Hey there!

More than 30,000 people currently have ARTIFICIAL in their Steam Wishlist! I never imagined this would be possible! My original goal for the project was somewhere around 5-7k, and even that felt a little bit too ambitious at the time. I'm very happy to see so many people interested in my work! There are a lot of things happening behind the scenes, and I hope I will be able to talk about everything in regular monthly updates, which will be starting soon!
In the meantime, you can:

• Wishlist SECTOR ZERO, a new side story from the universe of ARTIFICIAL
• Join our amazing community on Discord

Thank you and see you soon! p2cube steamhappy - Ondrej

Hello Everyone!

Over 25 000 people have added ARTIFICIAL to their Wishlist! I'm very happy and excited to see that so many people are interested in my project! Thank you all for your continued support and interest in my game. I can't wait to share ARTIFICIAL with you and I hope you'll love it as much as I enjoy working on it! headcrabbms_crowbar

Other news:

ARTIFICIAL - The Prequel is a new free side story from the universe of ARTIFICIAL which you can WISHLIST HERE! I'm still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to me. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes!

Thank you once again and see you soon with more news! p2cube

Hello Everyone!

Next Fest Developer Live-Stream!

ARTIFICIAL is taking part in the October Edition of Steam Next Fest which is live right now! There should be a Developer Live-Stream happening today at 20:00 CET. I will be playing ARTIFICIAL live, talking about the game and answering your questions! You will be able to watch the Live-Stream on the store page of the game or on the main page of Next Fest Event. Right now there is a pre-recorded loop running so don't get confused by that. ^^ Of course you can also play the demo which is available for the duration of the event but will also stay available after the event ends!

Some websites are also writing articles about the game!

https://www.pcgamesn.com/artificial/half-life-portal https://buried-treasure.org/2023/10/steam-next-fest-october-2023/

Milestone of 20 000 Wishlist reached!

In the meantime we have reached the milestone of 20 000 wishlists on Steam! We are currently sitting at 24 875. ARTIFICIAL got over 5000 wishlists in less than two weeks which is really crazy compared to the fact that it took me 2 years to get the first 5000 wishlists for the game. Thank you for all the support! p2cube

Other news:

ARTIFICIAL - The Prequel is a new free side story from the universe of ARTIFICIAL which you can WISHLIST HERE! We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes!

Thank you once again and see you soon with more news! p2cube

Hello Everyone!

Next Fest Developer Live-Stream!

ARTIFICIAL is taking part in the October Edition of Steam Next Fest which is live right now! There should be a Developer Live-Stream happening today at 20:00 CET. I will be playing ARTIFICIAL live, talking about the game and answering your questions! You will be able to watch the Live-Stream on the store page of the game or on the main page of Next Fest Event. Right now there is a pre-recorded loop running so don't get confused by that. ^^ Of course you can also play the demo which is available for the duration of the event but will also stay available after the event ends!

Some websites are also writing articles about the game!

https://www.pcgamesn.com/artificial/half-life-portal

Milestone of 20 000 Wishlist reached!

In the meantime we have reached the milestone of 20 000 wishlists on Steam! We are currently sitting at 23 656. ARTIFICIAL got over 5000 wishlists in less than two weeks which is really crazy compared to the fact that it took me 2 years to get the first 5000 wishlists for the game. Thank you for all the support! p2cube

Other news:

ARTIFICIAL - The Prequel is a new free side story from the universe of ARTIFICIAL which you can WISHLIST HERE! We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes!

Thank you once again and see you soon with more news! p2cube

Hello everyone!

ARTIFICIAL has been selected to take part in heavily curated showcase of Tiny Teams 2023! Tiny Teams kicks off on Steam at 6 PM BST August 3rd. The event will run through August 10th 6pm BST.

More info about the event:

Tiny Teams is all about celebrating games made by solo developers and micro-studios, helping them connect not only with the Steam audience. You can check out the steam event page HERE!

Other news:

ARTIFICIAL - The Prequel is a new free side story from the universe of ARTIFICIAL which you can WISHLIST HERE! We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes!

Thank you once again and see you soon with more news! p2cube

Hello everyone!

ARTIFICIAL has been selected to take part in this year's Cerebral Puzzle Showcase The Cerebral Puzzle Showcase kicks off on Steam at 6 PM BST (10 AM PDT) on August 3. The event will run through August 7.

More info about the event:

The Cerebral Puzzle Showcase is a celebration of the most wonderful puzzle games available on Steam. With a carefully curated selection of award-winning titles and puzzle fan classics, youll find great discounts on your new favorite games - everything from the meditative to the brain-melting! Alongside the Steam sale, the showcase features interviews produced by Thinky Games and guest streams from beloved influencers in the puzzle community. You can check out the steam event page HERE!

Livestream:

Live gameplay with the developer will be happening on 3th of August 19:00 BST (11:00 PDT) here on Steam! You will be able to watch it on ARTIFICIAL's store page or on the page of the event! steamhappy

Other news:

ARTIFICIAL - The Prequel is a new free side story from the universe of ARTIFICIAL which you can WISHLIST HERE! We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes!

Thank you once again and see you soon with more news! p2cube

Hello everyone!

ARTIFICIAL has won the "Best Game" award at Indie Awards of Game Access Conference 2023! Winning the award made me really happy, especially considering the tough competition and the other 80 incredible projects that were showcased. It's truly a privilege to be recognized among such talented individuals! The winner was chosen by a public vote. Every attendee of the conference could vote for a game in three different categories. ARTIFICIAL had its own little booth where people could try out the game, provide feedback, and stop for a little chat. I met a lot of amazing people, and the whole event was a lot of fun! Big Congratulations also goes to the winners of the other two categories: Best Art - Heist Geist Best Gameplay - Silence of the Siren


Don't forget that you can still get your username into the game by participating in the Cube Hunt! We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes!

Thank you once again and see you soon with more news! steamhappy p2cube

Hello Everyone!

Over 15 000 people have added ARTIFICIAL to their Wishlist! We are very happy and excited to see that so many people are interested in our project! Thank you all for your continued enthusiasm and interest in our game. We can't wait to share ARTIFICIAL with you and we hope you'll love it as much as we do! headcrabbms_crowbar
Don't forget that you can still get your username into the game by participating in the Cube Hunt! We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes!

Thank you once again and see you soon with more news! steamhappy p2cube

Hello everyone!

In order to have some fun with the community I decided to start a Weekly Cube Hunt Challenge where people are looking for 3 hidden "glowing cubes" p2cube in the ARTIFICIAL Demo, which is available through the store page! steamhappy
Challenge resets every week! First person to find one of the cubes get's the opportunity to have their username displayed in a special hidden room in the game.
You can read more about the challenge and it's rules on our Discord! > Click Here to Join our Discord <

Hey guys!

ARTIFICIAL is taking part in this year's Czech & Slovak Games Week! You can check out the event page HERE! Live gameplay with the developer will be happening on 16th of November 20:00 CET (11:00 PST) here on Steam! You will be able to watch it on ARTIFICIAL's store page or on the page of the event! Feel free to ask me questions in the chat! :) We have also passed another milestone - ARTIFICIAL just got over the mark of 12 000 wishlists which makes me really happy and motivated! Thank you a lot for all your support! p2cube
I'm still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to me. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot me a message in the #tester-sing-up channel. I'm streaming development of ARTIFICIAL on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes! steamhappy Thank you for all the support and see you soon! ^^ - Ondrej

Hello everyone!

We are very happy that ARTIFICIAL made it into this years heavily curated selection of Dreamhack Beyond! Demo of ARTIFICIAL will be available for the duration of the event. (Till Oct. 23, 11:59 PM EDT) You can check out the event page HERE!
We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes! steamhappy Thank you for all the support and see you soon! ^^

Hello everyone!

Over 10 000 people now have ARTIFICIAL in their wishlist! We are very happy and excited to see that so many people are interested in our project. We are still looking for testers who are able to record their gameplay and send it over to us. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, hop onto our Discord and shoot us a message in #tester-sing-up channel. Development of ARTIFICIAL is also being regularly streamed on Twitch, so make sure to check it out to get a sneak-peek behind the scenes! steamhappy
Thank you for all the support and see you soon! ^^

Hello everyone!

We took part in the Game Access Indie Expo (Brno - Czech Republic) together with ~60 other projects. ARTIFICIAL got into the final nominations (Best 3 projects) in 2 out of 3 categories (Best Gameplay & Best Game).
Even though ARTIFICIAL didn't win in any of the categories, we managed to meet awesome like-minded people and collect tons of feedback from protentional players! We had loads of fun! :) ARTIFICIAL Team from Game Access 2022 (From the left: Ondrej - Project Lead, Devel - Composer, Kate - 2D Art)
Have a good one and don't forget to join our discord! ^^ Join Discord Server

Hi everyone!

For the last couple of months I've been regularly streaming development of ARTIFICIAL on Twitch. For me, as a solo developer, It's a great way how to hang out with the community and hear your thoughts & ideas about the stuff I'm currently working on. Make sure to stop by and say hello! ^^ https://www.twitch.tv/simple_gamedev

Hello! We are looking for testers!

If you would like to help out and play an early version of the game please join our discord server and ask for the tester role! Testing should start in a couple of days. We are mostly trying to discover bugs, performance issues and make sure that game is understandable and easy to control. Discord invite link: https://discord.gg/5sDEGZM

New Screenshots

ARTIFICIAL is looking better than ever and that's why we have decided to update all Steam Store page screenshots. Here is a little sneak-peek!
See you in our Discord server ! - Ondrej

WELCOME

Welcome to another bi-weekly ARTIFICIAL devlog!

GAMEPLAY

I've decided to release a short playthrough of one of the early levels as it nicely demonstrates different aspects of ARTIFICIAL's gameplay. In this case - simple platforming combined with dynamic obstacles (lasers & turrets) and environment-based puzzles. Everything you can see in the video is still work in progress. Because this level takes place around the start of the game, it shows just the most basic gameplay mechanics. There are many more which are gradually introduced throughout the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIEGG1IR8J0&feature=youtu.be

TURRET TROUBLE

As you could see in the video above, one of the many obstacles you can encounter in ARTIFICIAL is security turrets. They scan their surroundings and shoot any biological entity they pick up with their scanners. You can either sneak around them or disable them by tipping them over.

MODEL IMPROVEMENTS

Several models went through various visual improvements. Here you can see an example. I've decided to add a little bit more detail to the "drum antenna" model in the form of a beveled edge. It's just s small change, but environments which are using this model now look much more detailed.
Models also went through some performance improvements. Many of the prefabs were causing unnecessary draw calls, so by merging together meshes which were using the same material, I managed to reduce overall draw call count by around 30%. Messy models can get performance heavy really quickly.
Here is a quick description of draw calls from official unity3d.com documentation: To draw a GameObject on the screen, the engine has to issue a draw call to the graphics API (such as OpenGL or Direct3D). Draw calls are often resource-intensive, with the graphics API doing significant work for every draw call, causing performance overhead on the CPU side. This is mostly caused by the state changes done between the draw calls (such as switching to a different Material), which causes resource-intensive validation and translation steps in the graphics driver. https://youtu.be/NQ7DnESGvEU

VISUALS AND PERFORMANCE

The other day I ran into GRAPHY - Stats Monitor & Debugger which is a free asset on the Unity asset store. It's a quite reliable and handy tool for checking the performance of your game and seeing how various graphics options affect your game's performance.
While playing around with this tool, I found out that enabling shadows for secondary lights (which are mainly used to subtly light up darker areas of the game) has a really small effect on the overall performance. I've decided to add the possibility to have the shadows enabled in the game and I have to say that environments now definitely look much better. I also decided to make overall shadows a little bit darker as in some cases they were not quite visible. https://youtu.be/7n3ILbJb7cI Adding dust particles to the game was something that I had on my mind for quite a long time. I finally decided to work on them last week. After a few iterations, they turned out to be a nice little touch to the overall atmosphere of the game and this is how they look like in action: https://youtu.be/UXJZLUgN5I4

DISCORD

ARTIFICIAL is mostly a one person Indie game and that's why I'm often relying on opinions of people from my Discord community. Feel free to join in if you would like to chat, or just see more screenshots and videos from development!
JOIN OUR DISCORD! FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER Thanks for reading this far and see you in two weeks! - Ondrej

WELCOME

Welcome to another bi-weekly devlog about the development of ARTIFICIAL! This time I was mostly solving technical issues and working on performance improvements, but I'm also going to show you some of ARTIFICIAL's gameplay features in closer detail and talk about my past projects.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

Unity decided to give me trouble once again. It suddenly started spitting out errors about missing libraries. At first, I thought that I broke something in my project but the problem remained even when I tried opening older projects or creating new ones. I spent a whole day trying to resolve this issue while searching for possible solutions on the internet. Even reinstalling Unity & Visual Studio didn't solve the issue, so in the end, I had to reinstall my whole system.
I decided to disassemble my 5-year-old laptop in the meantime and discovered some of the first unity projects I ever made on its hard drive. Enjoy this sneak peek at the quality games I made back in 2011. :)

LASERS!!!

Lasers are one of the first obstacles you will encounter in ARTIFICIAL. Touching them results in instant death. At first, they take the form of mostly static obstacles, but they get more dynamic as you progress through the game. They can switch on & off, change their rotation and even move on rails. https://youtu.be/bqUIFV767l4 At the programming side of things, each laser has its own set of instructions which control its behavior. This way, I can easily create different laser behaviors by writing down different sets of commands. Each laser is a little state machine that waits for the next instruction and carries it out.

OBJECT INTERACTION

Interacting with objects is a big part of every ARTIFICIAL level. Objects can be picked up, dropped and thrown. Those which are too heavy to be carried can be still pushed around to uncover secret passages or used to reach otherwise inaccessible places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUic8GKHDYw&feature=youtu.be Object interaction is a big part of puzzles and it's closely tied to numerous game mechanics. https://youtu.be/nKzZBv9Cuug This is how object throwing looked like back in 2018 when I first programmed it. I kinda forgot to change "isHoldingObject" state to false after throwing an object so I accidentally created a brick machine-gun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geS_piDIq7o

SLOVAK GAME OF THE YEAR

Also, During last weekend I attended the Slovak Game of The Year Awards. My short experimental game "The Flood" from 2018 got nominated and received honorable mention for best visual design. Yay!

DISCORD

ARTIFICIAL is mostly a one person Indie game and that's why I'm often relying on opinions of people from my Discord community. Feel free to join in if you would like to chat, or just see more screenshots and videos from development!
JOIN OUR DISCORD! FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER Thanks for reading this far and see you in two weeks! - Ondrej

WELCOME

Welcome to the second ARTIFICIAL dev-log! I was hoping I would be able to release these every week but It seems I'm going to adapt a more manageable bi-weekly format. Otherwise I would bore you by talking about uninteresting parts of the development process. So let's get into it!

MONSTER CUTSCENE

Final game is going to contain numerous cut-scenes. At one point player will be thrown into deep abyss by a huge mechanical monster. I handled visuals and animation, but working with audio is not really my strong suit. Fortunately I happen to be working with two skilled freelancers. Devel Sullivan takes care of all ambient music of ARTIFICIAL and Vlad Drahan helps me out with most of the SFX. We managed to put together this scene and I'm really happy how it turned out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfnbQQK45bM

PIPELINE PROBLEMS

Sometimes unpredictable life events can get in the way of development. One of these days I woke up motivated for work, thinking how much stuff I'm going to get done... then I found out about clogged pipe in the garden. I kinda ended up playing real life minecraft for the rest of the day.

CONVEYOR BELTS

Conveyor belts can be found in almost every level. They can carry various objects, they can be truned on and off again, but mainly - they are important part of various puzzles and level design in general. I never thought that there can be so many issues one can run into with such a simple mechanic.
The most common issue being objects bumping into the wall openings and then getting stuck. This usually ended up in a huge pile of objects wiggling around. I realised that instead of just pushing objects in the direction of the belt, I also have to write a small piece of code to keep the objects centred. This solved most of the "bumping" issues and objects started to happily ride on the conveyor belt. Conveyors can also affect the player. It's great fun, but player's body is not really a physical object (from the code perspective) so a small bug appeared where player could be pushed into walls from time to time and get stuck. I've managed to solve this by projecting a capsule into player's new location (each frame before moving them by conveyor) and checking it for any collisions. If collisions occurred, it meant that player would be teleported inside a wall or some other object. I also realised that conveyor belts are pretty long and sound which they make cannot really be emitted from a single point in space. I had to write a small script which compares position of the player relatively to the conveyor belt, and moves the sound emission point to the part of the conveyor belt closest to the player. This way the sound feels like it is always coming from the conveyor and not some static point in the room.

MUSIC

I've already managed to introduce Devel Sullivan up above - he is the guy who stands behind all ARTIFICIAL's music. We currently have multiple finished tracks so we figured that we could show you a little sneak peek. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW6_R_PWyFw&feature=youtu.be

ENVIRONMENT POLISHING

One of the things which take up most of the time is getting back to old levels and improving them both visually and gameplay-wise. For me, working on ARTIFICIAL is a huge learning process. Most of the time, new levels end up looking far better, than the older ones. It's definitely not a bad thing, but it creates a huge visual inconsistency. That's why I have to revisit old environments from time to time and make sure that I'm still happy with how they look and how they play. Below, you can see small example of how one of the environments changed over time.

DISCORD

ARTIFICIAL is mostly a one person Indie game and that's why I'm often relying on opinions of people from my Discord community. Feel free to join in if you would like to help out, or just see more screenshots and videos from development!
JOIN OUR DISCORD! @ARTIFICIALGAME ON TWITTER Thanks for reading this far and see you in two weeks! - Ondrej

WELCOME

Welcome to the first ever (hopefully) weekly ARTIFICIAL devlog where I would like to summarize some of my recent work on the project and take you behind the scenes of development!
Project is in a phase where most of the key mechanics are in place. Only thing missing is content. That's why I'm mostly focusing on creation of new levels, and occasional polishing.

CRISIS AVERTED

Last week of development started by unexpected power outage which occurred in the middle of the night. Let's just say that my laptop's hard drive didn't take it very well. Fortunately, every change on ARTIFICIAL is automatically uploaded to the cloud so all I had to do, was to power up my desktop and wait for 200 000 files to download.
I also had to set up up proper colours on my desktop screen which turned out to be pure hell. Most of ARTIFICIAL areas are pretty dark, so working with proper screen settings is crucial for my work on environments and their lighting.

UPGRADE

Converting the project to newest version of Unity engine was also loads of fun. Scripts were spitting out errors, models went missing, but 15 minutes of googling solved most of the critical issues.

TESTING

Couple of friends stopped by to do a small play test. I let them wander through first 40 minutes of the game while occasionally scribbling down notes about possible improvements in level design. In one case, all players got confused just because I showed a tutorial message for object pushing mechanic little bit too soon. They started to push random objects near them, instead of walking another 5 meters where barrel was visibly blocking a pathway. It shows pretty nicely that one should never underestimate importance of testing on other human beings.
I have spent quite some time on polishing & fixing problematic areas which were hard to navigate. Most of the issues were easily solveable by adding a few lights or points of interest that show up as a small piece of floating UI text describing important items and locations in the current level.
There were also some more interesting issues discovered during the play test. I had to increase the range from witch you can interact with objects, because picking up objects from under your feet was sometimes little bit tricky and required you to crouch. Crouching had to be remapped from 'C' key to Left Control as people who don't have a pair of baby hands like me, had hard time pressing it. I also had to disable collision detection for power lines and increase fall damage, as players could sometimes walk on them and parkour through whole areas.

DUMB WAYS TO DIE

ARTIFICIAL currently uses a library of almost 100 sound effects. This time I was implementing SFX for various death scenarios. Players can fall and break their legs, end up cut by lasers , get shocked when touching electrified objects and much more. Worker drones also got their fair share of SFX upgrades. Now they randomly emit beeping sounds and you can hear their thrusters as they fly by. Death by fall SFX - Youtube Link Death by laser SFX - Youtube Link Drone SFX - Youtube Link

DISCORD

ARTIFICIAL is mostly a one person Indie game and that's why I'm often relying on opinions of people from my Discord community. Feel free to join in if you would like to help out, or just see more screenshots and videos from development! JOIN OUR DISCORD! @ARTIFICIALGAME ON TWITTER Thanks for reading this far and see you next week! - Ondrej