Particles, Colors, Music.

Intake’s back on the iPad!

2019-09-12T16:30:00+00:00

Last up on the Return From The iPad Graveyard Tour—Intake! If you haven’t spent any time with our Drugstep shooter, give it a shot a let us know how you like it!

With this, all our iPad games should be back on the store, so if you’ve been waiting to play your old CP games, now the time. Intake was always one of our favorites, so I’m thrilled we’re able to get it back on the App Store. We were super bummed out knowing that people who bought our games on iPad weren’t able to update them, so I’m really happy to know you can download them again. Thanks again to everyone that helped out in the beta!

We’ve got some really, really exciting news coming up soon that we can’t wait to share, so keep your ears open…

Make Blooms Not War! Fractal’s back on the iPad!

2019-08-15T16:45:00+00:00

We’re stoked to announce that Fractal: Make Blooms Not War is finally back on the App Store and available for iPad!

It’s been too long since Fractal’s candy-coated math gems got some play, so let us know how everything runs! And—can’t say this enough—so many thanks to everyone who participated in the iPad beta!

Splice is finally back on the iPad!

2019-08-02T16:45:00+00:00

Next up on the update train: Splice: Tree of Life is finally back on the App Store and available for iPad! Wooooo!

Splice, like Pulse, has been updated for newer iPad graphics and gotten some slight performance tweaks. Let us know how everything runs! And once again, so many thanks to everyone who participated in the iPad beta—we can’t wait to get everything back on the store 💗!

Pulse is finally back on the iPad!

2019-07-11T17:00:00+00:00

Hey guys! We are beyond thrilled to announce that after, like, entirely too long, Pulse: Volume One is finally back on the App Store and available for iPad! We’ve had our heads pretty deep in finishing our new title Lineweight, and we can only spin so many plates (despite how good at juggling Will is). So before Lineweight comes out, we want to get our proverbial house in order.

Pulse has everything you remember, along with Retina-updated graphics and some slight performance tweaks. We’ve been really sad that it hasn’t been up, but people kept writing in to ask when it would be available again, which is honestly the best kind of love and support we could hope to ask for. This is the first of quite a few updates coming out from CP, so let us know what you think! And thanks so much to everyone who participated in the iPad beta—your help really means so much to us, and we couldn’t have done it without you 💗!

How to rescue a blog from the Wayback Machine

2019-05-15T15:00:43+00:00

Or Resurrections, Part One

What do you do when you lose ten years of blog posts? Some of us move on. Try to find a way to live with the loss.

But what if you’re given a chance to bring it back? A chance to reach back in the past, and undo the horrific decimation wrought by ~~Thanos~~ Russian hackers. A chance to make it all right. Whatever it takes.

Okay, so it’s not as dire as all that. But our Wordpress-powered blog had been destroyed—and since all our content was in a database that no longer existed, it seemed like an impossible task to recover everything.

Enter the Wayback Machine.

As one of the best parts of the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine is a magical resource that by all rights shouldn’t exist. Started in 1996, it’s probably one of my favourite things about the internet—good-natured librarians working to preserve ephemeral bits of our history before they’re forgotten forever.

And since our humble little blog happened to get juuust enough traffic to be archived, we were lucky enough to have a snapshot saved from just before the KGB decided our nonsense posts were simply too dangerous to exist.

To download the archive, I used the Wayback Machine Downloader, which after some misadventures in Ruby gave me a nice archive to work from.

Now we had our old blog, in HTML format, with our old permalinks more or less intact in the folder structure. For the new blog, we decided to go for something signficantly more hack-proof—a Jekyll-powered blog hosted on GitHub. Jekyll automatically translates Markdown pages into well-formatted HTML, which is great because:

Markdown is really easy to write
GitHub is really secure
Everything is plain-text, so nothing is stored in a fragile database.

To handle the conversion, I wrote a small NodeJS script to process the downloaded archive. This script crawled each html page, pulled the post and author content out, and put that content in a Markdown template.

I used cli-progress for the snazzy download bars, and image-downloader to handle… downloading images (this got around CORS issues on the command line).

On that note: pulling images out of the archive proved to be a bit trickier, as I had to take each image, find the Wayback resource associated with it, download said resource, then update the image link in our blog. This required a bit of guesswork to find the right root URL the images were saved under. Unfortunately, some of the more recent images hadn’t been online long enough to be archived—those are truly lost, as far as I can tell. But sometimes you have to make a sacrifice to ensure the greatest good. (Sorry, you guys, Endgame was really, really good.)

There’s still some stuff missing from the blog. Tags are saved, but there’s no quick dynamic way to show them, though this post from Long Qian looks promising. And I was able to retrieve old comments, but adding comments to the blog now requires some workarounds, using something like Staticman to handle the updating. This is probably gonna take a minute to get working properly, so in the meantime, we decided to use Disqus—super familiar, super easy to configure, and we might even be able to import the old comments eventually.

In the end, I’m pretty happy with this little experiment! I was really sad when it seemed like we’d lost such a big part of our history, so I was super-stoked to know that nothing’s ever really gone.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop nerding out.

Oh. One last thing—the blog isn’t the only thing getting resurrected. Keep an eye out for some exciting iPad news soon!

Hey there.

2018-05-07T15:47:43+00:00

Hey there, old friends.

It’s been a really long time since we’ve posted here. I mean, a while–our blog got hacked again, and we didn’t even realize it till someone pointed it out to us. Not only was it hacked, but every post we’ve made is gone–we might have a backup somewhere, but honestly? It seems like it might be a good time to start fresh.

Now, there’s a bunch of reasons for that. I reckon it might even be a good story–but that’s for a different time.

So, today at least, I just wanted so say:

Hey. We’re here. We’re still making games–got a new one called Lineweight, and we’ll let you know when we’re close to releasing it.

Lineweight’s gonna mark number ten for us. Ten games, ten years. That’s something to be proud of. Now, y’all might’ve missed some of the last couple (Jawns? Tailwind?), but we’re still proud to share them with you.

We know our games are busted on iOS, and we’ll try and get ‘em fixed up as soon as possible. In some cases, it’ll be just like it was before; in others, hopefully we can make em a little better.

Outside of Cipher Prime, Will’s been doing some silly, cool experiments, and you should check ‘em out. I’ve been working on some music outside of games, just tryin’ to make sense of my world, and I’d love for you to take a listen.

As for Cipher Prime…

Let’s just say that, at this point in our lives, we want to take a moment to reflect; to look back at how we’ve been working and see what we want our future to look like. We’ve got some pretty dope ideas, actually, and we can’t wait to share them with you. But first things first…

We’ve missed you. How’ve you been?

Press Start to Continue

2016-06-14T16:43:43+00:00

Dear Friends and Forgers,

Firstly, you’re beautiful. Yep. You. You’ve made our lives better and brighter. Which, is why this is so hard. But, let’s rip off the band-aid. As of July 1st we’ll be closing down the Forge located at 239 Chestnut Street.

For some of you, you may have just become a member. For others, you may have been here for 5 years. No matter how long, you’ve probably had the chance to make some pretty cool friends. We might be closing the Forge, but those people won’t be going anywhere. We’re all friends and we’d like to urge everyone to keep being awesome and keep supporting each other. This has always just been about the people anyway 🙂

You might be wondering about Dev Night. Who would of imagined a few friends hanging out once a week would turn into a 70+ person event. Dev Night has truly become a fantastic gathering point for all us. Sadly, Dev Night will have to move too. But, there seem to be quite a few places that would love to have our badass community. We’ll have more news soon as it comes.

Please feel free to write us with any questions or concerns. This is also a pretty trying time for us too. So, if you have the time to offer any help–we sure could use it!

Thank you all so much!

To our bold future,
Will and Dain

P.S.
FOR CURRENT MEMBERS:
We will be keeping Slack and moving over to a Patreon with a much cheaper membership fee. This money will be used to keep Dev Night running.

If you have any personal belongings in the Forge, please remove them before the End-Of-Day Monday the 20th or get in touch with us about your items. We’ll be selling things in the next week to help offset the shut down cost of the Forge.

Shields Up!

2016-05-17T11:43:49+00:00

Today, we wanted to give you a little peek behind the curtain of development at Cipher Prime. This is your window into what it’s like to make a game from the ground up. The struggles and surprises of development laid bare. Today we are covering the addition of a game-play element to Tailwind – the shield.

Shields are ever-present in games today. You can ask any child what a forcefield or shield is and they will have a complete answer for you. Not just simply that it stops bullets or lasers, but what it looks like, how it works and how to overcome one. It’s so common modern film doesn’t need to take a break from the action to explain what shielding does for a spaceship or alien. It’s a given!

But in the bullet hell world of Tailwind, one hit is all you can take. This simple mechanic bred super-twitchy game-play and precise movements in seasoned pilots.

To find out more about what the addition of a shield means for Tailwind we turn to Dain (@dainsaint) and Will (@willstall) –

Why add a shield?

Will – The main reason is: don’t nerf the game buff the player.

Dain – Yeah Andy Schatz (@andyschatz) did a talk on buffing the player not making the game easier.

Will – It makes general sense right? You can make the game easier or give the player more power. The player feeling more powerful is fun.

Dain – …and you can challenge the player more.

Will – …and a good game is kinda about that tug of war so it adds agency too. When you don’t have the shield you feel really vulnerable when you have the shield you can afford to be more risk adverse so it creates this push and pull rather than just be a constant “oh something hits me I’m dead” and we really wanted the game to be a bit easier too.

Dain – It gives the ability to have that danger of anything could kill me at this moment but if I could just get over there and get this thing then I’ll be a little bit safer and that changes the emotional state of the player back and forth.

Once it was in testing what did you discover about it?

Dain – Well we made it so that when you loose the shield it kills enemies in a radius. That made it an offensive weapon. So normally you take a shield as a defensive thing it protects you but now you have a something you can choose to detonate.

Will – Yeah originally we had it so that if you picked up another shield on top of the one you had it wiped the screen. That was OP so we changed it to this more confined space around the player.

Dain – So we made it so you can get the shield out of the big rocks. But you cant hit the rocks by dashing cause that kills you. But you can lightning through them. You can set up the lightning so when it goes off you blow up the rocks. So you can spend a full charge to get a shield. This adds an interesting decision for the player.

Will -What is interesting is that before the shield no one could finish the game. Once we added it just about everyone got through.

Dain – Which doesn’t really have an end screen.

Will – You just blow up…

More power ups in the future?

Will – so yeah pickups will be a thing we’re working on. Cause they’re fun. Going back to the buff the player idea. What I found was that before we added the shield I was bored playing my own game. That shouldn’t happen. The shield added a missing piece.

Dain – When we added the shield it made us pissed. And that’s what should happen. You should be upset you didn’t put it in the game sooner.

That’s it for today!. Keep up-to-date with us on Twitter @cipherprime. Learn more about Tailwind at http://www.cipherprime.com/games/tailwind.

Monster Want Burger now on iOS!

2015-06-25T18:36:20+00:00

Remember our silly little mini-game, Monster Want Burger? Well, we’re happy to announce it’s now available on iPhone and iPad!

Not only that, we’re featured in “Best New Games!” At its core, Monster Want Burger is an extremely cute game where you make burgers for a hungry monster. We’ve added a lot of cool little features, including a custom burger naming algorithm. But probably the most important thing is how many “firsts” we had with this game. Monster Want Burger is:

Our first self-published iPhone game!
Our first game aimed towards kids!
Our first game with a character!
The first time we made all our assets inside of Unity3D (using some cool new tools we’ve been working on…)
The first time we’ve released a game made for a Dev Night Game Jam
The first time we self-published a desktop game as pay-what-you-want through our own distribution method
And last but not least, Cipher Prime’s first released mini-game!

Thanks for being with us for so many first time events. Go grab Monster Want Burger now on iPhone or Desktop! And if you can, help spread the word!

A new player has connected.

2015-05-18T10:22:53+00:00

A few months back, we received an email with a strange request. Admir is a Steam gamer, who described to us an uplifting friendship he’d developed over two years with a fellow gamer, Lina. He spoke wonders of her tirelessly cheerful personality and the positive affect it had on his life. As it turned out, Lina is a fan of Splice — and her birthday was fast approaching. He wondered if there was any way we could help him show his appreciation. The line that did me in was:

“Her name is Lina and she is someone who influenced me and changed me for the better and I couldn’t be more happier that I know her.”

And something about people coming together through games to make each other better people just resonated with me on that particular day. So, feeling inspired, I wrote a small piece of music for Lina, in the style of Splice. (From what I hear, it was very well received)

http://blog.cipherprime.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/For-Lina.mp3

Within our community, we all know people for whom the unforgiving pressures of life and industry prove to be too much to handle alone. And often, when we need a helping hand or a kind word, we find it altogether too easy to become more withdrawn and isolated, stubbornly maintaining that our problems are ours alone. It is in those moments that we need each other the most.

Games can provide distraction, yes. But they also provide a space to connect. For one of our games to be part of that connection, no matter how small, is an enduring reminder that we all possess the ability to bring joy to each others lives.

Why do I make games? For simple, human moments like this.

Happy birthday, Lina!