Jungle advancement

The improvements to jungle stage are taking place indeed, and we held another developer meeting to check up on how we are advancing and what should still be done. We held the meeting at the workplace of two of our team members, and the game looked quite stunning on an enormous screen! It inspired us to add even more tasks to our ever-growing 2.0 tasklist. To spoil a little, upcoming features besides the light/dark planet halves and challenges to "the dark side" are smoother movement and the ability to teleport between beginning and end of the planet once you have reached the end once. Pretty convenient, huh?

Jungle experiments and yesterday's daily #scrum

Let's be honest: the development of Back From Afar has been pretty much dormant this summer but things are definitely changing. The last few weeks have been quite hot on Finnish standards so yesterday we had a small daily scrum meeting on our Flowdock group chat. Here's a short summary on what we're up to:

Zam!

So the thing is, we realize that the game hasn't provided that much of a challenge until now, so we are playing with the idea of adding a dark side to the planets. The lighter side will not go anywhere and it will receive at least some cosmetic improvements in the form of friendlier inhabitants. These experiments will take place in the next few weeks and jungle is already receiving the treatment.

Semi-Mexican greetings from sunny Finland!

Yesterday nearly all of us got to celebrate the journey we've had with Back From Afar by eating some Mexican food in Amarillo restaurant. The authentic Mexican experience was topped off with some Finnish rap music, ¡Ay, Caramba! :D I totally forgot to take photos of the event or the food (what a lousy blogger..), so let's just borrow some pictures this time.

Amarillo Jyväskylä [source]

It was really nice to chat about topics outside game development and just spend time together. I'll retrospectively let you in on our table conversation by naming some things that we talked about. Of course the ongoing Ice Hockey World Championships could not be avoided. Thanks Switzerland for putting Finland through to the quarterfinals! We also discussed about what games everyone's been playing recently and to name a few, here's what came up: Planetside 2, Final Fantasy VIII, Hearthstone and League of Legends.

We all were also really intrigued about our Colombian team member Felipe's experiences in Finland. To be specific, it was nice to know that he didn't arrive in the country with a spear in his hand, prepared to fight some Finnish non-existing polar bears. Lastly, the Finnish "don't speak while eating" tradition was totally ruined by saying it out loud.

[source]

It's both awesome and a bit sad that we've come this far. Some of us will continue with other ventures in game development and most of us are devoted to continue working with Back From Afar. We'd love to give you guys more content and maybe some challenges as well. What better way to end the BFA version 1.0 development project than some Mexican philosophy:

"There'll always be a dead beast for a hungry vulture"
= Life doesn't fail to present us with opportunities [source]

Yours,
Jenni

Back From Afar v1.0 release on Android

We had a meeting on April 17th where we discussed about what it's been like to make our first game. All of us have had a positive experience and we've learned a lot during the process. Some things that were mentioned was for example about gaining courage to communicate in English as we've had a multinational team. Finally we pressed the "Publish" button together and ate the Marianne candies from the tables. Yum yum.

The game has now been released to Android for a few days and it's steadily gaining downloads towards our first 100 downloads.

Go try it out and tell us what you think. We'll be fixing bugs and adding new features plus more content in the near future. We've got our eyes on iOS too. The development isn't over yet!

Get Back From Afar from Google Play

Yours,

Jenni

Looking back (…from Afar)

Expa offered an open invitation to be involved with a making of a game. Having only just moved to Jyväskylä, I decided to grab the chance and see where it would take me. It has been a lot of fun and given a real hands-­on experience of what making games is all about. How a simple game idea evolves into a polished game product has proven to be quite a journey! In addition, making new friends has been an unavoidable side-­effect of this game project.

It has been an honor to be surrounded by such a creative, devoted and skillful group of people. Producing code, graphics and sound ­effects hasn't been a problem within the group, everyone have had the chance to contribute on the level they feel comfortable and what they have wanted to learn. There has been a lot of room for different ideas and I think we captured quite early on the basic feeling that the game would have. The game project was very cleverly conducted so that different sub­-teams would concentrate on certain tasks while others worked on some other aspect. During the project there has been a story-­team, a concept & reference team, a mock-­up & layout team, mechanics team and game flow team, to name but a few.

Time devoted to this project can be seen as an investment to the future: the more one has worked with Back From Afar, the more one has learned about making games. Actually, Expa could be the purest form of learning organization. Now looking back, for me it would have been beneficial to also work with the code and sound ­effects, but making graphics was sufficient for the time I had available for this project. It has been a strength for this development project that it can be seen as a hobby and therefore the stress levels and devotion to it have been freely adjustable for every individual. Of course there has been a good amount of
pressure to get the work done, but I haven't felt it overwhelming, while tasks have mostly been selected by ourselves.

Ice stage layout with arrows indicating wind directions

From a graphics point of view, the most frustrating thing is to see how much work doesn't make it to the final game. But this was emphasized from the beginning so it did not come as a surprise and what I have noticed from the project, the same can happen to code, sound­ effects and music as well. Not to mention the amount of work put into gathering reference pictures, making mock-­ups, designing layouts and all that kind of work that has to be done before starting with the actual game. The Ice stage of Back From Afar has grown my favorite, while from the beginning of designing the layout to many of the final graphics I have been most involved with the white and snowy scene.

I hope many will enjoy playing Back From Afar and recommend all their friends to try it as well.

Sincerely,
Saija Koivula

Of the Story

I've always been interested in games. At first it was merely playing them, but when I was faced with the question of what I wanted to do with my life, the idea of being involved in the making of games popped up. Thus, when I heard about Game Club, I was more than ready to give it a try, and am I glad I did.

The project Back From Afar has seen many changes from the initial plans during the production. Personally, I was mainly involved with story/level design, though I did work with the code as well. All in all, it was a wonderful learning experience in many levels. 

Now, something about the story planning on Back From Afar. The main character was agreed on fairly early on, but the story behind everything took a few more turns before it shaped up. Aside from the bullying concept that made it to the game, there was also a suggestion of the child escaping into the space world due to problems at home.

Oh, better also not to forget the original concept that started it all: A single space rocket escapes a planet that looks just like Earth before it is hit by a meteoroid. After this the player is left in the space, going from planet to planet looking for a new home. However, the player runs into complications planet after planet, not being able to settle down. After going through the planets, the player would then finally make it to the last one, a planet similar to Earth (just like the one shown at the beginning), signaling their homecoming.

During the development, quite a few different planets were thought up, yet due to time restraints, we decided to work on three at first. This means should the project continue in the future, we've already got material to work on. Concerning future material, it is not limited only to new planets either. When we were working on the story, we also came up with few possible continuations to Back From Afar's events. 

Sincerely,
Joonas Tiilikainen

Original game concept: Afar

We've come very far from the initial concept so I decided to tell you guys something about the origins of Back From Afar! It all started from our collective decision to make a simple game design. We split into teams and tossed some ideas around for a week after which we were supposed to tell the others what we've been brewing up. All of us voted for the concept we wished to see in action and Back From Afar became the chosen one among some really great simple game ideas.

The original concept for Back From Afar was named Afar. The idea formed as a synthesis of previous two game ideas: balloon flying and space colonization. As you can probably guess, flying in space became the setting. Me and Roni became a team and begun developing a concept by writing and drawing on the nearest piece of paper I could find - a study grant notification from Kela (The Social Insurance Institution of Finland). So the concept began to form and after about an hour, the paper was already full of Afar stuff.

In our vision, Afar was going to be a casual, atmospheric game with a film-like narrative and minimal amount of dialogue. This is because we didn't want the game to exclude non-English speakers and kids who can't read. This inevitably led to stricter requirements regarding usability, which was not a problem since it's something we're both passionate about anyway. Our platform of choice was Android and the graphics were intended to be made in a silhouette style with a splash of color in the background. Silhouettes seemed like a convenient way to start learning how to do game graphics and I was really into the style of Feist and A Walk in the Dark, both of which I found when I tried to find games similar to Immortall.

The original idea of our game was the player trying to survive and find a place to call home by flying in space and exploring nearby planets. This is because we decided that making the Earth explode and allowing one space module to escape might result in some interesting situations. However weird or intimidating the situations might seem, they weren't supposed to be fatal. Anyway, the lonely space module was going to be manually steered away from the remains of a dead planet.

The module was supposed to run out of fuel to limit the playable area so the player would be forced to land on one of the nearest planets. Finding the edge of the very tiny universe would undoubtedly shatter the illusion of vast nothingness so we decided to use a time limit and fuel as an indicator of flying restrictions. Originally there were going to be two anonymous characters on board, but later the whole team thought it was better to ditch the parent and give the limelight for the kid. The player was supposed to see the silhouettes of the main characters for the first time once they would emerge from their module. The characters would search for a place to stay without any luck because of space bedouins, boars.. you name it! Eventually the player would've come across a very familiar looking planet, run into some loved ones and see a healthy looking Earth.

The interpretation of the story was supposed to be left to the player. Was the first planet Earth after all? Was it all a dream? What would you have thought?

How the game has changed from the first concept is a whole nother story.

Yours,
Jenni

// Some of the concept image backgrounds are from Wikimedia Commons. I bet you know which ones!