One of the things I’m currently struggling with in Caretaker is about how to make the voice over segments accessible for all players, not just the ones who can hear. This is kind of important to me because as a kid I was deaf so I really want to come up with a good solution to this. I’d like to get your opinion. One solution is to always display subtitles when the voice over sections are playing. Some people will have a problem with this because the text will always be taking up some portion of the screen space and obstruct the view of the world. Another solution is to only display subtitles when they are selected or enabled. One way of doing this is to have a setting that the player has to enable or disable to turn off subtitles in some kind of menu option somewhere or perhaps some kind of run-time toggle. The other option is to not have subtitles at all but to somehow embed the text of the VO into the game. In a version of the game I took to Rezzed this year this is exactly what I did – I put the full text as a transcript on the geometry and made it a part of the environment. Initially I was in favour of this approach because I wanted the text to be a part of the world rather than something tacked onto it. This approach does have some serious localization issues though. What are your thoughts?

[ 2016-06-21 16:02:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

One of the things Im currently struggling with in Caretaker is about how to make the voice over segments accessible for all players, not just the ones who can hear. This is kind of important to me because as a kid I was deaf so I really want to come up with a good solution to this. Id like to get your opinion. One solution is to always display subtitles when the voice over sections are playing. Some people will have a problem with this because the text will always be taking up some portion of the screen space and obstruct the view of the world. Another solution is to only display subtitles when they are selected or enabled. One way of doing this is to have a setting that the player has to enable or disable to turn off subtitles in some kind of menu option somewhere or perhaps some kind of run-time toggle. The other option is to not have subtitles at all but to somehow embed the text of the VO into the game. In a version of the game I took to Rezzed this year this is exactly what I did I put the full text as a transcript on the geometry and made it a part of the environment. Initially I was in favour of this approach because I wanted the text to be a part of the world rather than something tacked onto it. This approach does have some serious localization issues though. What are your thoughts?

[ 2016-06-21 16:02:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

1000 rounds of ammo, one shield charge and a Star Killer to take down. What could go wrong?

Navigate through the Star Killer and blow up all the hubs you find to stop it destroying all the stars in the universe in this 6DOF based action game for PC, Mac and Oculus Rift (Vive support coming very soon!)

Caretaker Sacrifice stars the incredible David Hewlett, who played Dr Rodney Mckay in Stargate Atlantis and has also starred in films like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Cube.

You can hear some of the (edited) story narrated by David in Caretaker Retribution here: http://caretaker-game.com/CaretakerVODemo.mp3

Stargate Atlantis
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Cube

The role of Andy Carolan in Caretaker Sacrifice is played by the talented voice actor Ed Mace.

http://edmace.com



Project “Retribution” weekly update report
Confidentiality level: department heads only

Report begins:

I’m going to confirm a rumour I’m sure most of you will have heard by now.

A Star Killer returned to the Alpha Device in a very damaged state. Every attempt we’ve made to stop these automated machines has failed, they are incredibly tough – they have to be in order to get close to a star and harvest all it’s energy, leaving it dead. So one returning in such a devastated state got everyone who saw it very excited.

Our first question was ‘who or what did this?’ because if something or somebody out there can destroy a Star Killer then there’s hope for a solution to these relentless killing machines. For the first time ever we’ve been able to explore the inside of one through the holes in the wreckage and that’s when we discovered the biggest surprise of all – we did this.

Okay, to be technical it was Commanders Alan Purdy and Andy Carolan, two pioneers sent out over 20 years ago on the Jolton mission to discover why all the stars were disappearing. They are the reason we found the Alpha Device, the place that all the Star Killers are harvesting the energy for. Even though they led us here through that signal they sent us we never knew what happened to them. Well now we know.

We found a flight recorder in the wreckage. It belonged to Commander Andy Carolan and it’s a video recording of the events that took place inside the Star Killer. It’s not as complete as we would have liked. For some reason the footage comes completely from Andy’s tactical computer which gives the world a simulated look, the ‘raw’ footage is there but after over 20 years it’s degraded too much.

Commander Alan Purdy discovered a series of connected nodes that seemed to be central to the harvesting of energy from stars. Even more important – he managed to isolate hubs within those nodes that appeared to be controlling each node. Alan surmised that destroying these hubs could be enough to disable the Star Killer. Alan’s first attempt to destroy a hub got him killed.

Each node looks to contain drones that appear to perform some kind of Caretaker role but when the safety of the node is threatened they swarm on the threat until it’s removed. While the threat is present it looks like the hubs can manufacture these Caretaker units at an incredible speed.

Having watched his colleague die from being swarmed by these Caretaker units, Commander Andy Carolan worked out an optimal way to destroy the hubs while avoiding the Caretaker units and it worked.

I never met Andy or Alan, I was too young when the Jolton missions happened and I’m going to guess you were too. They paid the ultimate sacrifice of their lives to get us this crucial information and we should honour that sacrifice by making sure that the Retribution project succeeds.