Silent Totems – ALPHA released

Back in march I was hoping to have the ALPHA demo done in mid of april, but as usually everything slips if you can’t work more on your games than 24hours a week. So now its mid of may and it’s done. The schedule I made 7 weeks ago has been reached, all major features of the game are implemented. Yippee!

For the impatient among you, the game can be downloaded from the android market here: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ludocrazy.totems.
(Or simply search for “Ludocrazy” in the market app on your android phone)

Have fun travelling to the background layers!

Also: If you like it, spread the word!

Silent Totems is a sandbox adventure with strange characters in a stranger world.
Please try it out and send us your feedback via email.

Controls: Touch on screen to walk there, touch objects to interact.
Gameplay: Find out what to do

The game is intended to be released for $2.80 (Euro 2.00) next month.
The ALPHA-TEST will be updated with features every weekend.

The current version of the game does not yet contain full gameplay of the final game,
also it might contain gameplay bugs and will for sure contain some technical bugs.

The game is intended for HD phones and tablets. It is designed for a resoluton of 800×480, but should run okay on smaller and also larger resolutions. Because our style is to not use textures (besides text-rendering), the game could perform well on phones with slow 3D GPU. But as i wrote in the Developer Diary – Part 5, the game is more or less CPU limited, and phones with slower GPU typically also have slower CPUs.

Just for reference: I’m developing it on a Motorola Droid with 550MHz CPU and for 3D processing a 200MHz PowerVR SGX 530 (similar one to the iPhone 3 GPU, which has also been used on Intel chipsets as internal PC graphics device. Is based on a pre 2005 chip which had been developed for SEGA arcades  ).

This version of the game has not yet been performance optimized (at least not successfully, it’s still on my todo list) and has not yet been tested much for compatibility on different phones. (Google says my game is technically compatible with more than 370 different android phones and my framework is also used by Princess Nuriko which runs properly and sells on quite a lot of phones, so I don’t expect much issues with the underlying basic technology.)

Communicate with us!

Please refrain from voting negatively on the game via android market. Rather send us an email with what you dislike, or post in the comments of this post, or post on the threads in tig-source forums or indie gamer forums.

Also please send emails to report technical issues. Don’t leave anything out
(See contact options via android market app on the phone, or contact me via email.)

Another point: the game allows you to talk to the photographer, who will then upload a screenshot of your achievements to our server. Please try it out, and comment if the process is understandable and if you like it.
Additionally on the ALPHA version i mapped the phones camera button with taking screenshots (if you have such a hardware button. If not please tell me what hardware buttons your phone features, so I can add another solution!). The screenshots are then uploaded to our Visual Achievement, too.

Please take screenshots with the camera button of your phone. Take screenshots if you find graphical errors and also take screenshots if you have questions (you can refer to them in your emails/comments/posts).

And one last thing: Please give subjective feedback! Yann and me would like to listen to what players think, to extend the game with your ideas. Doesn’t matter whether they’re vague or detailed, just write them up