. Photos of the event can be found here on our facebook page. Like us if you havent yet! Soon, probably after the holidays, we will back to work and finishing this game off over the next few months. Til then, keep following our progress on this awesome game!

Another Presentation, EAE Open House

I made a presentation for our class about where I game is at, which is supposed to be Alpha. The school also had an open house today where people from industry around the valley came to check out the EAE program and see the games that have been made in it. We received really great feed back and were even featured in the school’s newspaper, made the front page! Everyone who wanted to come was welcome and we had a lot of fun showing off all our hard work thus far. We have had a great time bringing this idea to life and will continue to push hard for its release in May 2013. We also have a short game play trailer which I will include below which was put together by our team lead. The images below are the slides that I put together for our presentation. We also realize that these things are only temporary and will most likely all be changed before the release.

More on Making Alpha

Making Alpha, Making Alpha, la la laaaa. (sung to the tune from Nightmare Before Christmas) Time sure has been flying while making this game. Things are coming together nicely though, which is good since the Alpha state is due on thursday. The character has been rigged and skinned. We also have quite a few in game animations going, and the alpha puzzle has been pieced together in the level editor and ready for game testing. We have already had 3 professors play it and they liked it, and gave us good feedback. The only things that we have left to do are to finish getting the art put into the level editor. That’s where I come in. I will be getting the proper software onto my computer so that I can get on the level editor and piece all of the artwork on top of the level design. This will probably be handled on tuesday. More updates then.

More Sprite Sheets, Making Alpha

I am learning more about what my responsibilities are as tech artist, as well as putting together more sprite sheets! Hooray for sprite sheets! In the long run they will be incredibly useful and save the team so much time by doing it this way. If we did not set it up like this we would have to redraw everything we do for every level and scenario….and we artists don’t like that idea. I’m grateful for a good team to work with and great programmers who know what they are doing, and thus are able to help me understand what they want from me. It has been a really good experience working with this group of 9 people, 5 other artists and 4 programmers, learning to work as a team and communicate with the left brained folks. We are really pushing for Dec. the 6th when people from industry are actually going to come try our games and give us feedback. I am a little nervous, but really excited to work with actual industry people and get real feedback from them. I think that they will be able to give us great advice on how to make our game even better. Below are the two new sprite sheets that I put together for our alpha puzzle. The top one is for the flourishes that will adorn the environment. They will be non collideable but will make the game look much prettier and more appealing. It will also add to the mood and setting of the game, which starts out in an old abandoned factory.

Environments and prep. for Alpha

The team has been doing more environment work so that we can move forward on the visual style and mood for the game. We also need to have this thing in Alpha state by the next week or two if we want to stay on track for a release of the game in May. Kyle, Jon, and myself have designed a puzzle utilizing all of the key elements that the player will see in the game, and we will be using this extended puzzle for the Alpha level. The programmers on the team have been working hard and nearly have our level editor working. Thats where I come in, as the Tech Artist on the team, I will be responsible for slicing up our chosen level design and building the puzzle we made in the level editor.

Character Modeled and Name Change?

Kyle, our team lead, has taken all of our robot ideas for the main character and mashed them together and has created a 3D model in Maya. It is a rough design right now, and we will polish it up a little, but here it is for now. Each artist on the team contributed a piece of the robot. The piece that was used from my design was the lower torso and legs. What do you guys think of the robot so far? Also, our team has decided that we dont like the name attraction anymore. We are thinking something to do with polarization…something like Bi-Polar. We havent decided yet, all we know is it is no longer called Attraction.

Level editor sprite sheet tests

I have been assigned to be the tech artist for the team. As such one of my responsibilities is to create a sprite sheet with tiles that can be placed into our level editor to create the level design. Below is the very very rough sprite sheet that I created for the programmers to use, just to test the level editor to make sure that it is working. Once we nail down the design for the levels I will come back in and make it look prettier and add to it. We also need to work on quantifying everything so I know all of the pieces that I need to put into the sprite sheet.

Character and Level Editor

The artists have been hard at work, drawing concepts and silhouettes so that we can flush out our main character. We are now doing final versions of our silhouettes and doing value passes and eventually color passes on them as well. The programmers have been working on hard on getting our level editor working right. So far it is coming along really nicely. We are trying to all work together to make sure that we can tile our background and graphics seamlessly with the level editor and make it work beautifully together.

Social Media

We now have a working twitter account (@TeamTripleslash) as well as our own facebook account, Tripleslash Studios, and our own website! So check it out, hit us up, and follow our journey of making a sweet indie game which we are currently calling “Attraction”.

Concepts Concepts Concepts

The team has been working hard this week to concept out our main character and get that going. We have been drawing drawing drawing, tons of silhouettes and trying to really define what our main character should be. We are getting really close to setting that, and also we have been concepting out some background work. We will be having another meeting on Saturday where we will really narrow down our character. Things are going really well and our team is moving forward with great success. We have also set up our own website and facebook. We will continue to spread our media outreach by hitting twitter and possibly tumbler, and indie arcade with our new company…which is Tripleslash Studios, not sure if I’d already posted that. Below are just a few of the ideas that I have done for concept for the background and the main character.

Team progress issues, addressing visual style

Our game has hit a bit of a roadblock at the moment. Our team is trying to incorporate the other 7 members into the team. We have also discovered that the name “Salty Games” is already taken so we are trying to come up with new names to use. We are also working hard to try and figure out the art direction and visual style we want to go for. We will be holding another meeting on saturday to work out more concept art and talk about visual style. So far we are pointing to a couple of different games for inspiration and visual reference. Those are “Limbo”, and “Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet”. Both have incredibly beautiful and striking visuals. Limbo achieves it with absolutely no color, relying only on layered shades of grey. ITSP has beautiful colors and awesome organic shapes throughout the game. Both are 2D and sidescrolling, and use a parallax effect on their backgrounds. They also make great use of atmospheric distortion to achieve a very engaging and beautiful screen for the players to view. These are all aspects our team would like to implement into our own game.

Our game has been selected to move forward

Our game has been selected by the panel to move forward! Attraction is a working title, and with our new team we will be rethinking a lot of this game, including story and art direction. Our team is now comprised of 6 artists and 5 programmers, instead of just 4 of us. I am excited about the team that we’ve got and this game is going to be amazing.

New Concept Art, and gearing up for the big pitch!

New concept art for our game Attraction. This week is our big pitch to the department panel. We have all worked hard and are hoping that our game will make it through for production.

“Attraction”

Our capstone game has a name finally! It’s “Attraction”, and it will be a physics based platformer, using primarily push and pull magnet game mechanics to solve puzzles. I think we have also decided to make the main character a female robot. get all you XBLIGers (Xbox Live Indie Gamers) out there excited for this title, coming out in the spring!

Magnet Bot progress

We have progressed pretty well in the game. The programmers have worked hard and have gotten our white box prototype up and running. The physics engine is working well and some of the other mechanics we discussed are also working. Here I have done a few little concept sketches for the main character(s). We as a team have not yet decided whether or not we want the main character to be male or female, which is why i did sketches for both.

Games Similar to MagnetBot

There are a couple of titles that come to mind as far as inspiration and similar characters. However I have yet to find a game that has the same game mechanics and or similar story line as MagnetBot. Which is great, I feel that our team has a really unique and great idea going.

Games we could draw ideas from are:

1. Robot Platformer 1 – this game is on the indie arcade. The only similarity it has to ours however is that it is a plat former, and you play as a robot. It does not have any unique or exciting hooks or mechanics to it.

2. Robot Platformer 2 – unfortunately yes, this game does have a sequel to it, which is basically the exact same as the first.

3. RobotRiot – this is a great game. It has wonderful music and beautiful artwork. It is also a side scrolling platforming game, but the character relies on its guns to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.

4. Limbo – This is one of the best platforming/puzzle games I have every played. It has really simple yet beautiful art. It has wonderful physics based puzzles that we can get inspiration and ideas from as we create our own puzzles for MagnetBot. I also love that it plays as one giant level, you just tackle one puzzle after the next. It is not split up into levels, you just get to keep playing, and the gameplay tells the story by itself.

5. My 5th related game is not necessarily a game, but rather a mechanic from a game. That mechanic is the hookshot from the “Legend of Zelda” series. The main character Link is able to pull himself around the level and solve puzzles by pulling himself around using the hookshot to hook onto designated areas. I love how this tool is used in the game and adds a new dimension to puzzle solving in Zelda. Especially the water temple in the “Ocarina of Time” game, that temple still haunts me to this day.

MagnetBot

We have made some more progress on developing the game. We have come up with new game mechanics that are unique and fun. The objective of this game now is that you control a small magnet assembly line robot. He is getting bored with his mundane life and position. He assembles other robots for his job. He decides to turn rogue and steal a head from the assembly line and run away. He is now trying to escape the factory, while gathering the rest of the pieces necessary to create his new girlfriend to keep him company. To solve puzzles you will be able to use your magnetic pull and push abilities, as well as use your new girlfriend’s head, that you are carrying around with you, to help you solve puzzles. We have some concept art ready and are starting to piece together our first prototype.