Dev Blog

Hello Everyone,

A little update from our production of The Splitting: Chapter 3 –

For the past two months we’ve been working from home, due to the CoronaVirus threat. Apart from the stress of the entire situation, working from home was even fun at first, but after a few weeks we started missing the world outside.

Recently the situation here started to show some improvement, and some of the restrictions became looser. We can now go to work in a limited capacity, so we decided to start getting out of the house. We went back to working from a co-working space for game developers, and we’re feeling much more productive.

I (Stav) have made some real progress in the development of the plot and puzzles for this chapter, and it is almost done. I have also implemented a lot of content into the game, and made some new graphics, with only a few more rooms left to design.

Yakier has made some amazing new animations, which most of them I consider to be spoilers so I will post only one of them.

We plan on having a meeting in a few days, in order to determine an approximate release date for the chapter. A formal release date will be soon to follow.

Here are some new art and animations.

Well, this is it for now. Hope to post another update real soon.

Thank you for reading!

Stav

Hello Everyone,

I know it’s been too long since I last updated. I will start updating more frequently from now on.

First of all, These are scary times, and I hope you all stay safe and well.

Secondly – an update on the state of the 3rd chapter. Yes, it’s been too long since I have started working on it, there had been some setbacks, but in the past few months I’m working pretty intensively on it, and I am quite optimistic. I really hope that in a few weeks we’ll have a release date, and maybe in a few months the chapter will be ready.

So, a few exciting updates:

We have a new member on our team – Yakier Bunker.

He is an artist and animator, and since he joined two weeks ago, he managed to add some awesome animations, but also to significantly raise my motivation. It had been very hard working alone on the game, with no one to share development with, and working in a team has really given life to this process. I have someone to consult with, get feedback from, and brag to when I solve serious bugs.

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Also, I recently discovered that “The Splitting” has a page on TV Tropes!
It’s super exciting for me, to see someone took the time to play the game and analyse it, and put it into word. Plus, I discovered some tropes I didn’t know were in there 🙂

Lastly – some new graphics I’ve been working on lately –

I also invite you to follow us at Facebook and Twitter, where you can get more updates.

Thank you for reading!

Stav

Hi everyone,

I’ve been wanting to post more often, so here’s some new graphics for chapter 3 –

The prison entrance:

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The prison lobby

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Hope to post again soon,

Stav

Hi everyone,

It’s been a long time since I have posted an update about the game. I have been working on it, on and off, for the past year, and I believe that I’m a few months away from finishing the 3rd chapter.

There have been several reasons for such a long delay.

Last year I’ve been working on building an engine with Unity, after the first two chapters were built with Flash. I had to learn how to work with Unity, which took some time. Also, I guess the engine didn’t make development that much simpler and faster like I thought it would when I made it.

The second reason was that It’s been a rough year for me, for personal family reasons. I’ve been kind of wrapped up in it, and lately have been trying to recover and invest myself in the game again.

As for the game itself, I have some update from the past year:

• The engine of the game is done. It will help me make future chapters and also recreate past chapters (because Flash is problematic nowadays). Now I just have to implement graphics, sound and content (which is also a lot of work).
• On October 2018 I presented a demo of the 3rd chapter at the GameIS annual conference. It’s about 25% of the game.
• I also sent the demo to some testers, got feedback and made some fixes.
• since then I have been working on the rest of the 3rd chapter. I have most of the puzzles planned and I have recently started working on some new graphics (some of the chapter reuses existing graphics from the 2nd chapter, but most of it has new graphics).

Here are some WIP graphics from the new chapter:

As for my plans for after chapter 3 comes out, I intend to create the first 2 chapters with Unity (the 2nd chapter is almost finished actually, so it won’t be too much work). After that I want to make an iPad version of the game.

Thank you for reading,

Stav

Hello everyone,

It’s about time for an update. It’s been more than a year since the 2nd chapter was released, and we wanted to let you know what we’ve been working on since then. We haven’t posted many updates, but we did make a lot of progress which we’d like to share with you.

So, what have we been working on this past year?

Mainly, we’ve been working on moving the game to Unity. I have been working with Elad Yekutiel, our new lead developer, on an engine for the game, which will hopefully make it easier to develop future chapters.

 

The Engine

In this screenshot, you can see that the the engine allows us to build new rooms and control their various attributes – like music, background, type of floor, and also the “mirror state” of the room (whether it’s real or mirror, shadow or not).

 

Here you can see the various elements you can put in the room. furnitures are marked blue, characters are marked red, and “tile interactions” (tiles with special features. It’s mainly walls, but also some other stuff) are marked green.

 

It’s also possible to “switch” between the shadow and non-shadow states of a mirror room, and edit them separately.

 

Here you can see the panel for editing and changing the attributes of an element (in this case – the door) – like position, size, and interactions that you can do with this particular furniture.

So, all in all it’s already a pretty elaborate engine, and we’re planing on adding more stuff to it in the future, like editing dialogues and cutscenes.

 

This is what the game looks like in Unity. Pretty much the way it looked in Flash.

 

The Chapters

So, after working on the engine for a few months, it was time to test it. I decided to build the 2nd chapter again, this time in Unity, in order to fix bugs that may appear in the process. I thought it would be quick, since I already had all the assets, but it took longer than expected, since copying the existing chapter required going back and forth and checking everything’s the same all the time. It wasn’t fun.

Anyway, that’s behind us, since it’s almost finished now. I’m planning to put it on the website once it’s finished, so if there are any bugs in the engine, they can be fixed before the 3rd chapter is released. In the future it will replace the Flash version, and I’ll also use it to create versions for other platforms.

The 3rd chapter is also in the works and expected to be finished in a few months. After that, hopefully, the 4th and 5th chapters will be a lot faster to make. Also, we hope to make a version of the game for tablets, which might happen after the 3rd chapter is released.

So, stay tuned. More updates will come soon.

 

Thanks for reading,

Stav

 

 

 

 

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since I’ve posted un update, so I would like to write about what we’ve been up to since the release of chapter 2, and also a little bit about chapter 3 and how it’s been going.

So, chapter 2 was released on September 18, 2016, and the following weeks were dedicated to reading comments, bug fixing and small improvements. After that, I presented my game at a few conferences, including “Game In” festival and “Casual Connect” in Tel Aviv, which also took some work, plus, brought on more fixes and improvements that came up while watching people playing the game.

After that, I took some time off for some very needed rest. The last 4 months of development were very intense, and the release was super stressful. It took a while until I felt as if I could start working on the next chapter.

Then, when I felt a little bit more ready, I took out my notebook and started, slowly, to write down some ideas for the chapter. I do have a skeleton of the plot for each chapter, but I had to dive in and write down dialogues, puzzles, and to expend the details and histories of the characters. It takes a while until ideas start to flow more naturally, but I think the thing that was slowing me down the most was the question of which engine I should use for my next chapter. Chapters 1 and 2 were developed with Flash, and I really like this program, it’s comfortable and I know it very well, but I was starting to understand that, for many reasons, I might have to switch to another engine. I didn’t know which one, and I was dreading having to learn a new program and a new programming language, so this question pretty much paralyzed me for some time.

It was especially hard for me since I am not a programmer. I am a game artist by profession, and my programming skills are quite basic. I enjoy programming, and I am getting better with time, but I am missing a lot of knowledge when it comes to deciding which engine would be ideal for me and for my game. So I had to consult a lot of programmers, who gave me different answers, and eventually I decided on Unity, because it has a big community, and I understood it was a relatively comfortable engine with the capability of exporting to different platforms.

So I started to learn Unity for the past few weeks, and I really like the engine so far. I have a programmer friend who is teaching me not only how to use the program, but also how to build the engine for the game in the most efficient way (certainly more efficient than the way I was building it), so I’m sure that it will help me implement the content faster, when the engine is done.

So, I am optimistic, thought I can’t say yet exactly how long it will take until the chapter is done and released.

Thank you for your patience, and here’s a little teaser from the beginning of chapter 3, which is going to be a flashback to a few weeks before the events of the game started, when llehctiM was found by geM and Stella at the abandoned asylum:

Thank you for reading!

Stav